Activists Moving to Forge a New Conservative Creed : Republicans: The Reagan-era image of unity has cracked open. Confrontation is between generations.

Hollywood has hooted him down and late-night comedians have enshrined him in their monologues. But Vice President Dan Quayle’s controversial comments these last few weeks have pulled back the curtain on a fractious struggle for preeminence among Republican conservatives.

For three decades, conservatives have fueled the GOP’s ideological engine, and they are likely to supply the party’s strongest 1996 presidential candidates. Yet they also are casting about for new moorings in a changed political world, engaging in a roiling dispute over the most basic of ideological questions: What do we believe?

Quayle, and others like him, are throwing themselves into the political fray in an attempt to define conservatism beyond its limited image as an anti-communist, anti-government ideology.

While much of the intra-Republican tension in recent years has centered on the heated issue of abortion rights, the debate now is by no means limited to that. Discussion is exploding on diverse subjects: Family values. Welfare and education reform. Economic development in the inner city. Foreign aid and the yoke of international leadership.

Had all been normal, this debate would have begun in earnest in November, after a unified general election campaign either gave President Bush his second and last term or sent him into retirement. But this year, between the surprise primary challenge Bush faced from former television commentator Patrick J. Buchanan and the prospective independent candidacy of Texas billionaire Ross Perot, the image of unity that characterized conservatives through the Ronald Reagan era has cracked wide open.

This year, in the words of California GOP activist Steven A. Merksamer, conservatives have been forced to consider their basic tenets: “Are we internationalists or isolationists? Are we a party of inclusion, or a philosophy that divides?”

The discourse is being propelled by a split among party activists. The major confrontation is generational, wherein a baby-boomer intellectual corps is flexing its constrained muscle against an aging group of Cold War conservatives. Less intensely, both of them are quarreling with a third wing, represented by Buchanan, whose ideology is rooted in the “America First” movement of earlier times.

Across the country, the debate has been conducted on telephone lines and across desktops. One of the nation’s best-regarded conservatives, former Reagan Administration education secretary and drug czar William J. Bennett, has gone so far as to suggest that the party’s intellectual lights hold a series of unofficial gatherings to hammer out some common philosophical ground.

“There’s a large younger generation of conservative leadership. . .and among them a lot of thinking is going on,” said William Kristol, Quayle’s 39-year-old chief of staff and a leading conservative activist in his own right.

“Bush and Reagan are of the same era. No one will be left in 1996 who was of that generation. The leadership will really pass in the next few years to a younger cohort,” Kristol said.

There is always philosophical grumbling in politics, but the current maneuvering among Republicans is heightened by what could be a wild race for the party’s 1996 presidential nomination. Many of those now brooding over the party’s positions are also potential ’96 candidates--Quayle, Buchanan, Bennett, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Jack Kemp and Texas Sen. Phil Gramm among them.

While Buchanan won measured electoral success this year, he has yet to persuade many elected leaders or party thinkers to see things his way, especially when it comes to foreign policy. In terms of sheer support, the momentum seems to be with the more progressive younger conservatives.

The current rumblings run contrary to the relatively unified face that the GOP has shown for the last decade or more. With the exception of its very public and continuing dispute over abortion rights, conservatives and more moderate Republicans have been blessed with unanimity of purpose. While this unity was more a political dictate than reality, Republicans maintained civility while their more contentious Democratic brethren clashed repeatedly over the direction of their party--and lost presidential elections in the process.

In large part, the GOP success at maintaining a veneer of unity was due to the overarching enemy of communism and the beloved father figure of Ronald Reagan, both now gone.

“Anti-communism was really the glue that held it all together,” said Buchanan. “Now that issue has faded away. It’s like Alexander the Great’s death now--suddenly his generals are dividing up the empire. And the great coalition that elected Reagan is cracking apart.”

More to the point, it fell apart almost without warning, without anyone being able to figure out what would replace it.

