Dead center: the myth of the middle

National Review, Nov 2, 1992 by Terry Teachout

Starting when, Mr. Schlesinger? Don't you understand why all those nice professors are hiding under desks? This is not a polite debate over different styles of intellectual discourse. It's a struggle for power, the power to teach the young and shape the culture.

None of this is to suggest that everybody to the right of Arthur Schlesinger Jr. is doing an exemplary job of battling the cultural barbarians. George Bush's bland jabber about "family values," as pollster Richard Wirthlin explains, is no help: "If you overplay values, you get backlash . . . they have little political worth unless they are rooted in something that is concrete: policy or the attributes of an Administration." The White House, incapable of formulating a cultural policy and lacking any distinctive intellectual attributes, instead parades Barbara Bush's grandchildren on prime-time TV and hints broadly that Hillary Clinton serves newborn babies in a chafing dish.

At the other pole of conservative error is Pat Buchanan. When he trumpets the existence of "a religious war... for the soul of America," he implicitly excludes from the ranks of the sufficiently virtuous those Americans who oppose cultural totalitarianism but whose religious convictions differ from his own. Moreover, his harsh, hectoring tone is counterproductive. Says William Bennett, whose Convention speech was justly praised for its cogent framing of the "values" issue: "We shouldn't go at this thing as if it were the forces of light against the forces of darkness. Where lines are to be drawn, draw them. Be dear, be unambiguous--but don't be snide." The culture war still awaits its Ronald Roagan, a politician capable of setting forth an affirmative vision of traditional American cultural values, one who does not threaten the uncertain with anathema but invites them to take part in a battle for the greater good.

But if Pat Buchanan snidely draws the line of inclusion too far to the right, then Messrs. Hughes, Crews, Schlesinger, Kazin & Co. smugly draw it too far to the left. They would be more honest were they to draw it slightly to the right of the "center" they pretend to occupy. For there is no center in the culture war. You cannot compromise with a totalitarian movement-you can only fight it. Conservatives cannot win the war to reclaim America's cultural institutions by themselves. But the only liberals who will be of any use to them are the ones who understand that in this war, as in the cold war, there are no enemies on the responsible Right.