The conservative revolution (FWD)

Edward B Liebow (liebow@BATTELLE.ORG)
Fri, 6 Jan 1995 16:01:05 -0500

[timely post from a discussion on technology and society. Enjoy.] Ed Liebow

Subject: The conservative revolution [worth reading whether you agree or not]
Date: 1/6/95 8:59 AM
From: Phil Agre <>





The conservative revolution.

My liberal friends are virtually all in denial. They change the
channel when Rush Limbaugh comes on, they cite low voter turnout
figures as evidence against the electoral legitimacy of the new
Republican Congress, they assert as obvious that Republicans and
Democrats are the same by now anyway, they dismiss Newt Gingrich
and the editorialists of the Wall Street Journal as nut-cases,
they speculate that the 1980's provide grounds for predicting
that the new conservative movement will self-destruct and fade,
and they act as though they could rebut every last conservative
argument before breakfast with one hand tied behind their backs.

Dream on, my friends, because you are in serious trouble. Little
analysis of the detailed electoral numbers is required to figure
out that we're looking at the largest and deepest shift in US
political institutions since the New Deal. But the strongest
evidence goes beyond the numbers. The conservative movement has
built an impressive array of institutions, a system of parallel
structures with serious funding and a genuine mass base. This
includes parallel media institutions (the Washington Times, talk
radio and National Empowerment Television, all of them by-passing
the mainstream news), parallel public interest organizations (the
American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) competing head-to-head
with the ACLU, as well as a batch of other conservative legal
institutes employing the ACLU model but pressing property rights
and anti-affirmative action agendas), parallel intellectual
networks (based for the most part in privately funded think tanks
like the Heritage Foundation and Manhattan Institute, but also
in law schools and economics departments), and much else. One
reason why liberals can maintain their denial is that they have
chosen, by and large, to remain uninformed about these alternative
institutions. Their world has remained stable for so long that
they are unable to conceive that changing political conditions
could simply throw a switch, channeling cultural and financial
resources to the new institutions and leaving the old ones to
wither and die.

Money helps build such institutions, of course, but it's not
just money. The last decade has seen the rise of an extremely
well-organized network of activists who are much more thoroughly
studied in conservative ideology than the Reaganites of ten and
fifteen years ago. They support and recruit young Republican
activists on college campuses, they get vast amounts of ideology
distributed to people who can use it, and they sell large numbers
of books by Friedrich von Hayek and Ludwig von Mises and a world
of other conservative theorists to people who really do read and
understand them. In particular, they have sophisticated ideas
about the structure of the liberal coalition and its weaknesses,
and they are exhibiting extraordinary precision and thoroughness
in applying pressure along the fracture lines.

One sign of the ongoing decimation of the liberal coalition
is its nearly complete lack of rhetorical traction in rebutting
conservative arguments. We can see this, for example, in the
impunity with which conservative rhetors have appropriated words
like "elites" (a term which no longer includes bankers but does
include journalists), "bigotry" and "hate" (now used to signify
opposition to the political program of religious conservatives),
and "political correctness" (a term which formerly was rarely
used in seriousness by anyone but sectarian Leninists but which
now routinely conflates social dissent and political repression).
We can also see it in the impunity with which these same rhetors
employ extreme vocabulary in their anti-liberal polemics -- read
any of P. J. O'Rourke's "enemies lists" in the American Spectator
for the prototype, but the phenomenon is pervasive.

Much will happen in the next couple of years. The Democratic
Party will disintegrate. The corporate funding on which it
came increasingly to rely as it alienated its mass base by
increments since the late 1970's has now shifted radically toward
the Republicans. (Most of the figures you'll see won't seem to
prove this, since the radical shift only began toward the end of
the 1994 campaign.) Corporate money only went to the Democrats
in the first place because money buys access and the Democrats
were the majority party. Now that that's no longer true, this
money will seek its natural home and the inherent bias toward
incumbents in the money-intensive political process will lock in
with extra strength. Enough things are genuinely messed up in
Washington that the new Republican majority can be heroes simply
by cleaning up the worst of them, starting with Congressional
rules. It'll take incredible discipline to institute term limits
and pass a balanced budget amendment, but they'll do it. Once
they start actually balancing the budget, though, they'll need to
considerably deepen the revolution. If they're smart, which they
are, then they'll take Bill Kristol's suggestion and hold "show
trials" of failed government programs, presumably starting with
the Departments of Energy, Transportation, and Housing and Urban
Development. Eventually they'll empty out the Department of
Education, since it's a creature of the Democrats' most central
constituency, the National Education Association, but they don't
need to do that immediately. What the liberal pollsters don't
understand is that the conservative ideological network can back
up Republican legislative initiatives with tremendous grassroots
firepower through talk radio and other media -- the crime bill
and failed attempts at lobbying reform in the previous Congress
provide good examples. What seems politically impossible today
won't seem so impossible once this machinery gets back in gear in
a few months. This effect will be awesome in the 1996 election
cycle, and Bill Clinton is more likely to be assassinated than he
is to be reelected.

The biggest question is whether the new conservative majority has
enough discipline to prevent a return to the social conditions
of the 1880's, when a laissez-faire legislative majority and
legal system permitted the profound social chaos inherent in an
unregulated market economy to express itself. Large business
coalitions are already forming to eviscerate the Securities
and Exchange Commission and the Food and Drug Administration,
which regulate perhaps the two most morally hazardous industries.
Increasingly frequent proposals to means-test Social Security
benefits will turn Social Security into a form of welfare and
thus great increase its political vulnerability. Once people
like Richard Posner and Richard Epstein are appointed to the
Supreme Court, if not before, look for New Zealand-style changes
in labor law and the end of affirmative action. It's a leftist's
dream, in an unfortunate and twisted way, but it will take place
against the background of a thoroughgoing conservative hegemony
that will make leftist arguments nearly unintelligible.

What does this have to do with networks? All along, I've pointed
at something important -- the infrastructure of the conservative
political movement. This includes technical infrastructure --
radio, Newt Gingrich's videos and conference calls, direct mail
and the databases that back it up, and so forth. It includes
institutional infrastructure -- activist training by groups like
Gopac, networking groups like the Council for National Policy,
the Free Press, and the whole world of institutions based in
conservative evangelical churches. It also includes what we
might call rhetorical infrastructure -- the discursive forms of
public relations that provide standard frames and logics for the
ceaseless circulation and reassembly of bits of fact and argument
and narrative by conservative pundits and activists. And it
includes what we might call ideological infrastructure -- the
basic framework of abstract ideas that get filled in with this
rhetorical material in particular settings.

No one or two of these basic types of infastructure suffices to
characterize or explain the material workings of the conservative
movement. In particular, technology is an indissociable part
of the whole picture, but it is just one part. In another TNO
article I want to sketch a framework for thinking about the
communicative metabolism of social movements in general, but for
the moment I simply want to remark on the specific uses being
made of communication technology by this one particular movement.
As I keep saying, the technologies do not in themselves determine
how they will be used, but their specific workings do matter for
the workings of the larger social machinery -- the institutional,
rhetorical, and ideological machinery with which it articulates
in daily practice.

Will the conservative movement change its character as (or, I
suppose we should say, if) access to computer networking becomes
more widespread? We cannot be certain. We can be certain,
though, that computer networks will not themselves change any
existing movements or create any new ones. Rather than wait
for that to happen, let us become aware of the specific ways in
which different kinds of social movements take hold of particular
technologes, and let us keep on imagining the other ways in which
the technologies might be used.