# The Landslide Before the Storm **URL:** **By** Roy A. Childs, Jr. **Published:** January 1, 1981 --- “If Ronald Reagan’s landslide victory was a mandate, was the mandate for traditional conservatism, the Moral Majority, or some new shade of the political spectrum?” “Landslide. Yes, landslide—stunning, startling, astounding, beyond the wildest dreams and nightmares of the contending camps, beyond the furthest ken of the armies of pollsters, pundits, and political professionals,” gushed _Time_ magazine. “After all the thousands of miles, the millions of words and dollars, the campaign that in newspapers across the land on the very morning of Election Day was still headlined TOO CLOSE TO CALL turned out to be a landslide.” Not all the media reports were as breathless as _Time’s_, nor as Pollyanna-ish as _Time’s_ resident pontificator, Hugh Sidey, who chirped “We Are Off on a Special Adventure.” But they were comparable. “Reagan Era Begins, New If Ronald Reagan’s landslide victory was a mandate, was the mandate for traditional conservatism, the Moral Majority, or some new shade of the political spectrum? “Deal Era Ebbs,” trumpeted the _Christian Science Monitor_. The national conservative weekly _Human Events_ seemed to agree: “Victory at Last!—How Sweet it Is,” it exulted. _Newsweek_ merely headlined, “The Republican Landslide.” And a landslide it looked to be. Reagan beat Carter by more than eight million votes—43,201,220 to 34,913,222—swept away the incumbent’s support in 44 of the 50 states, and swamped Carter in electoral votes—483 to a mere 49. The percentage points looked equally decisive. Fifty-one percent for Reagan to Carter’s 41 percent. The Republicans gained an impressive 33 seats in the House. Even the incredible happened; for the first time since 1952 the Republicans grabbed control in the Senate, throwing 12 Democrats into the streets. The voters brutally punished prominent liberals and Democrats, defeating even George McGovern, the very symbol of liberalism, who took a dive by an astounding 20 percent. _Human Events_, ever gracious in victory, gloated: “All those big-name liberals who had so bedeviled conservatives over the years were gone. Frank Church (D-Idaho), the extremely dovish chairman of the Foreign Relations panel; George McGovern (D-S.D.), the dyed-in-the-wool radical, who always seemed to be singing hosannahs to some Communist or leftist dictator; John Culver (D-Iowa), the ex-Marine turned unilateral disarmer; Birch Bayh (D-Ind.), the pro-ERA, pro-busing, and anti-military power on the Judiciary and Intelligence panels; Gaylord Nelson (D-Wis.), the anti-business member of the Finance Committee; Warren Magnuson (D-Wash.), the big-spending chairman of the powerful Appropriations panel; etc.” \[November 15, 1980\] Democratic socialist John Judis, writing in the independent socialist weekly, _In These Times_, summed it up: “It’s ‘No’ to Liberalism by a Landslide.” And the liberals seemed to have got the point: “What happened in the 1980 election reflected a profound and general turn to conservatism in this country,” Anthony Lewis wrote in a column called “The Tidal Wave.” (_The New York Times_, November 6) And, commenting on the lame-duck session of Congress, a liberal House Democratic leader said woefully, “It’s the last drink before Prohibition.” (_The New York Times_, November 11) Almost before the votes were cast, key figures of the New Right and Moral Majority who claimed to have worked long and hard to elect Reagan had begun issuing threats to the incoming Administration. The morning after the election, New Right kingpin Richard Viguerie, Paul Weyrich, head of the Committee for the Survival of a Free \[sic\] Congress, and Moral Majority leader Jerry Falwell launched attacks on Bush and other moderates surrounding Reagan, taking credit for Reagan’s victory to themselves and promising to make life difficult for him if he didn’t appoint conservative hardliners to top Administration posts. The evening after the election, Weyrich and Falwell appeared on ABC’s late night news, gloating about their victory and sassing defeated Senators Church, Bayh, and McGovern, who feebly attempted through a television hook-up to fend off their attacks and their threats to the few remaining liberals in Congress. Terry Dolan, head of the National Conservative Political Action- Committee, released a list of target Senators and Congressmen for 1982, including not only obvious political enemies like Senators Edward Kennedy and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, but hawks like Senator Henry Jackson, as well. And when Ronald Reagan began choosing moderate Ford and Nixon-type conservatives for key transition positions, the New Right panicked and began to howl. “New Right Angered by Reagan Choices,” thundered one headline, while _Human Events_ worried publicly over the old-guard nature of top figures in the transition team. They were bothered, too, by the bluntness with which George Bush took them on, after their brash attempt to intimidate him. At a news conference