In recent months I have used this column to point out certain flip-flops of American leftists. I have needled the 1960s peaceniks for turning hawks once Bill Clinton became president and decided to send troops to Haiti and Bosnia.
I have chided the champions of academic freedom for cracking the whip in the name of political correctness once they took control of the university departments where they teach and tossed a few barbs at lifetime Keynesians in the Democratic Party who are now fretting over budget deficits run up by Republican administrations.
In response, I have received several letters and e-mails from readers who accuse me of Republican partisanship, reminding me that it is a mistake to assume that the Republican Party represents the principles and interests of American Catholics. This criticism puzzles me. I insist that I have been critical over the years of what might be called “country club Republicans” and “Rockefeller Republicans.”
But I’ll take the bait anyway. Fair is fair. It is true: Americans on the right have made some flip-flops in recent years that are worthy of comment. We could start with the right’s position on racial issues. There has been a change since the Goldwater days. I can remember when publications such as National Review and Modern Age defended Jim Crow laws in the name of states’ rights. In the 1950s, conservative spokesmen such as Richard Weaver argued that there were cultural differences between blacks and whites that justified laws separating the races.
Their proposition was that the races in the north were separated “de facto” by housing patterns, and that Southerners should be entitled to achieve the same degree of separation by law, since the races live in close geographic proximity throughout the old Confederacy. You won’t hear that argument made any longer by conservative politicians and journalists. Quite the contrary: Nowadays conservative leaders are fond of repeating Martin Luther King’s statements about a “color-blind” society where a man is judged by the content of his character rather than the color of his skin.
A comparable change can be seen on the right on the question of the Social Security system. There was a time when conservatives contended that the system should be abolished. Not reformed — abolished. The argument was that Americans could far better provide for themselves by keeping the money taken from them through the payroll tax and investing it. I can remember seeing charts making the case that the average worker would be able to amass significant wealth through prudent investments with the weekly deduction taken from his paycheck. Barry Goldwater made just this case back in the 1960s.
Indeed, the same argument was advanced just a few years ago when talk of privatizing Social Security was in the air. Steve Forbes was a prominent spokesman for the idea. Rush Limbaugh was on board. But now? The most you will get from any prominent conservative I can think of is the proposal that a tiny — the stress is always on “tiny” — portion of the payroll tax be set aside for the individual to invest in a private retirement account. Those who once talked of “abolishing” Social Security now act offended that anyone would think that they are proposing anything that would threaten the system.
What happened? The polls. And the end of the runaway stock market. People who were once confident that they could grow their portfolios 15 percent every year, can’t find a good stock to buy anymore. The Social Security check looks pretty good to them now. Any politician talking about abolishing Social Security these days would find himself out of office, especially now that the baby boomers are getting ready to line up for their monthly checks.
There has been a comparable shift on the question of censorship. There was a time when conservative spokesmen would not hesitate to apply the Supreme Court’s definition of obscenity as sufficient justification for prohibiting the sale and distribution of sexually explicit material. If the book or movie had “no redeeming social value” and appealed to “prurient interests,” they argued that a community was within its rights to outlaw it. Now? I can’t remember the last time I heard a leading conservative politician or journalist making this case. The right seems to have bought into the “victimless crime” and “consenting adults” point of view about pornography. From what I can see, the only category of porn that any public figure wants to prohibit these days is child pornography.
So am I saying that conservatives have been just as ideologically inconsistent as leftists have been? Well, I would argue that the key question to ask is whether the flip-flop is an instance of political opportunism and an outright disregard of principle. There is a difference between making adjustments in one’s point of view to take into account political realities and changing times, and cynically changing positions in order to save face or carry the day politically. There is nothing wrong with changing political perspective because of a genuine change of heart or because of new insights into the question at hand.
For example, conservatives could argue that Ronald Reagan’s budget deficits were necessary to discipline a Congress that would have spent irresponsibly on domestic programs; that Reagan’s deficits were designed to prevent the growth of federal spending rather than encourage it. They could also argue that their movement away from segregationist views was the consequence of a genuine moral conversion on this issue, rather than a case of jockeying for position to form a political coalition to aid Republican candidates for public office.
In other words, there is nothing wrong with admitting that we were wrong, or that we now see dimensions to an issue that escaped us in the past. That is different from flip-flopping ideologically simply to get our way on public policy. Am I saying that American leftists have been doing the latter? Well, here’s the test. Will the old peaceniks who became hawks when Bill Clinton was in office, and are doves again now on the question of war with Iraq, become hawks again the next time a Democrat is in office and wants to send the troops somewhere?
Will the Congressional Democrats who once beat the drums for Keynesian deficit spending, and are now criticizing the Bush administration for not maintaining a balanced budget, change their tune again and make light of the impact of federal deficits once the Democrats control the Congress again and want to increase spending on their favorite programs? Will the academic leftists who once led the charge for academic freedom, but are now enforcing codes of politically correctness to advance feminist, homosexual and racial issues at their universities, reverse themselves if the day ever comes that university administrators become more conservative than they are today?
It may be my political bias at work, but I am willing to bet the ranch they will flip-flop on these issues as readily as kids on a trampoline. Any takers?
James Fitzpatrick's new novel, The Dead Sea Conspiracy: Teilhard de Chardin and the New American Church, can be ordered directly from Winepress Publishers — 1-877-421-READ (7323); $12.95, plus S&H. You can email Mr. Fitzpatrick at jkfitz42@aol.com.
(This article originally appeared in The Wanderer and is reprinted with permission. To subscribe call 651-224-5733.)
