Being Right in a Post-Postwar World

By Richard Brookhiser

A specter is haunting conservatives -- the specter of the end of Communism. Our nightmare, our adversary, our dark doppelganger for the past 40 years seems to be fading away. From Stettin on the Baltic to Trieste on the Adriatic, an iron curtain is buckling. Will conservatism buckle with it?

This is a small matter next to the chance for peace on earth or a free Eurasia. But it's a matter of immediate practical import. In the past decade the conservative movement remade the face of American politics. Politics must change if conservatives do. And how can conservatives avoid changing once they don't have Karl Marx to kick around anymore?

The question arises because, beneath the level of day-to-day politicking, conservatives are a heterogeneous lot. We conservatives mock liberals for playing coalition politics with the federal treasury. But our own coalition, although we don't glue it together with tax dollars, is as diverse as theirs.

The founders of the movement in the '50s and early '60s -- the people who wrote for National Review and nominated Barry Goldwater -- included Southern Agrarians and free-marketeers, isolationists and advocates of the rollback of Communism, students of T.S. Eliot and fans of Joseph McCarthy. In the '70s there was a mass immigration of mugged liberals -- the neoconservatives. Communism acted on all these grouplets as a powerful unifying force. Whether you wanted an American Century or a minimal state, you could not be comfortable with Soviet aggrandizement. Lenin was anathema whether your philosophical polestar was Thomas Aquinas or Ayn Rand. Like an offensive guest at a lousy party, Communism drew together a lot of people who would otherwise have been standoffish.

Foreign policy will be the most obvious point of conservative contention in a post-Communist world. How long will we be in favor of maintaining garrisons in West Germany, South Korea and points between once the garrisons on the other side become unthreatening? Irving Kristol and Tom Bethell have been urging for years that the U.S. wind down NATO. The tradition of American noninterventionism is a long one (we like pedigrees for our prejudices). America should not "go abroad in search of monsters to destroy," as John Quincy Adams put it. "She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own." At the same time, our present forward position is the end product of an equally long thrust of American expansion, which was propelled by the fact that our stay- at-home sentiments were seldom consistent: isolationist politicians, however much they disliked Europe, typically favored brandishing big sticks in the Caribbean and the Pacific. Look for an intramural fight over these questions the next time our ally Israel finds itself embroiled in a Middle Eastern war. It won't be pretty.

Related to the issue of national strength is the issue of international purpose. How active is our friendship for liberty supposed to be? HUD Secretary Jack Kemp sometimes gives the impression that if he were ever to become President, he would show up with megaphone and pompons wherever in the world there was a pro-democracy rally. Such enthusiasm strikes most conservatives as suspicious -- liberal, even. If we expect the world to mind its own business, we should mind ours.

The most important foreign policy issue, after bringing the boys home, will be keeping the Japanese out. Anxiety over foreign imports has recently been a theme of Democrats like Richard Gephardt. But before he came along, the same worries were being expounded by John Connally. There is no such thing as a presidential primary in South Carolina without a protectionist pitch to the local textile industry. When the Fourth Reich joins the Yellow Peril as an economic bogeyman, squabbling on the right between free traders and protectionists is bound to increase.

The reef on which a breakup of the conservative coalition is hourly expected is composed of social issues, particularly that most inflamed social issue, abortion. How can libertarian baby boomers raised on the Pill and Fundamentalists raised on the Seventh Commandment stay under the same tent? Probably more easily than anyone suspects. The fight for blanket antiabortion legislation will be bruising, and many purely economic conservatives will want no part of it. But the question of Government funding of abortions unites laissez-faire and Old Testament moralists alike. Many other social issues, such as day care, lend themselves to similar cross-cultural anti-Government alliances. Junk-bond dealers and snake handlers agree in wanting Washington out of their lives. The Republican Party, of course, may turn tail on some or all of the social issues. But then, conservative diehards of every stripe have always regarded the G.O.P. as a painful necessity rather than an object of devotion.

If the right stands together on social issues, it risks falling together on the environment. Though conservatives and conservation are linguistically related words, most of the former have given the latter scant thought. For a brief moment ten years ago, we geared up to argue that one of the reasons why nuclear power is desirable is that it is safer and cleaner than coal, gas and oil. We were right. But Three Mile Island made the issue politically moot, and we've barely been heard from since. We can save elephants more effectively than liberals can. We also have to show that we can, for in an increasingly Green-conscious world, if we don't go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky, we may as well not go to the polls.

Mikhail Gorbachev may yet pull everybody back to square one, by changing his mind or getting the sack. Even if he stays on his present course, he will remain the ruler of a big country with large arsenals. There is enough history ahead for all but the most jaded. Once the malign magnetic field that held us with such power breaks, however, conservatives will have to find new ways to meet history. "Most of us," wrote political philosopher Kenneth R. Minogue in 1963, "are, in some degree or other, liberal. It is only the very cynical, the unassailably religious, or the consistently nostalgic who have remained unaffected." A lot fewer of us think of ourselves as liberal since Minogue wrote those words. But the different impulses that pushed us right -- the hard head, the stern faith, the backward glance -- remain in play and remain different. Each must find its own way through the sieve of events -- a conservative sentiment, come to think of it.