FEATURED IN NATIONAL REVIEW'S
CURRENT ISSUE

RAMESH PONNURU
Oh, Arrianna!

DAVE KOPEL
An Army of Gun Lies

JOHN DERBYSHIRE
Dr. Laura Non Grata

EDITORIAL
Elian and His Enemies

Now, I count myself a Reaganite and greatly admire Mr. Reagan's historic achievements and the solid political legacy he left to be squandered by his successor. But let us be clear: Reaganism was not an innovation in political thought. It was conservative common sense applied to the problems that had developed in the 1960s and 1970s. To the stagflation of the economy, it applied tax cuts and the monetary control of inflation; to the market-sharing cartel of OPEC, it applied price decontrol and the ``magic of the marketplace''; and to the revived threat from the Soviet Union it applied a military build-up and economic competition.

These policies were what most conservatives would have recommended as answers to these problems at most times in this century. The only novel thing about them is that they were actually carried out. Previous Republican Administrations had merely talked about them. If these ideas had failed when finally given their chance, conservatives would then have had some serious explaining to do. Fortunately, their success confirmed the validity of the conservative approach.

It can even be argued that in one respect President Reagan was extremely fortunate: the problems he faced, though they had baffled liberals, were problems which gave conservatives no great intellectual difficulty. Liberals were then wont to say, indeed, that conservatives were offering simple answers to complex problems. But the problems were complex to liberals only because they insisted on misunderstanding them at a very simple level. Just as the Ptolemaic theory that the sun goes around the earth can be made to yield accurate predictions only by qualifying it with a multitude of exceptions and special cases, so the liberal belief that inflation was caused by unions and corporations seeking higher prices led to a multitude of difficulties as each intervention to hold down prices created more problems which required more interventions which in turn created more problems and so ad infinitum. And what was true for inflation also held for most areas of policy. It was the complex solutions advocated by liberals that caused the complex problems — at least as much as the other way around. No wonder liberals suffered from malaise.

Their malaise deepened as conservatives won two great victories in the 1980s — the consequences of which continue to reverberate. The first was the victory of the West in the Cold War; the second the intellectual victory of free-market economics over economic planning. Taken together, these have combined to produce a marked shift to the Right in world politics, at least in economic policy, comparable to the world's shift to liberalism after the defeat of the Axis powers and the discrediting of any kind of right-wing authoritarianism in 1945. Marxists from Harvard to the Chiapas region of Mexico now lament the world-wide dominance of ``neo-liberalism.'' The moderate Left in Europe now asks: ``What's the Big Idea?'' — i.e. what's the big idea that can replace socialism. In this country, Mr. Clinton won in 1996 by endorsing a balanced budget, school uniforms, and white picket fences. Some genuine conservatives have therefore concluded that ``We won.''

nfortunately, as Margaret Thatcher remarked, there are no permanent victories in politics. (It was a prescient remark — made in her last party-conference speech as prime minister.) The game of politics continues indefinitely — but it continues on different ground and under shifting rules. And though the Left ought to be more confused than the Right by the ideological flux of the post-Cold War world, it is in fact moving more quickly to redefine the ground-rules of the new political game. It is doing so, moreover, not by conscious political calculation and argument, but by that curious blind but almost infallible instinct which seemingly enables liberals to see and promote their long-term aims collectively yet without any prior agreement — an instinct that led Tom Bethell and Joe Sobran to invent the term ``The Hive.'' That instinct comes in two parts: there is first the drive to support social trends that foster the disintegration of existing society; and, second, the impulse to build on the ruins a new social order in which traditional relations will be replaced by bureaucratic management. In other words, far from retreating at the end of the Cold War, the Left is seeking to advance: from planning merely the economy to planning society as a whole, from efficiency to equity.

Let me now examine how that two-headed instinct plays out in three areas of policy: the economy, social issues (more precisely, moral issues), and cultural or identity politics (more precisely, the national question).

At first glance, the economy seems the most promising area for the Right. All parties now pay at least lip service to capitalism, a balanced budget, control of public spending, low (if not lower) taxation, and the good opinion of the bond market. To be sure, there will be disagreements over economic issues between political parties until the end of time. But as far as macroeconomic policy is concerned, we are living in a post-socialist age.

But this conclusion is too optimistic. If the economic argument for statist liberalism has evaporated, the impulse to run other people's lives which underlies it remains. The politicians and bureaucrats who seek to control us now do so on different and more slippery grounds.

They begin by expanding regulation on common-sense grounds of protecting consumer health, workplace safety, the environment, and racial or gender ``equity.'' Who can object to such desirable aims, or even subject them to cool analysis of costs and benefits? Not the average Republican congressman. Yet although these interventions are not advanced on economic grounds, they assuredly have economic consequences. Most obviously, their total costs are a considerable burden on the economy. A 1990 estimate by the Environmental Protection Agency put the opportunity cost of clean-air and clean-water regulation at about 5.8 per cent of gross domestic product. As for the economic consequences of more intangible controls such as racial and gender quotas, there has been a noticeable reluctance on the part of academics to wonder whether these have economic costs at all. Fortunately, Leslie Spencer and Peter Brimelow did not share that reluctance. Their research led them to estimate in Forbes magazine that the opportunity costs of affirmative action were on the order of 4 per cent of GDP. Everett Dirksen's observation — ``A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking about real money'' — begins to sound quite modest.

Such regulations presumably account in part for whatever ``stagnation'' of wages may have occurred over the last twenty years. People have taken the greater wealth produced by economic growth in the form of these dispersed social, health, environmental, and equity ``benefits'' — which has meant that there is less left for the wage package. The same burden of regulation also powers much of the recent drive for protectionism. Both on the union Left and the Buchananite Right the explicit argument is advanced that regulated American industries are at a competitive disadvantage against the ``dirty capitalism'' of the Third World. Although this argument overstates the case — American industry is highly competitive when the total ``mix'' of productive factors is taken into account — it does have the merit of conceding that tariffs would protect not American jobs but American levels of regulation. Once again, complex solutions create complex problems.

More important, they represent an attempt by the liberal bureaucracy to bring nominally independent companies and individuals under its control without the bother of owning them and so being responsible for the consequences of the decisions which the bureaucracy enforces on them — what might be called ``socialism without tears.''

But this sort of economic regulation is ultimately less significant than the second area of policy — the social issues — where the Left exercises the moral regulation of society by government. We are told by government, for instance, that equity or fairness dictates not only racial and gender quotas to remedy the effects of discrimination, but also ``sensitivity training'' to root out ethnic prejudices of which we may be unaware. (Judges now routinely sentence offenders to such political re-education.) Or that a proper concern for our own health (or at least for the social cost of our medical treatment) requires an ever-higher level of regulation of smoking and drinking. Or that if we have inappropriate sexual attitudes — a belief, say, in traditional morality — then government should seek to protect our children from what liberals see as the consequences of such obscurantism (AIDS, unwanted pregnancies) by compulsory sex education at school and, when that fails, the availability of abortion. Or that the government's obligation to protect the environment goes beyond simple long-term prudence; children are increasingly taught in school that this is a religious obligation which puts the interests of the Earth or Gaia above even the long-term interests of the human race.

(These last two justifications for moral interventionism — children and Nature — are supremely shrewd. They give the socially interventionist Left something which every politician has always wanted: silent constituents. For children are not allowed to answer back, and the environment cannot do so. Listening to Al Gore or Bruce Babbitt, there are times when one wishes that dolphins and chimpanzees really could speak. It would be especially interesting to hear the candid opinion of the sloth on welfare, of wolves on foreign policy, and of the cuckoo on family values.) Go to page 2.

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