Getting Even : With Democrats in charge of the White House and the Congress, there may be no brake on the nosey PC crowd--enter the party of tolerance.

Wandering amid the wreckage of the Bush presidency, Washington’s Republicans are veering between spasms of dread about future jobs and surprisingly good cheer about the party’s longer-term prospects.

The dread is personal: What are Republican policy wonks to do now that three major institutions--the executive branch, the legislative branch and the media--are in hostile hands?

The good cheer comes from the general acknowledgment that the election results were a repudiation of George Bush the man, not the party. Also heartening is the fact that Bill Clinton did not win a particularly commanding victory. To Republicans, he is assuming the presidency in a weak position and has little margin for error.

In 1996, Republicans may well have the ability to renovate the party’s disastrous ’92 image as a bunch of yahoo, gay-bashing, single-mother-haters by running to the left of the Democratic Party on one of its signal issues this year--tolerance.

There was a whiff of the trouble it might pose earlier this year, when Hillary Clinton uttered her impromptu dismissal of women who stay home and bake cookies. The public outcry that followed was an expression of the widespread sense many traditionally minded Americans have that their elite brethren look down on them and think themselves terribly superior. Clinton may talk a lot about the middle class, but he, his wife and their closest friends are not occupants of that class. They are, instead, members of the articulate class--those of us who write and talk for a living. And the particular disease of the articulate class is precisely the sort of smug social intolerance represented by Hillary’s remark.

The tolerance issue cuts deeper still. Though the Republican Party was accused of advancing a stultifying political orthodoxy at its convention, the Democratic Party and its attendant interest groups are slowly being co-opted by their own brand of cultural orthodoxy. Call it political correctness, call it the new sensitivity, call it whatever you want--this radical form of intolerance that used to be concentrated on college campuses has begun to dominate the public discussion.

On issues of interest to liberals, freedom and fair play are being discarded. Take women’s rights. The issue has gone so far afield that Americans prominent and obscure are being accused of what George Orwell called “sex crime” because they ask women out on dates. This neo-Victorianism is not coming out of the Republican Party, which can be accused of trying to turn the clock back only as far as the 1950s.

Sex education is another matter. In the name of health, city officials in Washington and New York are insisting they will give children condoms in school regardless of the views or desires of their parents. This episode of “Bureaucrat Knows Best” is another example of how intolerant liberally minded and well-intentioned people can be.

The Republicans have helped to restrain the imperial ambitions of government bureaucrats and the spread of political correctness, but with Democrats in charge of the White House and the Congress, and with a sympathetic press, there may be no brake on the growth of the new intolerance. And if Americans start feeling as though they are being oppressed and bedeviled by arch and sanctimonious Washington insiders on matters of privacy and social conduct, the GOP may have a real opening in 1996.

Republicans are going to need it, because the collapse of their unifying enemy, world communism, atomized the misnamed “conservative movement.” The new post-communist right is merely a bunch of people with wildly different political obsessions--abortion for the religious right, capital-gains tax cutting for the supply-siders--and only a common set of dislikes--Anita Faye Hill and Oliver Stone, to name two.

The Republican governing coalition is now split into three camps. The first and most easily defined is the “war party”--the followers of Pat Robertson and Patrick Buchanan, whose belief that there is a “religious war” going on in America links their pro-life views with their anger at the growing acceptance of a moral equivalency between the traditional American way of life and so-called “alternative lifestyles.”

The second camp is the “country club”--Republicans led by Sen. Bob Dole and Secretary of Labor Lynn Martin who believe in fiscal probity and balanced budgets and a moderate social agenda.

The third is the “growth group”--Republicans following Jack Kemp who believe that stimulating economic growth by drastically reducing the costs of capital for small business is the key to the American future.

All three camps are going to embrace what the inside-the-Beltwayans call “the empowerment agenda.” That is an infelicitous blanket appellation for policies such as school choice designed to take tax dollars away from government bureaucracies and to put both in the hands of ordinary Americans through vouchers. Kemp is the politician most closely associated with the concept, which Republicans hope and pray is their ticket back to power.

It isn’t, though, because it’s just a buzzword, one that Clinton has already adopted. The keys to a Republican renaissance can be summed up in one word: optimism. Optimism--faith in America and in the American future--was the special gift of Ronald Reagan to his party and the nation, and it was the loss of this gift that helped spell Bush’s doom. Giving voice to that optimism, and policies based on an affirmative view of the American political experiment, is the role for which Kemp alone among all Republican politicians nationwide is suited.

Everybody in Washington thinks the “growth group” is in the power position. Kemp is hands-down the most popular Republican politician among the party faithful. But here is where it starts getting tricky. Although Kemp is personally popular, the “growth group” has nowhere near the clout of the “war party.” The “war party” is an actual voting bloc that proved itself the most loyal Republican constituency in 1992 and might well be larger than that, since Ross Perot surely drew some support from them as well.

Meanwhile, the “country club,” in the person of Dole, is making an aggressive move to take the reins of the party by

appealing to the budget-balancers among the homeless Perot voters. Dole and fellow country-clubber Bob Michel, the GOP leader of the House, are, by default, the power centers in a city dominated by the Democrats.

But what was true for the Democrats this year will be equally true for the Republican Party in 1996: The next election will be a referendum on Clinton’s performance. If he is not successful, the GOP will be ready if it can manage to keep itself whole.

For this to happen, Republicans must become the party of tolerance--Republican tolerance. PC tolerance requires society not only express its sympathy and support for the problems of a given interest group but also take rigorous, even reverse-discriminatory, steps to solve the problems. It is a matter of policy. Republican tolerance, by contrast, is about manners: You should be nice to people, but you should not be compelled to express your support for them and what they do.

Republican tolerance is more illustrative of the American character. The danger for Republicans is always that their moral and ideological messages will start to sound shrill and discordant. Republican tolerance must be accompanied by a more composed and more commanding face than it has worn these past two years in the guise of the increasingly hysterical and disconnected Bush--a welcoming face that says:

“If you think those guys don’t understand you and are demanding things of you that you do not wish to give, that does not make you a bigot or a racist or a sexist or a fascist. You’re just like everybody else, tired of being accused of crimes you did not commit and being asked to bear burdens you do not feel you should bear. We are your party.”

It might happen, if Republicans can just calm down a little.