5/02/00 12:40 p.m.
Who's Yelling ‘Stop!’ Now?
Look who is standing athwart history now.

By Jonah Goldberg, NRO Editor-----------------------JonahEMail@aol.com

This article originally appeared in IntellectualCapital.com

don’t think you understand. We have to STOP the WTO. … We have to STOP indigenous and native cultures from being destroyed. … We have to STOP biotechnology. … We have to STOP global capitalism from ruining the world, from destroying the environment.”

A Western Union telegram from Jane Fonda? No, this was the message I heard from dozens of earnest and thoroughly pierced young men and women on college campuses throughout Illinois. I was the in-house reactionary for an activist-musician minstrel show called “The Spit Fire Tour.”

My role in the tour — dominated by “spoken-word poets,” anti-capitalist preachers such as Jelo Biafra of the now-dead punk band the Dead Kennedys (“everybody talks about the minimum wage, what I’d like to see is a maximum wage!”), hemp boosters and folk-rock activists like the Indigo Girls — is akin to that of the Washington Generals, the team that amiably loses every night to the Harlem Globetrotters. I could score points, but winning was out of the question.

The rock-star awe for Ralph Nader and the encomiums to Castro notwithstanding, what was most shocking about my experience is how conservative America’s left has become. Stealing from the other side's playbook In the 1955 charter of National Review, William F. Buckley defined conservatism as the willingness to “stand athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who do." Buckley was truly an outcast of the age. Only a year earlier, literary critic Lionel Trilling famously summarized the times, saying, “There are currently no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation today.”

A Republican president, Dwight Eisenhower, had irrevocably validated the perceived soft-socialism of the New Deal rather than roll it back. The Soviet Union seemed to be overtaking the United States both scientifically (Sputnik was still a fresh victory) and ideologically (the Ivy League was already occupied territory). An obscure economist, Friedrich Hayek, had received ample notoriety among anxious conservatives by suggesting that Western welfare-state social planning was nothing less than the first step on the possibly short road to Soviet-style serfdom. The refusal of Buckley, and conservatives generally, to accept the times they lived in drew snickering ridicule from sophisticated liberals and leftists who believed an affluent society can solve any social problem — simply by applying their good intentions, their intellect and other peoples’ cash. Conservatives, they argued, refused to wake up and smell the coffee of the 20th century.

Well, look who is standing athwart history now. In virtually every sphere of human progress the left today is saying, “Stop the world, I want to get off,” while conservatives get made fun of by the same snickering sophisticates, only now because of our optimism.

The proof is out there. Take some recent examples:

Globalization
They didn’t call the Seattle anti-WTO protests the “Carnival Against Capitalism” for nothing. Ask the most energetic anti-WTO protester what is really bothering him, and he won’t say it is the International Monetary Fund (IMF) cookie-pushers. Instead, he will tell you the wrong side won in the great Cold War battle of economic freedom. Economic development — despite its higher life expectancies, cleaner environments and tendency toward peaceful co-existence — is somehow corrupt, while Cuba, where a chicken is the closest thing to a hard currency, commands the moral high ground. When I told one young man handing out “Just Say No To the WTO” and “50 Years is Enough” fliers that free trade makes poor countries richer, he laughed, saying: “But at what price? Do you want the entire world to be full of capitalists? Do you want Indians to work in offices?” Well, yeah. Sure, globalization and development will inevitably mean that “indigenous peoples” will lose some of their traditional ways. It also will mean that they will escape crushing poverty, disease and ignorance. This is an unacceptable trade-off to leftists who desperately want to preserve authentic vacation spots where they can leave only footprints and take only pictures. Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo had it right last January when he said, "Forces from the extreme left, the extreme right, environmentalist groups, trade unions of developed countries, and some self-appointed representatives of civil society are gathering around a common endeavor: to save the people of developing countries from development." Of course, it should be noted that, in America, the forces on the extreme right have the economics of the extreme left. Pat Buchanan recently announced that he will appoint Teamsters' head Jimmy Hoffa to his Cabinet if he is elected president.

