The rise of the counter-establishment; from conservative ideology to political power.

• Author: Rowe, Jonathan

The Rise of the Counter-Establishment

Suddenly, Star Wars is an industrial policy."It could open whole new fields of technology and industry, providing jobs for thousands right here in Colorado,' President Reagan told a Republican campaign rally in that state before the election.

In Massachusetts, the anti-abortion peoplehave become Naderites. "I think government should regulate industries, not contribute to them,' says a plaintive housewife type in an ad for Question 1, a failed ballot initiative that would have enabled the state legislatuure to cut off funds for abortion, among other things.

To the press, the Reagan ascendancy has beena triumph of "conservatism.' But government jobs programs and interference in an industry for which there is a market demand, are hardly "conservative' as that term is normally defined. Nor is an adventurous foreign policy, or an effort to "stimulate' growth by manipulating the levers of tax and monetary policy in Washington. As Sidney Blumenthal points out in his new book, The Rise of the Counter-Establishment,* Reagan conservatism is really a form of "shadow-liberalism.' It arose in a conscious reaction to liberals and "requires liberalism for its meaning.' It has less--almost nothing, in fact--to do with conserving the best of what is past, than with trying to eradicate every evidence of liberalism in our present.

* The Rise of the Counter-Establishments; From ConservativeIdeology to Political Power. Sidney Blumenthal. Times Books, $19.95.

The Counter Establishment is the loose networkof scholars, publicists, and think tanks that set out to stymie their liberal counterparts. Liberals had labor PACs? Then we'll have business and ideological ones. The libs had Common Cause? We'll start Citizens' Choice. The liberal public interest movement found its shadow in organizations such as Jim Watt's Mountain States Legal Foundation, which defined the common good as the right of individuals to maximize their personal gain. For Brookings there was the Heritage Foundation, for The Washington Post there was the Washington Times. Even conservatives' book titles had a shadow quality. Wealth and Poverty, George Gilder's paean to the free marketplace, was a play on Progress and Poverty, Henry George's late 19th century tract against land speculators and on behalf of a tax system to bring them down.

Sidney Blumenthal is a Washington Postreporter who has covered the rise of the Counter Establishment for that newspaper and for The New Republic. Partisans on the Right will say that a left-winger has done a journalistic number on them. In part they will be right, though it is an intelligent and well-informed number. But Blumenthal has at least taken the Counter Establishment seriously. This in itself is progress.

For years, journalists of moderate to liberalviews took comfort in portraying right-wingers as mentally imbalanced people obsessed with flouridation and the Connally Amendment, who saw communism in the school lunch program and the U.N. A whole generation of college students studied such books as Richard Hofstadter's The American Political Tradition, which looked with condescension upon the unwashed on the fringes. Hofstadter portrayed William Jennings Bryan, the populist presidential candidate, for example, as a coarse and sweaty provincial whose leading characteristic was his "torpor' of mind, that six years at a hick college had done "nothing to awaken.'

Such views made the animus of the populistright and its cohorts easy for liberals to dismiss. And history seemed to be on their side. A Right destined to prevail would have come up with something better than the Goldwater campaign; a Sunbelt reaction that was really going to happen wouldn't have run aground on Watergate. Through the Sixties and Seventies, respectable opinion held such "progressive' Republican politicians as Charles Percy, William Scranton, George Romney and Nelson Rockefeller to be the future of the party. Rockefeller was the national personification of "new ideas.' George Gilder, who was a...