A lot of talk goes on these days about whether the Republican Party is complicit in a defalcation of intellectual coffers filled by great ideational entrepreneurs like Messrs. William F. Buckley, Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan and Rush Limbaugh. Claims are made from accountants of that investment, the American right. "Conservatism" is in some trouble, they begin — and immediately trip over imprecise language.
"Conservatism" is an anachronism for moral self-determination, federalist liberty and national interest when those who prefer the last century's ponderous, statist flying buttresses are uniformly close to or a part of the ideological left. Patrick Buchanan, leftward, just because his populism and isolationism resembles Howard Dean's? Now, I believe that a consistent differentiation follows the belief or denial of absolute values independent of, but congruous with, human knowledge and tradition. Take to that or not, "liberal" and "conservative" are indeed misnomers. There is something progressive about, say, inviting all working citizens to become investors when technology has made it possible; and something regressive about denouncing stock markets with the demagogic form and economic comprehension of William Jennings Bryan. Is that acceptable? For the sake of clarity, that which the right considers its own is rightism.
Rightism, then, is said to be dead, dying, wounded, infirm, lost, remiss or folded over in half to fit the back pocket of Washington interests — a slightly different misfortune depending on how bereaved a dissatisfied rightist considers himself. The right is content for now with foreign affairs but, by denomination, agitated with Republican policies on immigration, education, budgeting, trade or jurisprudence. There is rhetorical excess — some are contrasting George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, as one might place Sir Isaac Newton and Chuck Yeager side-by-side — and there are unrealistic expectations for political attainment. OK, the right can hope to win it all at once; it can daydream.
How about perspective? I recently read an opinion put forward with a modesty belying the enormity of its implication. It was the answer to a question about the state of "conservatism," submitted during an interview of one of the four men listed above — you can guess which. In the 1950s, this man said, the highest marginal tax rate was 90 percent; today, no leftist with national standing would dare suggest so much as 45 percent. What he meant was that distilled socialism had been decisively rejected by the American body politic. So the matter turns to what is yet to be achieved — and if frustrated rightists will acknowledge that while ascending one still contends with an incline.
And, too, that others have been watching. Rightism's appeal is broadening, no more evident than in Japan. Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has succeeded in pushing law to privatize the nation's rotund state postal service through a receptive Diet won, in special election, with his own political risk. Koizumi, recall, saw the cardinal policy of postal reform defeated in August by his own Liberal Democratic Party; drawing on another cardinal policy, the prime minister dropped the LDP into a mid-September electoral sieve. Within a month of winning a lower house supermajority, Koizumi sent his reform bills back to legislators. Not only did supporters approve the bill but nearly two dozen of those in the upper house, responsible for its earlier demise and likely still opposed, genuflected and voted Yes. Voila, the Japan Post methuselah will now be on "equal footing with the private sector."
This has raised Junichiro Koizumi to a stature momentarily, if not yet for posterity, brushing heights of the archetypical Shigeru Yoshida and Yasuhiro Nakasone. LDP politicians have entered a kind of triathlon with events party loyalty, reform and patriotism — Koizumi as judge. Commentators deride the competing politicos as jobseeking buffoons but these are the same people who did not expect the prime minister to survive. Minority coalition leaders in the Democratic Party of Japan, meanwhile, are in knots trying to look and sound like Koizumi without actually adopting the principles of free-market and individualist reform. The "flag of reform" remains Koizumi's, and the recent announcement of the prime minister's favored successors suggests the LDP will continue to fly it.
What have fortunes half a world away to do with Washington? Look to the axioms of flattering imitation and strength in numbers.