Republicans in Paradise:
Reflections on Election 2002

by Steven Yates

Republicans are whooping it up like cowboys at a rodeo these days. They again control both the House and the Senate, and they also claimed victory in a number of gubernatorial races. Pundits are crediting both George W. Bush’s leadership and the public approval of his agenda. Is the hoopla justified? I admit that even though part of me prefers let’s-drag-our-feet Republicans to openly socialist Democrats, I find myself hesitating to join the festivities. I hate to be the one to throw cold water on the Republican Party’s party, but some of us have memories. What happened the last two times Republicans seemed poised to launch a counterrevolution?

In 1980, Ronald Reagan was elected President, ending the disastrous Carter era. It was "Morning in America," or so the soundbite of the day went. All of a sudden conservatism was popular-among college students, in movie theaters, you name it. Moreover, the economy did improve – after Jimmy Carter, it could hardly do otherwise – and Reagan can take some credit for sowing the seeds that led to the collapse of the Soviet Empire.

The trouble was, the culture was deteriorating. The pop-conservatism of the day wasn’t exactly a revival of Edmund Burke, or even Russell Kirk, but more a cross between the childish pseudo-patriotism of a Rambo movie and a college fraternity party. While the pop-conservatives partied it up, the cultural Marxists who would transform campuses into Stalinist camps quietly gathered their forces. During the Reagan years affirmative action was strengthened rather than weakened, and those of us who had previously paid such things almost no attention were forced to notice them. We began warning of trouble ahead. We had no idea!

In the end, the Reagan Revolution foundered all across the board. The period 1988–92 was a weird transition. The frat party was over. Reagan’s successor had a quite different political philosophy, one hatched in the bowels of the UN and the CFR, not the venues that had spawned Reaganism. Gorbachev was a globalist, too, so perhaps the Soviet Empire had simply outlived its usefulness. During Bush the Elder’s term the economy tanked, Saddam went from being our ally against Iran to arch-villain when he invaded Kuwait and triggered the Gulf War, and the cultural Marxists came out of their library cubicles in force with their gender studies programs and critical race theories. Political correctness became a household word. Suddenly, conservatism wasn't so popular anymore. In fact, in the hallowed halls of ivy it had become almost synonymous with racism, sexism, etc. ad nauseam. At one time I had thought I would probably marry an academic woman. I discovered to my dismay that I couldn’t have an intelligent conversation with an academic woman if the topic was politics. Most had completely bought into notions I considered absurd, like sending women into combat in the name of "gender equity." I witnessed women verbally assaulting other women for not towing the gender feminist party line.

Then we saw the rise of the most despicable figure to get into the White House since Abraham Lincoln: William Jefferson Clinton. "It’s the economy, stupid," he told the public, and defeated Bush the Elder handily. He began making mayhem about "gays in the military" before he was even in office. I recall thinking, Geez, we’ve got our first politically correct White House. Some would doubtless argue that the culture war was already lost. The "official" conservatives seemed to flounder helplessly, and the country lurched leftward into its "celebration of diversity."

Republicanism went into eclipse. Cultural Marxism seeped outward from campus and began to affect, or infect, the nonacademic world. Confederate symbols that had previously troubled no one came under attack throughout the South. It was as if a nation that had existed for less than six years was responsible for everything wrong in black America. Restaurant chains such as Denny’s faced huge discrimination lawsuits as Jesse Jackson honed his shakedown skills. Threats of both litigation and destroyed reputations hovered over even large corporations. The latter began their "sensitivity" sessions where white males were expected to adopt and endure their legacy of historical villainy. For all practical purposes, an alien ideology took over America during the early-to-mid 1990s, one resolutely hostile not just to American founding principles but to Western civilization itself.

Moreover, it was the beginning of the party for the global-governance crowd which also came of age during the 1990s. The UN Rio Summit had unleashed Agenda 21 almost unnoticed. Clinton and his cronies gave us NAFTA, which accelerated the destruction of America’s manufacturing base. I began to notice how more and more American foreign policy was influenced by men whose names I wasn’t sure I was pronouncing correctly. Having long laughed off "conspiracy theories," I located a copy of Carroll Quigley’s Tragedy and Hope, and spent some time studying it. It offered an explanation why government continued to get larger and more intrusive no matter which major party controlled the White House, and dropped some very strong clues about who was really running this show, and it wasn’t the Republicans! I closed the book wondering about the future of U.S. sovereignty, given that almost no one believed that a relatively small global elite had been laying plans to dominate the world for decades.

