Unified Kvetch Theory.

• Author: Olson, Walter

Got a problem? Blame "radical individualism."

In case you were wondering against whom the traditionalists' culture war was going to be waged, James Dobson and Gary Bauer are pleased to clarify matters. "STOP AND LISTEN, AMERICA," they demand in their co-signed full-page ad in the May 4 Weekly Standard, which plays off the Jonesboro, Arkansas, schoolyard massacre. "Are we surprised at the spectacle of children killing children?...Radical individualism is destroying us!"

That last is not a misprint: Among many of the nation's social conservatives, it's getting to be more like a slogan. "Radical individualism threatens to devour even America's children," says Diane Knippers, president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, in a piece written before the shooting sprees. Watergate veteran Charles Colson, now a preacher who's described present-day America as groaning under an "amoral libertarian regime," warns against getting "suckered in by the radical individualism of American culture."

True, some found it a stretch for Dobson and Bauer to blame this year's string of schoolyard murders on an excess of radical individualism (with its reputedly related -isms of secularism and skepticism). Jonesboro, after all, had not exactly been famed as a hotbed of Rand-quoting individualist radicals, or even latte-drinking freethinkers. Like Pearl, Mississippi, and West Paducah, Kentucky, other towns hit with schoolyard killings, Jonesboro is located both physically and temperamentally in the Bible Belt. (Springfield, Oregon, and Edinboro, Pennsylvania, scenes of other shootings, were likewise no one's idea of stamping grounds for the secular elite.) Still, like Eleanor Roosevelt in her heyday, the nation's trads seemed determined to shift the blame for crime away from individual sociopaths and onto the social and cultural environment said to have shaped their psyches - a trend not dampened even by a rampage carried out by a Swiss Guard in Vatican City.

It's not happenstance that as terms such as individualist, libertarian, choice, and autonomy turn into epithets of abuse in many traditionalist circles, many of these same circles are turning a friendlier ear to proposals for state intervention in the economy. Pat Buchanan, of course, has long since departed the free market reservation. Gary Bauer made headlines by deriding the "free-trade mantra," rhetorically assailing Wall Street and big business, playing footsie with unions in their efforts to curtail U.S. firms' use of low-wage labor abroad...