Posted on 08/09/2003 10:50:26 PM PDT by Forgiven_Sinner
Mark L. Hineline is an historian at the University of California, Riverside and San Diego campuses. He lives in Escondido, California.
Over the past three decades, strident voices of social and political reaction -- voices belonging to Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, George W. Bush, and lately Ann Coulter, among others -- have captured the national agenda. In so doing, their greatest prize is the success they have enjoyed in blurring the critical distinction between conservatism and reaction.
This is a distinction with a difference. And it is not only conservatives who have suffered its loss. Progressives -- who should know better -- have grown muddled or careless in enforcing the distinctiveness that separates reactionary aim from conservative belief.
Reactionaries have learned the art of subversion.
There is, at present, no greater threat to our political traditions -- or to our sense of who we are as Americans -- than our growing inability to distinguish reactionary rhetoric from the deeply rooted conservative ethos that has complemented progressive reform and conviction through so much of our history as a nation.
And surprisingly enough, the distinction between conservatism and reaction is not even subtle.
In the plain, conservatives are content with American values and institutions very much as they are. Here, the present tense is important: Conservatives are content with America as it is in the present. They may want small changes in the way that government does its business but such changes are always, for conservatives, those which enhance stability and predictability in national affairs.
Reactionaries, in contradistinction, disapprove of America as it is in the present and long to return it to conditions that it obtained at some time in a real or imagined "golden age."
Precisely because reaction is imbued with deep discontent about American values and institutions, it has been every bit as threatening to the conservative center of the American electorate as has liberal reform, perhaps more so. Conservatives no more long to return to America as it was before Brown v. Board of Education than they pine for Princess telephones with rotary dials in place of their cell phones.
When voices of reaction have cropped up, making their perennial appearances in American history -- the voices of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, Father Coughlin in the 1930s, Strom Thurmond in the 1940s and Joe McCarthy in the 1950s -- they have briefly captured the attentions of Americans. And, just as quickly, those voices have been dispatched to oblivion, recognized as unworthy of mainstream notice.
So what is different about the current crop of reactionaries, who have succeeded spectacularly where their predecessors have failed?
The answer, alas, is that reactionaries have learned the art of subversion. They have learned that where they cannot defeat their rivals through a direct assault, they succeed by corrupting from within.
The art of subversion begins and ends with manipulations in the meanings of words. Socrates observed this, and so did George Orwell. John Dewey took note of it, and so too Wendell Berry.
Typically, subversive manipulation of language requires that a word be used to mean its opposite: justice comes to mean repression; peace signifies war; hate is love; greed is good.
But conflating the meaning of two words that appear to share an antonym can be just as effective. Thus, reaction and conservatism have become conjoined in opposition to liberalism. But they are not now, nor have they ever been, the same ideological bent. They aren’t even similar.
Conservatives have, traditionally, shown as much concern for conserving from their position to the left of reaction as from the right of liberal reform.
And therein lies the threat. Today, conservatives still dimly recognize the extremism of the right, but they are less clear about the distinction with each passing election cycle.
Gabriel Kolko, author of The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900-1916, put the matter most succinctly: Conservatism consists in "...an effort to preserve the basic social and economic relations essential to a capitalist society...." In his study of Progressive-era reformers, Kolko argued that political reform in the early 20th century was devised in large measure to create stability in the marketplace. Conservative business interests did not worry that the federal government was too big but rather that it was not big enough to bring predictability to the marketplace.
The idea, therefore, that conservatives -- those who seek to "preserve the basic social and economic relations essential to a capitalist society" -- ever favored absolute limits to the size of government is a myth. This is generally as true today as it was 100 years ago. Nor do conservatives oppose regulation in an absolute sense. Rather, they favor regulation where they believe it to be in the national interest and oppose it where it does not. This is politics.
Conservatives have also sought stability and predictability on the social side of the national agenda. Fearing that they have much to lose from sweeping social change, conservatives have tended to resist it. Social conservatism might best be understood as a tension between the power of privilege -- grounded in race, gender, ethnicity or inherited wealth -- and a genuine desire to make real the promise of the Declaration of Independence that all men (and women) are created equal. Conservatives think it reasonable to increase individual privilege as a consequence of increasing personal wealth, and they are chary of losing privilege – as individuals, or as a nation.
Reaction and conservatism... are not now, nor have they ever been, the same ideological bent.
This, despite the Reagan, Gingrich, and Bush II/DeLay insurgencies, is still what most Americans mean by "conservative."
By this definition, Bill Clinton may have been the most conservative president in the past 30 years. He defended the status quo: Social Security and Medicare. He defended public education and the environment. His policies and political interventions were designed, almost exclusively, to create predictability and security in the American and global economies. His conservatism was well within the mainstream of the political tradition. Clinton’s conservatism was not a tactic for winning elections, I believe, but deeply rooted in his experience and character.
The claim that Clinton was the most conservative president of the past 30 years is intended to provoke; any such claim is the fodder for scores of books and dissertations. But who can be ruled out? Nixon, I think. Nixon's record is mixed, but contains a surprising number of progressive directions -- such as the creation of the EPA, wage and price controls, and revenue sharing.