But Clinton misstepped. He gave the country its biggest tax increase ever; his wife laid plans that would have basically nationalized the health care industry. In 1994, voters rebelled, and there was evidence – in the form of a steady stream of litigation much of which would make its way to the Supreme Court – that questions about runaway affirmative action were finally being taken seriously. Conservative talk radio appeared, and Rush Limbaugh became its major voice. A new slogan began making the rounds: "Clinton-Gore, Out in Four!" The fundamental silliness of much academic political correctness was exposed (e.g., Leonard Jeffries’ absurd distinction between European "ice people" and African "sun people," or Catharine MacKinnon’s infamous claim that all voluntary sexual intercourse is a form of rape). Conservatism was back!

In 1994, Newt Gingrich became Speaker of the House. This time it wasn’t "Morning in America" but the "Contract with America." Gingrich promised to bring a number of resolutions to the Floor, and did just that. Rush Limbaugh, now on television, loud ties and all, praised the new Republican Revolution. There was a tremendous flurry of activity in early 1995. It was an exciting moment – if you hadn’t heard Limbaugh defend NAFTA and ridicule the idea of global government in the works, or heard Mr. Newt identify his favorite ghost of U.S presidents past: Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Clinton told us that "the era of big government is over."

Soon there was more trouble. Liberals had retained control of the major media, after all. They put Limbaugh’s show on at ridiculous hours. They bashed the "Contract with America," and the Gingrich crowd took it with token retorts. Liberals denounced "angry white males" who wanted to "turn back the clock." Timothy McVeigh’s pale complexion and male body parts made it possible for pundits to connect the Oklahoma City bombing with the anti-affirmative action movement and also with the citizens militia movement. McVeigh had had no involvement with either, but we were seeing the rise to dominance of a mode of thought that saw truth as unimportant. Again, Republicanism showed signs of beginning to flounder.

Then, in early 1996, the Clinton Regime was able to engineer a major budget crisis that almost shut down the federal government. Clinton blamed the Republicans. The Republicans seemed unable to muster an effective response; it would not have been unreasonable to suspect either their intelligence or their motives (or both) by this time. Despite favorable if indecisive Supreme Court decisions such as Adarand and the triumph of measures like California’s Proposition 209, preferential treatment kept getting worse, not better. It had done the very thing we had warned about, expanding to encompass more and more groups. Homosexual militancy in particular had come of age, pulling gays and lesbians under the affirmative action umbrella. States such as Massachusetts wrote "sexual orientation" into antidiscrimination law. The campuses got worse, as cultural Marxism completely took over despite the earlier exposés. Critics such as myself who had tried to fight the campus battle without tenure were simply elbowed out. It became impossible for speakers identified as "conservative" to speak on campuses without being interrupted. Fraternity men who showed up at Halloween parties in "black face" found themselves in serious trouble with the sensitivity police. Corporations became as politically correct as the campuses had been. Employees were called onto the carpet for such things as having Confederate symbols on their cars. By 2000 there would be cases of people being fired for "insensitivity."

Again, Republicanism seemed to go into eclipse despite Republicans’ having retained – more-or-less – numerical dominance in Congress. As evidence surfaced that Clinton had sold nuclear secrets to the Chinese to help finance his 1996 re-election bid, they pursued him for his dalliance with an intern. Our drift toward global government under the UN continued, as terms such as sustainable development, smart growth, etc., crept into public discourse. Evidence began to emerge – if you were looking for it – of how both federal and state governments were buying up land and furthering the unholy alliance between radical environmentalists and purveyors of world government that had shifted into high gear in 1992 with the Rio Summit and Agenda 21. Mainstream Republicans offered only token objections that went nowhere.

It is now eight years since the Gingrich Revolution. Does anyone remember what was in the "Contract with America"? Did any of it change anything?

The question’s a no-brainer. In 2000, George W. Bush was elected president by the slimmest of all possible margins, an election Democrats might well have stolen had the Supreme Court not stepped in. Gingrich was exposed as having had an extramarital affair of his own the whole time he’d been condemning Clinton’s sexual olympics. Discredited and publicly disgraced, he stepped down into oblivion. At first, Bush the Younger seemed a relatively unimpressive former party animal who’d ridden to the top on his father’s coattails and Skull-and-Bones connections. And then 9-11 happened.

