9 "If Conservatives Cannot Do It Now..."

Interview with Irving Kristol Authority on Political Trends

At the beginning of the Reagan administration, Irving Kristol, a noted political expert, said that with the rise of conservatism, Republicans had their best chance in fifty years to become the country's "natural majority party" again.

О Professor Kristol, what are the chances that President Reagan can mobilize conservative resources to forge an enduring coalition for governing the nation?

A I think his chances are very good. And if he can establish that coalition, there is no reason why the Republican Party cannot again be the natural majority party in the country. This is the best chance conservatives have had in 50 years to create such a coalition. If they cannot do it now, one has to assume that they cannot do it at all. О Would conservatism then come to dominate politics as liberalism did after the 1930s? A I think so. People will have confidence in their government and its programs as long as they per­ceive that it's working in a vigorous way toward the solution of their problems. If President Reagan can generate the kind of economic growth that his policy forecasts, the American people will be perfectly satisfied.

О Which elements in the conservative movement will President Reagan have to bring together into his governing coalition? A I'd say there are perhaps four main elements:

One certainly is the Moral Majority — that is, the basically Christian-oriented, patriotic Americans who feel that the government has become too in­trusive and the United States has been too weak in its foreign relations.

Then you have what you might call the Establishment conservatives — namely, the governmental types who have been serving in various Republican administrations and who are cautious, prudent men of the middle.

You also have the neoconservatives — with whom I am usually classified — who are really the people within academe, the media and the intellectual community generally who have become conservative over the past 15 years.

The fourth component, I suppose, would be the traditional right-wing organizations, like the American Conservative Union, that are close to the Moral Majority but are also interested in such issues as right-to-work legislation. ... Q Can the Moral Majority element — emphasizing religious intervention in controversial issues — fit into a stable coalition?

A Sure. Look, if Franklin D. Roosevelt could fuse the Southern-conservative vote and the Northern-liberal-union vote into a single coalition, then Reagan should have no trouble fusing the existing conservative groups into a coalition. They're far less disparate in their interests than the coalition established by FDR.

True, moral issues such as abortion can be very disruptive because it's hard to compromise on them. It's too bad that the Supreme Court made the abortion issue a national issue instead of leaving it to the states. There doesn't seem to be much possibility at the moment that it will revert to the states, so we'll just have to negotiate it as best we can. ...

О What role will people like you play in the coalition-building process? A A crucial role, in my opinion. Every political movement needs its intellectual wing these days. It's the age of higher education and the media, and a movement can succeed only temporarily unless it has an intellectual segment to go along with its popular appeal and an interest group to articulate what the movement is up to. ... Q What will be Reagan's most difficult challenge in translating conservatives ideas into government policy?

160 AMERICA IN CLOSE-UP

5. continued

A Foreign affairs, by far. He came into office with a very coherent and fully articulated economic policy, and he's going to get it through with the coalition entirely behind him. But he also took office with a set of attitudes on foreign policy, not a coherent, well-worked-out set of policies. Witness the controversy over the grain embargo within the administration. This lack of coherence is going to be a very serious problem for the administration. Let me put it this way: We have no conservative counterpart in foreign policy to "supply side" economics in economic policy — something which is identifiably ours. ...

О As a student of politics and ideas, do you see the dramatic rise of conservatism as part of a cyclical pattern in the ascendancy of rival political philosophies?

A There is a cyclical pattern — yes — which to some degree is simply natural. Namely, a party becomes powerful, holds office until it makes mistakes, exhausts its agenda, then another party takes its place. But this, in a way, is simply a function of retrospection. There is a natural cycle in the sense no one ever expects any party to dominate forever in a democracy. I don't know that there's more of a cycle than that. О Does the cycle shorten or lengthen according to how well the party out of power sees new situations emerging and develops new and persuasive ideas for meeting them?

A To some degree, yes. Mainly, however, I think it results from the fact that a ruling party eventually hits a crisis which it cannot cope with, as happened to the Republicans with the Great Depression. Then people will turn to the other party almost regardless of what it has to offer.

О Now that liberalism seems to be declining, can it avoid the stagnation that typified conservatism for so long after 1932?

A Well, what liberals have to do is to come up with an agenda. That is not going to be easy, because, to begin with, they enacted most of their agenda. Parts of it will be repealed or cut back, but most of their agenda will remain the law of land. No one's going to repeal medicare or medicaid. Certainly no one's going to repeal Social Security or unemployment insurance.

That being the case, it's hard to see what the Democratic agenda can be. My own guess is that the Democratic Party will find its agenda on the left, because unless this administration behaves in a very stupid and inept manner, there will be no room on the right for liberals. Therefore, they will probably have to go into the wilderness for a few years before coming out with an agenda — perhaps something that sets the goal of total equality, with more state intervention and an emphasis not on job creation, which is Reagan's program, but on job retention — that sort of thing.

Kristol, Irving: professor of social thought at New York University, co-editor of Public Interest and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Great Depression: see page 73.

Social Security: government measures providing economic assistance to persons faced with unemployment, disability, or old age.

THE POLITICAL SYSTEM 161