The Conservatives' Morning After

By Henry Grunwald

Question for conservatives: Now what?

The first order of business is to sort out just who or what failed: George Bush or conservatism? Or which mixture of the two? The Washington Post gave its answer when it reported "the end of the age of heroic conservatism" and announced the start of a new day.

Advice to liberals: not so fast!

Experience suggests a little caution in proclaiming new days -- or mornings -- in America. The electorate turned against Bush not so much because he was conservative but because he was perceived as inept. Some abandoned him because they did not see him as a good conservative. Bill Clinton, meanwhile, offered a program that was at least half conservative. He promised (threatened?) massive federal intervention and spending, but also restructuring and limiting government, curbing bureaucracy, reforming welfare, strengthening individual responsibility. Many conservatives, this writer included, saw a chance -- just a chance -- that Clinton might carry out conservative policies that a re- elected Bush could not have. That's known as the only-Nixon-could-go-to- China syndrome.

The "conservative era" did not spring from Reaganite nostalgia for a mythical American Eden, or from a crass conspiracy of the greedy and heartless, but from international phenomena: the welfare state had grown too gargantuan, too ineffective and had to be cut back; it became clear that economies cannot indefinitely redistribute more wealth than they create. The emergence of the information society requires initiative and self-reliance rather than the setting of standardized tasks and centralized control. Moreover, the dislocations, including structural unemployment, of the "second industrial revolution" are not susceptible to the old quasi-socialist cures.

In this changed landscape, there is room for maneuver, but its basic contours cannot be escaped.

In the economic sphere, conservatives have every reason to continue to be critical of Big Government, undue intrusions into the market, protectionism, excessive regulation and apocalyptic environmentalism. They should continue to stand against ever expanding entitlements and the ideal of forced equality. But conservatives must not merely oppose. In that spirit they should also question some of their taboos (certain tax increases and government initiatives cannot be damned under any and all circumstances). As creative conservatives from Disraeli on understood, conservatism is bound to fail if it is seen as a prescription for doing nothing.

It is admittedly very difficult to "do something" while relying on the free market and trying to curb the statist Leviathan. But that is the narrow bridge on which the conservatives will have to fight. It is not a matter of being "kinder and gentler" but smarter and more imaginative. At present, the challenge is best met by Jack Kemp and Co., who are developing new forms of interaction between the public and private spheres, more individual autonomy without setting the individual adrift. That is, of course, the "New Paradigm" (but won't somebody please invent a less clunky label?).

In foreign affairs, the traditional positions are confused. Many liberals have suddenly turned hawkish, some, for instance, almost pushing to bomb Serbia back into the Stone Age, while many once hard-line conservatives now oppose intervention. But the differences are not dramatic. With communism gone, along with its domestic political fallout, there is an opportunity for a new bipartisan foreign policy.

Social issues may be the most troublesome for conservatives.

Despite some ugly, off-putting rhetoric at the Republican Convention, "family values" are of real concern to most Americans. They are bothered by a moral vacuum in society and the disintegration of the family (although that is as much a result of economic forces and the dizzying mobility of American life as of moral decline). And they resent the process by which the redress of every grievance and condition becomes a "right." Moreover, conservatives should be able to question the radical politization if not exaltation of homosexuality or to protest the cost to society of maintaining growing numbers of illegitimate babies without being demonized as Babbittical bigots.

But such matters should not be fought out in Pat Buchanan's fire-and- , brimstone "religious war." They should be settled by the civilized exercise of majority rule. Better still, whenever possible, they should be left to the free give-and-take of persuasion and argument, for they are really philosophical disagreements not easily settled by politics. Liberals should resist the monstrous thought police of the "politically correct"; mainstream conservatives should resist Fundamentalist zealots who sometimes seem bent on turning America into a theocracy, a modern version of Geneva under the rule of provincial Calvins. Thus conservatives should rethink their universal opposition to abortion. If the conservative movement, or the Republican Party, is taken over by the religious right, it will become indefinitely marginalized, which is what nearly happened to the Democrats when they were taken over by extreme liberals.

The most important task for conservatives is to be a force for American unity. They must offer alternatives to the new tribal urges, the growing ethnic and racial separatist drives under the slogan of multiculturalism, which liberals, unfortunately, often encourage. If Clinton himself fights the tendency and steals some of the conservatives' clothes, that would be great for the country. If he fails, the conservatives will have a stronger mission than ever.