Race
We are in the midst of an unprecedented success story that the left not only refuses to acknowledge but violently resents. In 1994, the last available date for statistics, one in eight marriages involving an African American was to a white spouse. That number can only be higher today, and what better sign that blacks are being accepted into the American family than that they are being accepted into actual American families? Despite this and other tangible signs of obvious progress, professional racialists cannot accept that times are changing for the better. It was once the litmus test issue for all liberals: Society should be colorblind. During the civil-rights movement, progressives argued that race had no place on any government document. Today the Census Bureau is assigning people to races, regardless of their own personal wishes. Moreover, as Harvard professor Stephen Thernstrom has pointed out, the real scandal of the census is not the snooping nature of the long-form questionnaire, it is that one of the only questions asked on the short form is about race. Even more disturbing, as Thernstrom notes, is the desire in some quarters to freeze racial politics forever.

While the left is in denial about the permanent importance of race, the rest of the world is moving on. In Florida, Republican Gov. Jeb Bush’s plan to replace racial spoils by sending the top fifth of all high-school students to state universities — which would result in more, not less, minority enrollment — has been greeted by a panic of bizarre proportions. The head of the NAACP calls such a change, “Jim Crow Jr.” Bush has been compared unfavorably to George Wallace. But conservatives aren’t the ones standing in the school-house doors against the forces of progress; it’s liberals terrified of losing the status quo.

Entitlement Reform
During the Democratic primaries Al Gore beat up Bill Bradley with his sloganeering about how he chose to “Stay and Fight!” Fight what? He chose to fight a broad array of reforms in Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and the rest. On the stump, when he wants to appeal to his liberal base, Gore is fond of screaming (shouting is Gore’s only means of communicating sincerity) that he will “Never!” sign an anti-labor bill. He will “Never!” sign a bill diminishing the right to abortion. He will “Never!” let anyone touch benefits for the elderly. H will “Never!” moderate in his support of affirmative action, school vouchers, etc. For a guy who promises “revolutionary change,” isn’t this an awful lot to yell “Never!” about? Isn’t it reminiscent of the out-of-touch conservatives of yesteryear who vowed they would “Never!” surrender to the changing times?

Technology
The press steadfastly refuses to give it the coverage it deserves, but Luddism has thoroughly taken over the left. By now the growing movement to “Stop Biotechnology” is well known on both sides of the Atlantic. Groups like “Seeds of Resistance” and the “Bolt Weevils” are growing increasingly brazen in their stop-everything campaigns. Recently after destroying a genetically engineered corn crop at the University of California, a group called “Reclaim the Seeds” declared, "Modern agri-business and genetic mutilation is a capitalist machine that must be dismantled." Indeed, from the Gore-like writings of the Unabomber to the near-universal opposition on the left to advancements that could feed the world, material progress is under attack. This strikes many normal people as kooky, as it should, and as it did when such was the stuff of the conservative fringe. Remember Gen. Jack D. Ripper, the insane officer in Dr. Strangelove? In Stanley Kubrick’s dark satire of the Cold War and the American Right, Gen. Ripper feared flouridated water as a “commie plot” to “sap and impurify our precious bodily fluids. … That's the way your hard-core commie works.”

Today, this sort of conspiratorial paranoia plagues all quarters of the left. Dozens of groups are dedicated to the notion that various chemicals introduced by corporate giants are silently poisoning us all. Indeed, even fluoride is still a threat, as The Wall Street Journal recently reported. Darlene Sherriell leads the fight against what she calls America’s a politically motivated “poison” from her Caribbean bunker where she lounges athwart history. She told The Wall Street Journal, “Let’s not call for new studies. Let’s call for stop!”

Indeed, it seems yelling “Stop!” is the rage everywhere.

Fear the future?
If the left and right are truly changing sides in their sentiments toward the tide of history, we could be in for some interesting times. Central to the conservative esprit de corps is the notion that we are a harried insurgency. If, as many have surmised including Judge Richard Posner, Bill Clinton is actually a modern-day Eisenhower, validating the Reagan Revolution as Ike did the Rooseveltian one, then conservatives will need to learn how to go with the flow more. Moreover, if the analogy with 1950s conservatism holds, than we must be prepared for the fact that the silly left represented at the IMF protests isn’t so silly after all, and simply snickering at them will not make them go away.