Reagan's spoiled children: malaise and infighting are threatening the future of the conservative movement

National Review, May 6, 1996 by Ramesh Ponnuru

Malaise and infighting are threatening the future of the conservative movement.

THIS has been a winter of discontent for conservatives, one that left the high spirits of 1995 a frustrating memory. Budget defeats and infighting in the primaries have left them still more demoralized. Republicans in Congress fear taking on powerful but controversial issues such as official English and affirmative action. They ascribe to Bill Clinton and Dick Morris mythic powers of winning the public-relations battles that would ensue. And in some cases their defeatism extends to predictions that the GOP will lose its majority in the Congress.

At the grassroots, the Left is more energized than the Right for the elections. "You can practically feel the malaise," says Amy Moritz, head of the National Center for Public Policy Research.

This mood is in part a byproduct of the political season, the dog-days between the primaries and the general-election campaign. Grover Norquist, the jovial strategist, argues that ever since "the adrenalin rush in the first hundred days," conservatives have had been marking time. They should use the lull, he says, to build up their grass-roots organisations rather than grousing.

Then, too, Beltway conservatives are still adjusting to majority status. Unrealistic expectations of a "revolution" after the 1994 elections set them up for disillusionment. A thin majority in the House and merely nominal control of the Senate ought to have led them to build the case for expanding their majorities by giving the public a preview of the tangible benefits they could expect from conservative governance. Instead they tried to govern immediately, believing that their triumph was historically inevitable and permanent. When Clinton declined to roll over as expected, says Michael Horowitz of the Hudson Institute, "Many conservatives, particularly the younger ones, discovered to their shock that the other side can shoot real bullets." As a result, the Congress has so far delivered for only one group: speed demons made happy by the repeal of the federal speed limit.

And those early defeats have made them gun-shy. Where they once had over-ambitious goals, they are now nervous of having any goals at all. Their inability to devise a sequel to the Contract with America that would command broad support from lawmakers is an ominous indicator of the present mood. "If you don't have a goal, you won't have morale," says Miss Moritz. "And we haven't had a goal other than taking Newt's orders for fifteen months."

But if specific mistakes and the constraint of having Clinton in the White House were wholly responsible for the current malaise, conservatives could be optimistic. But they have a deeper anxiety: is their coalition cracking up, its internal disagreements no longer submerged by a common desire to topple the mighty empire of Liberaldom? Even on an issue as central as taxes, conservatives have not reached a consensus. After two years of debate, supply-siders still see the tax credit for children as a sop to the Christian Coalition, and social conservatives still see the capital-gains tax cut as a sop to Wall Street. In this and other debates, different sorts of conservatives are too often walled up in their respective ghettoes.

When they're not hurling incendiary charges at each other. Charges of racism and nativism, for instance, have been bandied about freely, and other charges typically used by liberals to smear conservatives en masse have been brought into intra-family debates. Such conduct has provided grist for liberals' mills and eroded the collegiality that used to exist on the Right.

And as conservatives fought these Beltway battles, they were losing touch with the concerns of conservative voters in the boondocks. The two candidates who won the most votes, Dole and Pat Buchanan, were the very ones most disliked by the conservative intelligentsia. Conservatives were, at best, irrelevant to the presidential race. Yet they have been remarkably disinclined to reflect on their role in the debacle.

FOR debacle it was -- and, moreover, an unnecessary one. In 1988, the three conservative candidates won about a third of the primary votes; this time around, economic and social conservatives combined were pulling much closer to 50 per cent. The conditions were there for a united conservative coalition to win the nomination and the election. While it's too early to know how a Dole Administration would turn out, it's not too early for recriminations.

On paper the choice was an easy one: either make a conservative case for the front-runner, or coalesce around a candidate capable of stopping him. A thin slice of the conservative intelligentsia settled for Bob Dole early. The rest played with weak candidates or non-candidates. A number of prominent conservatives, many of them clustered around The Weekly Standard, flirted with Colin Powell and Newt Gingrich -- helping Dole freeze out his actual competition for crucial months. (By the time they moved to the Lamar Alexander camp, their influence in these matters had worn thin.) Other conservative notables such as Norquist and Paul Weyrich adopted an airy nonchalance about the outcome; some even suggested that it might not matter if Republicans won the White House so long as they held Congress.