And Reagan? Reagan certainly did not run, nor did he govern, as a conservative. He said that he did, but this was the subversion. Reagan's rhetoric and record show that he both intended and succeeded in rolling back what he believed were the excesses of the Great Society. That is reaction.
Ronald Reagan wanted to erase the prior two decades of social progress (and, in the case of the Vietnam war, the lessons learned).
Bill Clinton, by contrast, sought to preserve them.
Compare Clinton’s record to Reagan’s. Clinton appointed Bruce Babbit as Secretary of Interior; Reagan appointed James Watt. The conventional wisdom today might be that Babbit was liberal while Watt was conservative. But if one adjusts one’s perspective to eschew the subversion of language, it becomes clear that Babbit's policies were fairly conservative while Watt’s were clearly reactionary.
Clinton’s record on social reform is mostly conservative. In the matter of gays in the military, Clinton settled for "don't ask, don't tell." This was about as close to the status quo as he could come, given a primary campaign promise of real reform. It preserved and codified de facto social progress, but didn’t go beyond that.
On affirmative action, Clinton authorized a review designed to save affirmative action in principle. And he pledged to "reform welfare as we know it": a defense of the status quo seemed to require compromise with the forces of reaction.
Clinton's major accomplishments over his eight years in office were in the realm of foreign trade; he worked diligently to open foreign markets to American goods and to stabilize trade relations with other nations. This was a conservative accomplishment, not a progressive one.
The most progressive policy initiatives during the Clinton years were health-care reform and Americorps. One of these failed, and the other was little more than tokenistic nostalgia for the Peace Corps from the past generation.
Democrats on the left need to clarify the distinction between conservative values and reactionary schemes.
Those who would claim Clinton as a social reformer and a progressive -- as other than a conservative president -- would need to show what Clinton did to move the society a full step beyond the gains of our last serious presidential social reformer, Lyndon Baines Johnson. The crucial test is this: what social reform (other than health-care reform) did Bill Clinton initiate which threatened -- or even seemed to threaten -- the social status of any privileged group in the United States?
Just so.
Then why were "conservatives" so angry at Clinton?
The clear answer is that the anti-Clintonites were not conservatives. They were reactionaries.
The anti-Clintonites saw the gains from their insurgency vanishing in the success of Clinton’s appeal to conservative Americans, and they stopped at nothing to corrupt the public’s opinion of his leadership. They succeeded in assassinating his character, but not what he stood for.
Today, Bill Clinton is no longer politically relevant. But his legacy contains a lesson that must be absorbed.
Democrats on the left don't have to move to the center -- which is conservative, in just the way that I have described it -- to win votes and to advance progressive causes. What they do need to do is to clarify, for all voters, the distinction between conservative values and reactionary schemes. All that is necessary is a bit of truth telling and striking the right tone. If they do that effectively, the Tom DeLays will again become marginal, as they were through most of the 20th century.
This is Mark Hineline for TomPaine.com.
remember his reference to doublespeak? Yet here he is practicing it himself. Clinton conservative? I don't think so.
these guys have spun themselves full circle.
If you look at the history of 20th century American liberalism, from Wilson and Brandeis looking back to smaller enterprises to recent Democrats disassociating themselves from the "excesses" of the 1960s, you'll find that conservatives or "reactionaries" have no monopoly on nostalgia.
There's something corrupt and dishonest in this desire for absolute up-to-dateness. It's just another form of mindless conformity, another means of silencing criticism.
His idea seems to be that there is some arc of change that one has to conform to, but clearly, this isn't the case. We are free to argue, resist, and suggest alternatives. Liberals and leftists want this freedom for themselves but deny it to others.
As for Clinton, he was a "status quo" President, but clearly that wasn't his intention. It was a result of 1) losing control of Congress in 1995, 2) the general exhaustion of liberal ideology, and 3) not having any base of support for more sweeping change.
The final irony is that Rush is such a supporter of President Bush that he can't be a "reactionary," since Bush also clearly "accepts" the present era.
He warned us what he was about to do.
And then he did it.
So, in the time-honored "liberal" tradition, he's set out to hijack the label we apply to ourselves, so he can tell us what we believe. This time, it's not going to work. You only get to use one label at a time, and "liberals" have chosen theirs.
Freedom, Wealth, and Peace,
Francis W. Porretto
Visit the Palace Of Reason:
http://palaceofreason.com
Thanks, I needed that defination. I got called a reactionary yesterday. Been looking for the leftist defination. Guess I am!!! A Reagan Reactionary, what a compliment!
He is accidently right about one thing, though. Rush Limbaugh and most Republican leaders are indeed reactionaries in the strictest definition of that term. Their politics consists almost exclusively of defensive moves in reaction to the dominant leftist establishment. Of course, here he uses reactionary in its classic Marxist ritual form; he means fascist, authoritarian, dictatorial, and racist but it is considered to be a form of great wit amongst the chi-chi left to vomit hate on your opponents while pretending to be objective. It's declasse, especially for a Professor, to show open hatred for your inferiors.
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