on November 10, Bush said that conservative religious groups would not over-influence Ronald Reagan when he took over the White House, and snapped: “I take violent exception to certain individuals in some of those groups, some of their positions, and have stated it publicly and am not intimidated by those who suggest I better hew the line. To hell with them.” In the offices of Richard Viguerie and Associates, the National Conservative Political Action Caucus, and Moral Majority, there was audible gnashing of teeth. Meanwhile, some very worried people on the left were sweating out Ronald Reagan’s ascension to power. Writing in the leftwing _San Francisco Bay Guardian_, sixties veteran Alan Kay mused: > It’s scary, this visceral sense that we can’t trust the world. It hit me with much the same impact as did that first assassin’s bullet, a long 17 years ago. And it seems to me I recognized echoes of this same anguish in the heavy, empty faces and darting eyes I saw on 24th Street, on Telegraph, on Columbus, and on Cortlandt last week. People—at least the ones I’ve been able to check in with—have been a little crazy. Maybe I have also. How could America have done it? \[November 13\] “How could America have done it?”—the anguished cry swelled into panic, as the left took to the streets in Berkeley, in a symbolic, nostalgic gesture. Barely an hour after Jimmy Carter’s concession speech, several thousand Berkeley residents were marching in the streets to protest Reagan’s election, in what turned out to be the kickoff of a 24-hour spree of anti-Reagan protests. By 7:30 Wednesday evening, 54 people, many of them UC Berkeley students, had been arrested…. 3500 people marched through the streets of Berkeley, led for much of the way by a man carrying a poster of Ronald Reagan and George Bush with the words “The End is Near” inscribed on it. \[_Bay Guardian, November 13_\] What can we make of an election whose results have panicked both the New Right and the remnants of the New Left, both the Moral Majority and the Permissive Minority? What did the election symbolize? These are the questions people have been asking, the questions the pundits have tried to answer with a sea of ink which, if released all at once, would have flooded every state Reagan carried (to borrow a rhetorical device from the President-elect himself). What was Reagan’s mandate a mandate for? Was it a breakthrough election of the stature of Roosevelt’s victory in 1932? More important, what impact will it have on the political spectrum as a whole, on the Left and the Right? These are the questions which need to be addressed. And they need to be addressed because there is a time bomb ticking, not only in the Reagan Administration, but in the whole conservative movement: the coming of age of the members of the baby boom generation, and their increased participation in American politics. ## Why Reagan won Reagan’s mandate has been most loudly claimed by the “Reaganites,” as James Q. Wilson called them in _Commentary_, employing a long familiar word in a special limited sense, to designate the members of a broad social and political movement which wants the government off our backs in economic matters, which is driven into a rage by “permissiveness” and by what it regards as increased “immorality” in American society, and which wants a hawkish, interventionist, “get-tough” foreign policy. At the core of this movement stands the New Right, an aggressive group which had a significant impact on the 1980 election. In his essay on “Reagan and the Republican Revival,” Wilson put it this way: “the Reagan candidacy is a candidacy based on issues, issues which the candidate has developed over the better part of two decades and which now, taken as a whole, command the assent of a very large proportion of the American people….” (_Commentary, October 1980_) Wilson spelled out the beliefs of this new movement thus: > Reaganism stands in opposition to those who believe in the unrestrained right of personal self-expression and the need for government to rationalize all other aspects of human affairs by rule and procedure. Reaganism opposes those who would legalize marijuana, abortions, and pornography and tolerate or encourage draft resistance, all in the name of personal freedom, and who would support court-ordered school busing, bans on gun ownership, affirmative action, and racial quotas, all in the name of rationalizing and perfecting society. Or, as Richard Viguerie put it in an interview with _The New York Times_, the establishment Right “began to reach out and strike an alliance with social conservatives” and the “whole movement began to come alive.” And the Reaganites have succeeded in persuading some interpreters that their values do lie behind the Reagan mandate. David Broder, for example, wrote in the _Washington Post_ of “two different agendas for the new administration.” As Broder conceived it, “the economic mandate is to reduce government spending, taxation and regulation and give people more room to seek their own goals. The social