State of the Conservatives : We are all Clintonites now

Does the conservative movement need to take some lithium? As the Washington Post's Thomas B. Edsall recently observed, over the last five years its mood has swung from giddy optimism to despair and back again. The arc can be traced in the pronouncements of individual conservatives. Less than a year ago, Bill Bennett was despairing of the American public's moral insipidity, as evidenced by its conspicuous lack of outrage at Bill Clinton's misconduct. Now he blesses George W. Bush's efforts to put a smiley face on the Republican party. Some of the same conservatives who were broaching the subject of justified revolution a few years ago have fallen behind the Texas governor as the unlikely leader of their insurrection.

These changes of mood are neither surprising nor particularly unhealthy. They reflect changed circumstances, for one thing. After several years of watching congressional Republicans play Wile E. Coyote to the president's Road Runner-their every trap exploding in their faces-conservatives can now look forward to each morning's newspaper, with its fresh revelations of the Gore campaign's incompetence.

Besides, mood swings are notoriously part of growing up. The 1994 Republican sweep left conservatives with a foolish and self-destructive, but also quite understandable, sense of their invincibility. People who believe in their inevitable triumph, of course, inevitably get their comeuppance-after which their grand expectations may curdle into excessive disillusionment. Attaining a majority, for a movement no less than for a teenager, involves moving to a third stage, in which the difficulties and imperfections of adult life inspire neither denial nor despair.

The real trouble with the conservative mood is not that it is mercurial. It is that it may be delusional. To support Gov. Bush as the best candidate available to conservatives would be one thing. It is quite another to describe him as the son of Ronald Reagan rather than of his actual father, as some conservatives have come close to doing. The overrating of Bush's conservatism (and of his electability, for that matter) is part of a general overrating of conservatism's prospects, even as it is evidence that those prospects are in fact not good.

Whatever they may say, conservatives know in their bones that their position is weak. Fear, after all, not confidence, is what motivates the stampede toward Bush-a stampede in which conservative voters as well as GOP hierarchs have participated. A lot of conservatives seem not to want to hear a word of criticism of the governor, much less a debate.

What these conservatives sense is that, at a level of politics deeper than the fortunes of the political parties, the ground is shifting away from them. What they have not noticed is that the 2000 election is shaping up to be a ratification not of conservatism but of Clintonism-and will be so even if the Republicans win.

Dick Armey, speaking to the Heritage Foundation on October 13, took a different view: "I can honestly tell you that, more than at any time in my life, our ideas and policies are on the rise." He has a case. Nobody believes in the planned economy, or wage and price controls, anymore; the budget is in surplus, inflation low, welfare reformed. The movement for school choice is enjoying its first halting successes. Almost as many Americans are now willing to call themselves "pro-life" as "pro-choice." In last year's elections, the Democrats came in third (getting only 18 percent of younger voters) in Minnesota-the land of Walter Mondale, Eugene McCarthy, and Hubert Humphrey. This, mind you, was amidst what was generally seen as a liberal resurgence. Social democrats may be in power throughout the industrialized world, but they have no choice but to implement a conservative program, however slowly and reluctantly.

If this optimistic case is to prevail, Bill Clinton's successes must be explained away as having nothing to do with his unconservative politics. They must be attributed to the accident of a booming economy and stock market, Clinton's freakish political talents, a biased press, Republican missteps, and a hundred other things. Many of these explanations have merit. Yet even taken together, they seem inadequate. It is revealing that conservatives often seem to suggest that Clinton has cast a spell on the public and that the Congress is too cowardly to resist him-revealing because this is an explanation that comes uncomfortably close to the one liberals had for Ronald Reagan's success in the 1980s.

Liberals took a long time to recognize that Reagan's success had anything to do with what he stood for; even today, many people place more stress on "the Reagan demeanor," as Armey did in his speech. (Gov. Bush, he said, "embodies" this demeanor: "Like Reagan, he is sunny, he is optimistic, and, yes, he's compassionate-because he recognizes that conservatism, like America itself, is inherently sunny and optimistic and compassionate." Where does one begin?) Just as liberals were unwilling to concede that Reagan's policies were popular-and my apologies to him for this comparison-conservatives are making the same mistake about Clinton.