President Bush has had little luck solidifying beliefs within his party. Despite the conservative nature of his Administration, Bush continues to be mistrusted by many on the right who consider him willing to abandon heartfelt tenets--like his 1988 pledge not to raise taxes. And he is struggling just to come to grips with a message for his immediate campaign, much less a future blueprint for conservatives.

The President’s political breeding is privately scorned by many younger GOP conservatives, who think of themselves as a more diverse and inclusive crowd than the upper-crust Republican stream which spawned Bush.

“You’ve got the born-on-third-base Republicans--George Bush represents that,” said one prominent Republican, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “The ‘We-know-what’s-best-Establishment,’ here to serve the public at large, all male, all white conservatives.

“The new breed Reagan brought in includes a lot of Catholics, Jews, Hispanics, not born to great wealth but maybe acquired wealth, and that is what the Republican Party has become.”

The thinking of that “new breed” has been molded by the times in which they have lived, and the result is a sea change in conservative attitudes toward government. While the Depression and World War II spawned a frugal, defense-dominated group of conservatives, the 1960s and its wrenching upheaval unalterably defined many younger Republicans as willing to accept a positive social role for government.

“Younger conservatives recognize that government is here to stay and we have to find ways to use it to our advantage--that government is not necessarily evil and we have to look at it in constructive ways,” said the 45-year-old Quayle.

Speaking specifically of the 1960s civil rights struggles, he said, “I just don’t know of anybody in my generation that actually thinks the civil rights legislation is a bad idea. . . . That is generational.”

Merksamer has a more specific theory--thus far untested on his peers--that today’s crop of younger conservatives was molded most of all by a Democrat--John F. Kennedy, the President of their adolescence.

“Here was this young, youthful guy who wanted to get this country moving again, who talked about a strong internationalist foreign policy where America would lead the world, who evoked leadership in every of his utterances. The fact of the matter is, he had a wonderful message,” said the Sacramento attorney.

“Those were our junior high and high school years. And by today’s standards, Kennedy would be a neoconservative.”

Ironically, Reagan’s assault against government also caused the new generation of conservatives to temper their rhetoric about eradicating it--on the grounds that if Reagan could not manage to tame the beast, who can?

“We need to break away from simple and unhelpful dichotomies like big government and no government and try to strike a middle ground,” said Bennett. “If you couldn’t do it with Ronald Reagan, who could you do it with? Let’s have a reality check here.”

The crux of the debate over what will be conservative orthodoxy is being played out across the fields of foreign, economic and social policy.

While emphasis on foreign policy has declined with the fall of the Soviet Union, most of the younger Republican activists advocate an assertive role for the United States. Few overtly suggest continuing the levels of either military spending or foreign aid reached in the last three GOP Administrations, but most prefer to see America “engaged,” in Quayle’s words.

“Not to say that we’re going to be the policemen of the world, but our presence means increased peace and stability,” the vice president said in an interview.

Buchanan, in contrast, advocated cutting all foreign aid and returning to U.S. soil troops currently stationed overseas. He insists that economics will force future conservatives his way.

“George Bush is the last of the World War II generation, and I think he is still living in a sense in the past,” said Buchanan, who at 53 is 15 years younger than the President. “I mean, they’re not going to keep 150,000 troops in Germany. It’s just not going to happen.”

But while Buchanan opposed the Persian Gulf War, few mainline conservatives followed suit and the prevailing opinion seems headed against him.

“The future is not going to be dominated by a country that practices isolation,” said Texas Sen. Gramm. “That debate was settled . . . by the attack on Pearl Harbor.”

Conservative economic policy came under challenge from Buchanan, who insists that the United States champion its own industries instead of backing free trade--the Reagan-Bush position. While most conservatives still favor free trade and an unfettered economy, the unyielding recession has given some the second thoughts expressed by Paul Erickson, Buchanan’s former political director.

