GANG OF FIVE: Leaders at the Center of the Conservative Crusade.

• Author: Heilbrum, Jacob
• Position: Review

GANG OF FIVE: Leaders at the Center of the Conservative Crusade

By Nina Easton Simon & Schuster

Onward Conservative Soldiers

What we can learn about the conservative movement from five stalwarts

A GOOD CASE CAN BE MADE THAT THE REAL radicals of the past century weren't on the left. They were on the right. Beginning in the 1950s, William F. Buckley Jr. set out not just to purge the right of anti-Semites, but also of Rockefeller Republicans. Once Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan had cleansed the party of the "wets," conservatives could get to post and assail the establishment--the liberal left, epitomized in the 1960s in the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, Harvard and Yale, and so forth. Far from presenting an obstacle to conservative aspirations, the rise of the New Left and the McGovern wing in the Democratic party helped complete the destruction of the New Deal-era liberal establishment and created a new establishment that proved an ideal target for Buckley & Co. A new, hardened left-wing based on affirmative action, multi-culturalism, and opposition to American intervention abroad could easily be portrayed as a caricature of liberalism, which it was. Now conservatives, who had earlier heaped contumely on traditional liberals, could lament the perversion of traditional liberalism by the young leftists turned tenured radicals.

The 1994 Gingrich revolution was the last stage in the general conservative revolt over the past decade. So sweeping were the aims of Gingrich and his paladins, however, that the American public revolted against the revolt--and President Clinton denuded conservatism of its most attractive features by hijacking them, the 1996 Welfare Reform Act being only the most prominent example of this political cross-dressing. As a result, the conservative movement is, in William Kristol's post-mortem after John McCain's victory in the New Hampshire Republican primary, "finished."

Or is it? For all his tacking to the center, George W. Bush owes conservatives big-time. Whether it's tax cuts, Supreme Court nominations, or the Strategic Defense Initiative, Bush will not have much leeway. And Bush's own memories of conservative disgruntlement with his father should help prompt him to remain on the straight-and-narrow path, even if he attempts to package his brand of conservatism as compassionate. Republicans seem more united than Democrats who carp about Al Gore and, on the party's left, worship at the shrine of the bitch-goddess...