6/05/00 12:40 p.m.
Complacent Conservatism
In The New Yorker, a conservative goes a little too far toward the mushy middle.

By Ramesh Ponnuru, NR senior editor

onservatives have been arguing among themselves over the direction of conservatism from the start. Still, it’s a little unusual to see an intra-conservative debate in The New Yorker. But that’s the venue Fareed Zakaria, the managing editor of Foreign Affairs, has chosen. Perhaps the appearance of his article there is another proof of one of his key premises: Conservatives have been successful in changing the mainstream of American politics and culture.

And now, Zakaria argues, they are the victims of their own success. Conservatives still pine for great causes, but there are none left to fight for. So instead they “infuse mundane political struggles with the atmosphere of a jihad,” try to invent foreign-policy threats, exaggerate America’s moral and social problems, and scant the successes of the practical, non-ideological Republican governors.

Zakaria is one of the sharpest young conservative intellectuals, and naturally he makes some good points. Conservatives have been too sour about the American condition for some years now. It has been hard for conservatives, and political activists of all stripes, to adapt to placid times. Conservatives need to understand that the revolts of the ’60s did not come out of a clear blue sky, and that their results were not uniformly bad. Where Zakaria goes wrong is in the lesson he draws from these insights: Rather than assimilate them to a more reflective conservatism, he moves toward the mushy center.

His picture of modern conservatism is in any case overdrawn. His best points have been made by a lot of conservative intellectuals in places such as NR and The American Enterprise. Zakaria himself uses books by David Frum and David Brooks to buttress his case. George W. Bush’s speech rebuking conservative pessimists such as Robert Bork-cited by Zakaria-was written by a conservative intellectual, Michael Gerson. And Bork’s book Slouching toward Gomorrah was widely criticized on the Right. The Republican governors are more frequently lauded than criticized in the conservative press; just check out recent issues of Policy Review.

So who are the conservative intellectuals Zakaria has in mind? Mostly, it seems, the ones at The Weekly Standard (although not Frum and Brooks, two of its top writers). He makes some telling points against the foreign policy advocated there by William Kristol and Robert Kagan, which he regards as too interventionist. But again, similar points have been made by many conservatives. Kristol and Kagan, as I suspect both would be willing to acknowledge, are in the minority among conservative foreign-policy intellectuals.

But Zakaria’s characterization of the conservative intellectuals isn’t fair to the Standard either. (If the Standard did not treat impeachment as a “mundane political struggle,” maybe that’s because it wasn’t one.) He is right to see that the Standard is animated more by a kind of conservative moralism than by antistatism. He is wrong to assume, as he apparently does, that social conservatism must be inherently apocalyptic, reactionary, and extremist, so that the only way to avoid these traits is to abandon it.

Of Bob Dole’s suggestion that Kansas in the 1950s was better than America today, Zakaria writes, “Really? Kansas in the nineteen-fifties? Where most women couldn’t have careers, minorities were treated as second-class citizens, a few companies and labor unions dominated work, big government was thriving, and the food was lousy? I’ll take Gomorrah, thank you.” This sort of debate is pointless. The America of the 1950s will not be brought back, and nobody seriously intends to bring it back. But that America did do some things better than we do now, such as make sure children were reared in intact families. We can learn from that America without romanticizing the past or assailing the present.

Kristol’s social conservatism did not stop him from criticizing Bork’s pessimism as overwrought, or Dole’s speech as excessively nostalgic. Zakaria seems to criticize Kristol for having recommended a “frontal assault on Roe v. Wade.” But Kristol is willing to be quite pragmatic about abortion; he has long argued that pro-lifers should accept, indeed push for, incremental progress. The trouble is that none of these moderate steps can be taken until Roe is overturned — as the Supreme Court is likely to demonstrate this month by striking down bans on partial-birth abortion.

It’s the Court, not conservative activists, which is insisting that laws conform to a high standard of principle. Zakaria champions the non-ideological conservatism of Michael Oakeshott, quoting the most famous passage of his work (“To be conservative then is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery,” etc.). That philosophy provides a powerful defense of widely accepted traditions under assault from malcontent intellectuals. But what is an Oakeshottian conservative to do in a society, many of whose most powerful institutions are deeply affected by ideology? Take the universities, for example. Zakaria ridicules Gertrude Himmelfarb, the social critic (and Kristol’s mother), for seeing America as “Antioch College writ large.” Point taken. But shouldn’t we care that Antioch College is Antioch College? Or that Harvard usually becomes Antioch College after a few years? Are we so sure that the ideas taught at such places are “irrelevant” to our children’s futures?

Zakaria wants a conservatism that is “accommodating on abortion and homosexuality,” that is “willing to reexamine conservative orthodoxy, and cast aside debris from another era, as George Pataki, of New York, did recently when he proposed tough gun-control laws.” (Note the easy substitution of present-ism for argument in that last bit. Why, by the way, doesn’t the NRA have as much claim on the present as Rosie O’Donnell?) To be “accommodating” on homosexuality must be to accept gay marriage, gay adoption, gays in the military, a pro-gay public-school curriculum, and a ban on employer conduct motivated by opposition to homosexuality. These are, after all, the live issues. Whatever one thinks of them-I myself am ambivalent about both the marriage and military questions-social conservatives are for nothing more aggressive than maintenance of the status quo. (The truly Oakeshottian position would be not to talk about homosexuality at all-again, a position that is no longer sustainable.)

Zakaria’s conservatism, on the evidence of this essay, is interested neither in moral reform nor in government retrenchment. Certainly, the governors he holds up for admiration, such as George Pataki and Christine Todd Whitman, have no such interests. They have been content to ride the waves of prosperity. They could have done worse. A conservatism that demands more may not be successful (see my own pessimistic take). But a conservatism that accepts George Pataki as its apotheosis has set its sights too low. Zakaria understands that conservatism begins in an appreciation of the world as it is. But what he advocates is a conservatism that approves too much.