mandate is to expand government’s efforts to prescribe and regulate individual behavior.” Yet in fact, the contradiction here—between relaxing government control in one area and simultaneously expanding state power in two others (foreign policy and personal freedom)—is what ultimately will wreck the Reagan mandate, and leave it in ruins. Consider the facts about Reagan’s election. Reagan reached his peak shortly after the Republican convention in Detroit, and then began to fade. Carter went on the attack while Reagan became defensive. And Carter’s most effective thrusts were at Reagan’s social views and his foreign policy. Reagan spent the better part of the crucially important final weeks reassuring the American people that in fact he was _not_ a warmonger. In the end, he succeeded, and Carter’s support collapsed. That is what is important about Reagan’s win: _it was a referendum on Carter’s economic policies_. Period. All polls, especially those conducted immediately after the election, show that the vote represented a rejection of Carter’s economic policies, and little else. The _Los Angeles Times_ poll of November 20 found that “two thirds of the voters, when asked which ‘two or three’ issues played ‘the most important’ role in influencing their decision, named the economy. No other issue came close.” The _New York Times_/CBS poll of November 8 found that fully 38 percent of those who voted for Ronald Reagan “were motivated more by dissatisfaction with President Carter than by serious ideological commitment to Mr. Reagan’s views.” That amounts to nearly 16.5 million votes—twice the number by which Reagan trounced Carter. By contrast, only 11 percent of those voting for Reagan did so because “he’s a real conservative”—which amounts to 4,750,000 votes. Moreover, according to the _Times_, the voters in this “throw the rascals out” category “tended to decide their choice later in the campaign and to be considerably younger than other Reagan voters. They were also less likely to call themselves conservatives, more likely to name inflation as the major issue in the election, and less likely to oppose the proposed Federal Equal Rights Amendment.” Two days before the election, _Washington Post_ reporter Haynes Johnson interviewed some of these younger voters on a Boston college campus. “Three things are most striking about the conversations with young voters here,” Haynes wrote, their great concerns over the possibility of war, their general unease about the state of the economy and what kind of life they will have in it, and their way of wrestling out which of those concerns trouble them most and affects how they will vote. By the time you reach here, after nearly two months of traveling in every section of the country, it’s clear that the apprehensions about war have become an overriding concern among Americans. Reagan’s candidacy has suffered because of it: The seeds of doubt about his possible presidential actions have been planted effectively. To win, he must reassure those who are troubled by what they think, or have heard, about him. \[November 2\] One student who told Haynes Johnson about his concern was Greg Beswick of Northeastern University. “The Big problem we have in our country,” he says, “foreign policy aside, is, of course, inflation. Quite frankly, Carter hasn’t done much to stem the tide.” But that concern has been outweighed in his mind by a larger one, and it is one that has become increasingly critical in the minds of Americans who will go to the polls in two more days—the question of war and peace. “One big factor,” he says, “is—well, let’s face it, for the last four years we’ve been at peace. And that’s a very strong consideration. Reagan kind of scares me. I don’t really know how to take the man. Sometimes he says things that are quite frightening.” Greg was speaking for much of the country. He was one of the tens of millions of people who nervously watched the debates that Tuesday before the election, and who made up their minds afterwards. As he settled in to watch the debate, Greg Beswick was inclined to vote for Carter. As he put it, “I’m leaning towards Carter for the reasons of peace.” But consider what Greg had to say to Haynes Johnson after the debate: Greg Beswick watched and listened and recorded, all as he had planned. When it was over, he found himself completely reversed from where he had begun. “I think it’s going to be Reagan,” he said, early the next morning. “He did a number on Carter last night. He was better able to explain his positions. It changed my views quite a bit.” He paused, and said: “As you know, the war or peace question was vital to me. Maybe the things I heard about Reagan being dangerous were distorted. He did not present himself as that kind of person last night.” ## Reagan’s style Reagan did not present himself as dangerous to most other Americans, either, that fateful night. He did just what he set out to do, carried it off with considerable style, and handily won the election. Consider the dramatic effectiveness of his final appeal to the viewers of that debate, an appeal, directed not to their _fears_, but to their _hopes_: Next Tuesday is Election Day. Next Tuesday all of you will go to the polls. You’ll stand there in the polling place and make a decision. I think when you make that decision it might be well if you would ask yourself: Are you better off than you were four years ago? Is it easier for you to go and buy things in the stores than it was four years ago? Is there more or less unemployment in the country than there was four years ago? Is America as respected throughout the world as it was? Do you feel that our security is safe? That we’re as strong as we were four years ago?