The Revolution That Wasn’t : Administration Policies Helped Stymie the Conservative Cause

With Ronald Reagan’s presidency almost over, American conservatives are having hard second thoughts about the “Reagan Revolution” and the realignment that wasn’t.

One reason for this is simple. Like Americans in general, conservatives tend to be impatient. Knowing that there are Twelve Labors to be performed, they begin to complain when their hero is stopped at Labor No. 4, proving, alas, that he is no Hercules. But conservatives are also beginning to reflect on how some of the Reagan Administration’s own policies may have set back the conservative cause.

In the first place, there is the fecklessness of our foreign policy, particularly with regard to the Soviet Union. The spectacle of Ronald Reagan embracing the general secretary of the Communist Party in the middle of Red Square was bad enough. When that is coupled with Reagan’s repeated refusal to blame the communist system for the Soviet Union’s cruel limitations on emigration--he chalked them up to the dilatory habits of bureaucracy, much the same on this side as on that side of the Iron Curtain--it becomes clear that the Moscow summit represented a new setback for the cause of principled anti-communism. The problem is not that Reagan has given away the store. In fact, he has avoided the worst treaty traps that the Soviets have set for him. The problem is that his Administration has helped to lay the rhetorical groundwork for the next round of bad treaties--and in the process, unilaterally disarmed Republicans of the anti-communist issue.

On the domestic scene, not a single item of the right’s social agenda has been enacted in this Administration. If any progress is to be made on abortion, the role of religion in public life, affirmative action and the like, it will have to come from the federal courts.

More significantly, the right’s social agenda has always been removed from, and sometimes in conflict with, its libertarian or economic agenda. Composed of at least two discordant parts, the conservative movement has been held together by its common enemies, by its anti-communism and anti-liberalism. But the decisive argument linking morality and freedom--the common understanding that could unite the two camps--has been lacking. Years ago, a prominent conservative editor told me that as a conservative he knew what he was against, but wasn’t sure what he was for. That is the conservative dilemma.

This uncertainty about the grounds of its own convictions hobbled the Administration’s efforts to build a Republican majority. Doubtless that is a strange claim, considering that the Reagan ticket won two landslide victories and the GOP captured control of the Senate for six years. But when the cheering stopped, when the President’s popularity faltered, when hard choices had to be made, there was often an awkward silence, a moment of hesitation, a shiver of self-doubt.

Consider, for example, the federal budget. Rather than force Congress to make difficult and partisan choices about spending, the Administration has sought compromise after compromise, lately through the improbable mechanisms of Gramm-Rudman. The fiscal result has been that even though tax revenues have grown, spending has so far exceeded them that the federal budget is deeply in deficit. Even worse, entitlement programs continue to swell while the defense buildup, perhaps Reagan’s best achievement, has ground to a halt. In fact, it has been reversed. Real expenditures on defense have fallen for four consecutive years.

When pressed for a way out of the budget mess, Reagan has not insisted that the Congress act responsibly. Instead of calling for the assertion of Republican control over the House and Senate, he has proposed a series of constitutional amendments requiring a balanced budget and granting the President a line-item veto. In effect, he has sought legal and administrative, not political, solutions to inherently political problems. The line-item veto would not require Congress, and hence the country, to make fundamental political choices about what we wish to do and about what kind of people we mean to be. On the contrary, it would avoid such questions by making the budget even more of an insiders’ game than it is already.

The Reagan Administration’s many policy successes should not and will not blind conservatives to the fact that it threw away the chance to mark a watershed, a real turning point in American politics. The lesson that this Administration forgot is as old as Moses, who found that before the children of Israel would keep the tablets of the law, he had to break them on the ground--reminding the Israelites that they could not worship both God and the golden calf; that they had to choose; that in fact they had already been chosen by a just but jealous God.

The critical failure of the Reagan Administration was that it never persuaded itself, much less the American people, that a time for choosing had come.