“There was nothing in the Reagan Revolution to deal with the following case: What do you tell the 55-year-old unemployed steel worker in Pittsburgh what he’s gonna do with the rest of his productive life, when (he’s) geographically and professionally in a position (he) can’t escape from?” asked Erickson. “Are they stranded there? What do you do about those people?”

Kemp, a veteran congressman before joining the Bush Cabinet, has sought to define more than any conservative--old or young--an activist economic agenda for the nation’s inner cities. Accordingly, he casts the overall conservative debate in broad economic strokes.

“The question of the post-Reagan conservative world is what are the great transcendent issues of the day? They are economic--both domestic and global--trade, jobs, education, helping families fighting poverty,” Kemp said.

Among other things, Kemp favors tax breaks for companies that set up shop in inner city “enterprise zones,” and he has long advocated tenant ownership of housing projects. While he has yet to win over even all of his conservative allies, Kemp’s role as the right’s social conscience appears to have blossomed since the Los Angeles riots sent all political ideologies casting for solutions to the nation’s urban ills.

“Equality is a word that seldom comes into the lexicon of the conservative movement, but it’s a very important word,” said Kemp, who has pestered Republicans for more than a decade to welcome more minorities. “Not equality of earnings but equality of opportunity--and frankly, we’ve got a way to go. You can’t have equality of opportunity in an economy where there is 7% (overall unemployment) and 40-50% unemployment among minorities.”

Yet it probably will not be foreign policy or economics that will prompt the most contentious battles as conservatives seek to redefine themselves. That distinction likely will go to the intransigent, polarizing social issues that have threatened GOP unity for years.

Abortion looms as the biggest fight on the Republican front, and to many it is the line which defines conservatism itself. Officially, every party platform since 1980 has affirmed the GOP’s opposition to abortion rights. Yet many of the most influential rising stars disagree strenuously with that position and see support for abortion rights as essential to the party’s future.

“I think the party’s abortion position has stood out like a sore thumb,” said Massachusetts Gov. William F. Weld, 46, who has garnered good reviews halfway through his first four-year term. “The more conservative position on abortion and family planning is hands-off on personal choice.”

Some of those who oppose abortion rights believe the issue may come to dominate all others in 1996, forcing a virulent and divisive intra-party battle.

“I do think the right-to-life issue will be huge in 1996,” said one senior Republican who opposes abortion rights. “It might swamp all these other things.”

On less contentious social issues, the testing grounds for new Republican theories have been states under the control of such governors as Massachusetts’ Weld, Tommy G. Thompson of Wisconsin and Pete Wilson of California, who have directed government programs in areas like education and welfare that staked out new conservative ground.

While their approaches differ, they all assume that government can prevent problems--a belief scorned by Reagan-generation conservatives.

“There’s a coalescing around the notion of prevention of social problems as opposed to the remediation and maintenance approach,” said Weld, who last year worked to repeal his state’s welfare program to emphasize care for the elderly and disabled. Spending for prevention programs alone has risen by 20% in Massachusetts, while other programs have been “cut to shreds,” Weld said.

“We have got to maintain the safety net,” he said. “And it has got to be a trampoline instead of a hammock.”

Some conservative theorists suggest that the popularity of Perot’s pledge to take an independent whack at America’s problems will inspire conservatives to more sweeping changes than have been sought by the Republican governors.

“Whether he is elected or not, it will very much (sanction) a clean-sweep, sledgehammer, blow-torch approach,” said Burton Yale Pines, chairman of a conservative think tank called the National Center for Public Policy Research.

The surprising appeal of Perot, with his promises of getting things done, has fueled the contention of many that conservatives need to forge a more positive identity for a movement that throughout its history has largely been defined by what it is against.

“I don’t think conservatism should be allowed to be portrayed as bashing Japan, bashing Mexico, bashing immigrants, bashing Israel, bashing the poor or bashing low-income people for the problems of America,” said Kemp.

“A country can’t base leadership on a negative,” he added. “It’s not what you are against that determines what you are--it is what you are for.”