… This country doesn’t have to be in the shape that it’s in. We do not have to go on sharing in scarcity, with the country getting worse off, with unemployment growing.... All of this can be cured. And all of it can be solved.... I would like to have a crusade today. And I would like to lead that crusade with your help. And it would be one to take government off the backs of the great people of this country and turn you loose again to do those things that I know you can do so well, because you did them and made this country great. Consider the effectiveness of these words and their impact on undecided voters, particularly younger voters. And consider another anecdote, told by a reporter on national television the evening of the election from Reagan’s victory celebration at the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles. The reporter noticed a young, enthusiastic Reagan supporter.... smoking marijuana. He walked over to her, and said, “Don’t you know Reagan’s against all that?” and she responded: “The hell with him.” This, you understand, was an enthusiastic Reagan supporter. Hardly a member of the Moral Majority. If a pot-smoking young woman, and a college student fearful of involvement in another war felt comfortable voting for Reagan, and if these were not atypical Reagan voters (remember that only eleven percent of Reagan’s voters voted for him because he was a “real conservative”) then what was the mandate all about? The fact is that there were only two clear messages sent in that “mandate”: voters want a strong defense, and they want government to get off their backs in their economic affairs. They did not vote for an interventionist foreign policy—voters remain wary of adventurism and do not want to get involved in a war—and they did not vote for the moral or religious views of the New Right. In a fascinating article entitled _“Is This the End of an Era?”_ in the October/November 1980 issue of _Public Opinion_, Richard Scammon and Ben Wattenberg argue that > “\[s\]omething very important has happened in American politics. People have changed their minds. Something very important might be happening now: people changing their politics. The political tide has turned, but will the Republicans be able to ride the realignment wave?” The authors of this article wrote in 1970 of “the Social Issue” as a time bomb ticking in the Democratic tent. Traditional values were being eroded by those perceived to be linked to the Democratic party.... Now, the Republicans face the danger of the flip side of the Social Issue. It is still true (as in 1970) that Americans approve of “traditional values.” But it is also increasingly true that, Garbo-like, they want to be left alone. The tacit toleration (for others, at least) of drug use, abortion, pornography, illegitimacy, homosexuality and pre-marital-living-together, represents a tidal and liberating change in American attitudes and culture. Surely these changes have engendered hostility and often repugnance, but most Americans seem to be willing to live and let live.... The Republican party having brought its traditional conservatives to the moderate mainstream of economics and politics—a mainstream with deep, cool water and good fishing—can risk the whole catch by heading off into the shallow, rocky swirling eddies of right-wing social issues. Emphasis on prayer-in-the-school, anti-sex education, anti-gay rights, anti-pornography, anti-E.R.A., anti-abortion amendments and anti-evolution is a one-way ticket to the Swamp of No Return. Among other things it should be noted that some of those good ole boys in church on Sunday morning had their pickup trucks at the XXX-rated drive-in on Saturday night. This is a message which Richard Viguerie and company ignore at their peril. And if they do ignore it, they can’t say they weren’t warned. In a column in the _Washington Post_, David Broder took “The Pulse of the Public,” and made a point very similar to the one made by Scammon and Wattenberg. Referring to what he sees as the “two agendas” for the new administration—the “economic mandate” to reduce government spending, taxation, and regulation, and the “social mandate” to prescribe and regulate individual behavior—Broder wrote that if the Reagan people choose the economic agenda, “they have a chance of success that can broaden their constituency,” while if they choose the social agenda, “they will squander their energies in what is probably a losing cause, divide their own ranks and alienate the very voters who could make them the majority party of the next three decades.” As Broder argues, there is no widespread agreement among Americans that the social changes we have seen in recent years are in fact as destructive as the Rev. Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority make them out to be. When asked whether trends toward social permissiveness are evidence of “moral decay” or of “greater social tolerance,” Broder reports, “the cross-section of Americans of all ages answered “Tolerance,” and by a margin of 3 to 2. More significantly, among those between 25 and 35 the margin was 3 to 1. Among members of the “baby boom” generation, in short, the moral views of the Moral Majority are not in favor. ## The baby boom And the baby boom is on the march. All polls show that tolerance for social diversity, for alternative lifestyles and the like, increases as the population gets younger, reflecting a liberalization of views across the generations. The baby boom generation contains a full one-third of the people in this country, more than 75 million people who were born during the historic “baby rush” from 1946 to 1964. And, if anything, as those in the post-baby boom generation reach maturity, as the older and more conservative generation dies out and is replaced by younger people in positions of power and influence, general social attitudes toward different lifestyles and personal habits are likely to move farther and farther away from the views of the New Right and Moral Majority. Demography is destiny. Moral Majority, RIP. Commenting on the Reagan landslide, George Will caught the scent of this in a single sentence: Reagan’s win, he wrote, “does not mean that the meanies won.” And in a surprising column in _The New York Times_, William Safire wrote of the same phenomenon in terms of a battle shaping up in the conservative movement. Safire sidestepped the issue of foreign policy, to which we shall return shortly, and focussed instead on a developing conflict within conservatism between traditionalism and libertarianism, a conflict which will only be accentuated now that the Right is ascending to power. The traditionalists want government to uphold society’s values—to bolster the family unit, to censor the pornographic, to discourage divorce, to encourage prayer, to curb abortion, to lend government sanction to their cultural propensities. They place a high priority on personal security against crime and on national security against aggression. The libertarian conservatives are quite different: they may believe fiercely in some or all of the above “family values,” but they are even more fierce in their belief that government is wrong to legislate morality. Moral matters are for individuals to decide, provided they do not brutalize others. The libertarian (with more consistency than the liberals) wants government out of his personal life, and is willing to take the risks and responsibilities of such self-reliance. Safire has caught more than a glimpse of the truth here, but there is more going on than he apparently realizes. There also is a battle going on between radical libertarians and the left, on the one hand, as to whether a socially permissive, anti-militarist, anti-interventionist political movement is going to stick with a decaying socialism or move toward a free market radicalism, in which laissez-faire is used as a weapon against established powers rather than as an apology for the status quo. And there is a battle between radical libertarians and libertarian conservatives over the issue of an interventionist foreign policy. In a way, Safire’s very sidestepping of the issue of foreign policy is itself symbolic. For American foreign policy is another time-bomb ticking away in the conservative camp. The hawkish foreign policy of the Reagan right is on a collision course with reality, as well as with the “conservative consensus” which supposedly expressed itself this year. Before the election, by a margin of 3 to 1, voters thought Reagan more likely than Carter to get the U.S. involved in another war; Reagan spent the last three weeks of the campaign assuaging their fears. But the issue did not disappear: by a margin of 11 to 1, voters who supported Reagan say they want him to keep America out of another war. In this light, consider what Reagan represents in foreign policy, and the facts he will have to confront in the years to come. Throughout the campaign, Reagan continually addressed the themes of American “weakness” and our “inferiority” to the Soviets. He even threatened “a new arms race” to bring the Soviets back into line. He spoke of a “consistent, firm foreign policy” to “make America number one” and proposed to “reassert America’s preeminent role in the world.” Yet, as Stephen Rosenfeld of the _Washington Post_ has pointed out, > What Republicans and like-minded Democrats have won is not simply a mandate for a new policy but the