I don’t need to rehearse all that’s happened since. Except to say that the cultural Marxism of the politically correct, with its having placed minorities of questionable competence in positions of authority, has reached the point where it has actually gotten innocent people killed. I refer, of course, to the recent D.C.-area sniper attacks, where Montgomery County, Md.’s affirmative action police chief, Charles Moose, had his troops looking for an Angry White Male, not a black Muslim and an illegal alien. Meanwhile, militant homosexuals have begun to propagandize in grade schools, and books hinting at a future normalization of pedophilia have begun to appear from major academic presses as our culture continues defining deviancy down.

So here we are, after the elections of 2002. The percentage of the public that voted obviously likes Bush the Younger, approves of how he is conducting the war on terrorism, and just placed the Republican Party back in the driver’s seat of Congress. Now what?

If the above history is any guide, it will be more of same old same-old. The Republicans will host a national frat party that will last a short while; meanwhile, (1) Democrats will scheme behind the scenes; (2) the media will continue to answer to leftist interests, which means that at the first Republican misstep, the party’s over. Leftists do, after all, have one trait we have to admire, however begrudgingly: they don’t quit. They have wanted power for decades, and despite minor-league setbacks such as Reaganism during the 1980s and Gingrichism during the mid-1990s, they’ve always come roaring back. Neither they nor the neocons who have assumed the mantle of "official" conservatism have moral scruples about playing ball with the global-government crowd; the leftists just play ball a little better, that’s all. The closer they can bring this society to socialism, the easier it is to control.

Here is what a genuine Republican Revolution 2002 would deliver: (1) a systemic, society-wide challenge to cultural Marxism and political correctness in all forms, with a spotlight on the universities and what often passes for education and scholarship in them. The result would be a swift end to coercive and insulting "sensitivity training" whether there, in corporations or wherever, leading to a permanent end to the affirmative action that started it all; (2) a new look at U.S. immigration policy that will begin, and proceed apace, to the expulsion and repatriation of illegal aliens who might mean harm to native-born Americans; this, it seems to me anyway, is a more intelligent way to fight the war on terror than the federal government’s current agenda, which is collecting as much personal data as possible on native-born Americans; (3) a repudiation of globalism, up to and accompanied by a U.S. exodus from the U.S.-bashing UN and a public exposure of the efforts of its minions to control American populations and natural resources in the name of "sustainable development"; (4) a new move to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education, to be followed (hopefully) by the elimination of its equivalents in state governments, as a precursor to getting the government out of the education business altogether; (5) a reawakened healthy skepticism about government power and government omniscience, as reflected in wholesale abandonment of "gun control"; and (6) a new national conversation about the guiding premises of our civilization, including such things as the relationship between belief in God, public morality and the much-misunderstood separations clause in the First Amendment. This conversation should rediscover the idea of rights, especially property rights, adhering in individuals, not groups, and how documents such as the U.S. Constitution do not create but rather recognize, in writing, rights that pre-exist government. And speaking of the Constitution, it might be a good idea to revive it, with the idea that Rome on the Potomac should follow it. Then I can quit calling the place "Rome on the Potomac." I’ve only listed six items here. I won’t say there aren’t others. There is a lot to undo, and as I’ve emphasized to more than one reader via email, we didn’t get into this mess overnight and we can’t realistically expect to get out of it overnight.

Needless to say, though, I don’t expect to see this. The appointment of one of the most rabid leftists in Congress, California’s Nancy Pelosi, to House minority leader, indicates that the Democrats have no intentions of rethinking their commitment to leftism. Why should they? They surely believe they will be able to go on directing the show behind the scenes, because apart from a few new faces in Congress, nothing fundamental has changed.

In Tragedy and Hope, Carroll Quigley wrote:

Sounds to me like a good reason to seek out alternatives to this two-party wasteland, as opposed to the naïve belief that things are somehow going to be different this go around.

November 15, 2002

Steven Yates [send him mail] has a PhD in philosophy and is a Margaret "Peg" Rowley Fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He is the author of Civil Wrongs: What Went Wrong With Affirmative Action (ICS Press, 1994), and numerous articles and reviews. At any given time he is at work on any number of articles and book projects, including a science fiction novel.

Copyright © 2002 LewRockwell.com

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