COMMENTARY
A New Front in the Culture War
Since the 1960s liberals have held America's moral high ground. The Bush camp wants to charge the hill.
This week in Philadelphia, for the first time, American conservatism is going on the offensive in the culture war. This Republican National Convention will be infused from beginning to end with compassionate conservatism--an idea that hopes to reshape our cultural idea of social virtue. How did this party of traditional values and economic discipline develop such an ear for culture? It had to.
The liberalism that came out of the 1960s has enjoyed one profound advantage over even moderate forms of conservatism: moral authority. Social inequality was established in the 1960s as the single greatest threat to the moral authority of our democracy. America would make a mission of ending it or lose its legitimacy as a democracy. This battle transformed our culture in a way that we are just beginning to understand. It made social morality, more than personal morality, the test of moral authority in American public life.
We have recently seen a baseball relief pitcher hounded into re-education because of "social insensitivity" while our president survived in office despite a flagrant lapse of personal morality. It is often said that a Republican president could never have survived what Bill Clinton survived. What makes this speculation plausible is our intuitive understanding that today's Democrats are buffered by a moral authority that Republicans simply don't have, an authority that comes in large part from their conspicuous alignment with the fight against inequality. Social morality gives them a second source of virtuousness beyond the personal, a blamelessness that is impersonal.
Democrats earned this advantage by being the first to step up to the problem of inequality 40 years ago. Through the Great Society and a long regime of affirmative action, they evolved an ideology that tries to solve inequality by engineering representation for minorities and women through the use of double standards.
That this ideology has failed to achieve anything like true equality between groups isn't the point. By addressing the deepest shame in American culture, it carries a blessing of moral authority to all who subscribe to it. It also gives American liberalism a power far beyond its actual support in society.
Since the 1960s the liberal ideology of engineered representation, double standards, cosmetic diversity and identity entitlements has been the American idea of social virtue. This means that liberalism controls our very terms of social decency. And no ideology can have a greater power than this, because at this level ideology becomes invisible. It becomes a propriety so obviously good and true that only the indecent would question it. Enemies of liberalism must conform to its ideological demands or be stigmatized as "mean spirited" and therefore lacking the legitimacy to represent all Americans.
This is why universities, public schools, government agencies, corporations, the media, foundations--all the important institutions in American life--live by the ideology of liberalism as if by virtue itself. This is why the majority of Americans quietly conform to the liberal policies in their schools and workplaces that they privately disagree with. Even if conformity brings them nothing more than benign anonymity, it spares them life-altering stigmatization as racist, sexist or homophobic.
The infamous culture war--which some see (and I believe erroneously) as over--might be reasonably defined as a struggle between the left and right for control over the terms of social decency. Whoever wins this war wins the extraordinary power to have their ideology become invisible. Much is at stake--literally the public culture and institutions of our society, much more than any single political platform or campaign can encompass.
That the right is so far losing this war is obvious in that conservatives are glaringly labeled as such in the media, so that they are not only made ideologically visible but are given a whiff of indecency. Liberals, as victors in the culture war, have enough ideological invisibility to be rarely labeled as such.
The price conservatism pays for losing this war is to be made to function as a subversive, countercultural movement--one that must relentlessly and shrilly and futilely argue for itself. Even when conservatism has won elections, it has not won this war. Eight years of Ronald Reagan hardly slowed the advance of political correctness. He won the Cold War, but not the culture war.
Of course the problem is not conservative principles--individual responsibility, merit, hard work, single standards, competition or initiative. These, after all, are the very tenets of classic liberalism, and few contemporary liberals truly disagree with them.
The problem is rather that conservatism failed to shape these principles into a countervailing vision of social decency, failed to compete with liberalism. Conservatives seemed not to understand that their own moral authority required that they proselytize for their principles among the former victims of inequality. Among the doubters and the disbelievers is where conservatism will cross out of its stigmatization and into unimpeachable decency.
George W. Bush is the first conservative on the presidential level to understand that he is in a culture war, that moral authority requires an explicit social application of conservative principles to problems of inequality and poverty. This kind of work has been a central mission in conservative think tanks for some time. But the Bush campaign is the first national showcase of this effort. And education will likely be its first triumph.
In schools too numerous to name, the "conservative" focus on high expectations, reasonable discipline, skill mastery and accountability through testing, has brought stunning results to precisely the poor and minority students liberalism has failed so abjectly. Conservative thinkers are now evolving a developmental model of equality to compete with the representational model of liberalism. In this model equal representation is a natural result of equal achievement.
There are some cracks in this picture. Mr. Bush's 10% plan for the University of Texas--guaranteeing admission to the top 10% of all Texas high school graduates--is a backslide into the engineered equality of liberalism. It forsakes the discipline of his K-12 education policies by protecting students from the accountability and competition that he rightly believes will create excellence in the lower grades. Here he commits the classic liberal sin: ceasing to believe in the capacities of the people one is trying to help, grabbing a little moral authority by making easy what should be demanding.
This said, the Bush campaign is poised not only to stand well in the upcoming election but also to have more impact on American culture than any conservative campaign in recent memory. In the Bush vision there is a way to restore moral authority to timeless American values. It was the shame of inequality that made them ideologically visible in the first place. When they are put to work against poverty--rather than kept away from such work--they can be seen again as merely the truth.
Mr. Steele is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and author, most recently, of "A Dream Deferred: The Second Betrayal of Black Freedom in America" (HarperCollins, 1998).
