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conditions sustaining it-stagflation, energy shortages, renewed Soviet
aggressiveness-are scarcely those to which the traditional proposals
and preferences of the Left seem obviously relevant. There ha rarely
been a time when a realignment of American politics along a class–
based left/ right axis looked less imminent.
If
the climate is unfavorable
for moderate reforms expanding the welfare state, it is even less
hospitable to radicals wistfully trying to revive the spirit of the sixties
by mindlessly marching against just about anything, one year the oil
companies, the next year nuclear power, until the possibility of a
renewal of the draft provides a new target of protest. The prevailing
conservative mood, more troubled than complacent, will probably
hasten the defection from neoconservatism of the nervous liberals
currently in its ranks. This center-if that's what it is-won't hold for
long and some of its most distinguished supporters will find their way
back at least to the moderate Left.
Others, a larger number no doubt, will move in the opposite
direction. Steinfels concludes in his final paragraph that, after begin–
ning as "an antibody on the left," neoconservatism "is now an
independent force." As its positions have hardened into doctrine, it has
attracted young adherents free of the ambivalence toward liberalism
that marked most of its founders and tempered and subtilized their
more embattled rhetoric, as well as older publicists with unsullied
conservative credentials (not to speak of corporate money). Already
neoconservatism as a recognizable beast seems to be disappearing, the
"neo" fading last of all like the smile on the face of the Cheshire cat.
Several contributors to a recent
Commentary
symposium on liberalism
deplored in tones no different from those of Hayek or Friedman the
degeneration of liberalism when it became tainted with "collectivism"
without so much as mentioning the New Deal and the welfare state,
although acceptance of these was supposed to be the dividing line
between the new and the unreconstructed versions of American conser–
vatism (really, laissez faire liberalism).
In the same vein, Steinfels can be credited with that rare achieve–
ment: a prediction confirmed in exact detail. Noting the extravagant
praise bestowed by a
Commentary
reviewer on the political satire of
Tom Wolfe, the "erstwhile laureate of sixties excess and the 'new
sensibility,''' he remarks that "without the moat of his current politics,
Wolfe would be an undefended city" in neoconservative circles. Lo and
behold, the reviewer in
Commentary
of Wolfe's recent book on the
astronauts reports his mocking of the square, God-fearing, clean–
living, patriotic image they cultivated and decides that Wolfe is
