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Après Reagan, the Deluge
| Article
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13611 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
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4 / 1988 |
5,028 Words |
| Author
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William Kauffman
William Kauffman, former Washington editor of Reason magazine,
has written for the Nation, Rolling Stone, and Utne Reader,
among others. |
Though the Reagan Octennial sputters to a close, conservative elites maintain a blithe, jaunty bounce in their walk, the gait of men triumphant and vindicated. "We've won the war of ideas" is a frequent refrain in the self-congratulatory warren of Washington, D.C.
How different the intellectual landscape appears today than forty years ago, when the purported dearth of non-New Deal thought compelled Lionel Trilling to his famous reflection: "In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition for ...nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation."
Who but the most obdurate liberal would dare endorse Trilling's observation in 1988? Yet the regnant "conservative" coalition is a combustible admixture that is doomed to blow; the relevant question is, where will the pieces land?
Reaganism, so the conventional wisdom goes, is a variegated thing, a "coat of many colors," to borrow Dolly Parton's phrase. New Right moralists, economic libertarians, hawkish ex-Democrats, and the GOP's sturdy mercantilists constitute the widest swatches of the garment.
But certain patches on that coat--the deepest-dyed, most venerably American, I'd assert--have all but vanished. Eight years into the Reagan presidency, "conservatism" has been stood on its head. Historical meanings have been perverted, foes have become allies, and the taxonomic straitjackets to which we've grown accustomed (Left, Right, liberal, conservative) have ceased to make sense. There's been a Reagan revolution, all right--but conservatism ain't necessarily the victor, nor is liberalism the toppled ancien regime.
Recall one of the most controversial speeches Ronald Reagan ever made: his 1975 address proposing a massive $90 billion shift of government responsibilities from the national to the state and local levels. Fleshing out his plan, Reagan limned his vision of a reborn America:
"I am calling for an end to giantism and for a return to the human scale--the scale that human beings can understand and cope with; the scale of the fraternal lodge, the church congregation, the block club, the farm bureau. It is the locally owned factory, the small businessman who deals with his customers and stands behind his product, the farm and consumer cooperative, the town or neighborhood bank that invests in the
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