obligation to tackle anew the old defense question, “How much is enough?” Or, better, how much is enough for what? At a certain point—at least by the second year, when the military increment starts to get very big and the Republican Party’s now-substantial civilian constituencies start to get very demanding—Reagan will come under pressure to show that he’s spending those extra billions on the Pentagon for cause. And that he will be hard-pressed to do. For, like it or not, he is going to have to contend with the logic of an interventionist foreign policy. Consider the facts: (1) An increasing number of nations in today’s world are going their own way, refusing to be dominated either by the U.S. or by Moscow. As a result, the whole Reaganite view of the world—that the Soviet Union is behind every world crisis, and that Soviet dominance is on the rise—is shot through with myths. In a special issue of _The Defense Monitor_ published early last year and devoted to “Soviet Geopolitical Momentum: Myth or Menace,” analysts of the prestigious Center for Defense Information found: (a) that “the percentage of Soviet-influenced countries in the world started at 9 percent in 1945, rose to about 14 percent in the late 1950s, then declined in the 1960s and finally rose back to about 12 percent in the late 1960s. It has remained at this level for the past ten years. According to this indicator, Soviet world influence was at its height in the 1950s and there has been no significant Soviet geopolitical momentum in recent years.” (b) that, moreover, “nothing that has happened \[since the late 1950s\] has really made up for the decline in the power of the Soviet bloc ... that occurred when the Soviets lost China,” while “Soviet inability to hold the allegiance and support of important Third World countries over the long term has been the major weakness of the Soviet Union in attempting to expand its influence,” so that “Soviet losses in the late 1970s have just about equalled gains.” (c) that “American actions have usually played no important role in the emergence of conflict between the Soviet Union and its clients. On the contrary, threatening American behavior has often helped solidify Soviet relations with affected countries...” (2) The Reaganite view that Russia and its Warsaw Pact allies are outspending the U.S. and NATO is simply not true. Military spending by NATO exceeded that of the Warsaw Pact every year in the 1970s. Both blocs approximately doubled their military spending over the last decade, reaching, by the end of the ’70s, about $212 billion for the U.S.-NATO group versus $175 billion for the U.S.S.R.-Warsaw Pact group. (3) Reagan and his advisors say they want to slash taxes, increase defense spending, and balance the budget, all at the same time. Realizing that high taxes cripple productivity, and that deficit spending and the monetization of debt cause staggering rates of inflation, Reagan has pledged to reduce taxes and bring inflation under control by balancing the budget. Yet already he is backing away from his promise of balanced budgets, and giving drastic increases in defense spending a higher priority. Reagan wants to increase defense spending at a rate of up to 10 percent a year in real terms. Republican Senator John Tower, incoming Armed Services Committee chairman, has suggested that, in real terms, the defense budget should rise even more—from Carter’s 1980 budget of $157 billion to $294 billion by 1985. Yet, such spending will necessitate not only higher taxes—Reagan still has proposed no significant cutbacks in non-defense spending—but also an even higher rate of inflation. Unlike simple domestic redistributions of wealth, which transfer resources from one group to another, defense spending takes real resources entirely out of the productive economy—in effect, burying them. As Earl Ravenal has pointed out, weapons can do only one of two things: they can rust or explode (and he prays that they’ll rust). This means that stepped up arms spending can only result in relatively more _rapid_ price increases throughout the economy than would be caused by other government spending, because real goods and services available to people would be reduced. The proposed Reagan defense policies would thus lead to nothing but higher taxes, greater deficits, and more inflation—all of which are likely to anger the new President’s constituents. By the end of 1984, Ronald Reagan may be signing the first $1 trillion budget—so much for “getting the government off our backs.” (4) Then there is the demographic problem with manpower which we will face over the next few years—as a result of the decline in the birthrate over the past few years. Right now, to fulfill manpower requirements in the armed services, 1 young man in 11 must volunteer for service. Within a few years, that number will rise to 1 in 8. If Reagan tries to increase our “conventional” forces, including troops, that 11 may quickly be reduced to a 9 or 10 now, and to a 6 or 7 by later this decade. If Reagan brings more women into the armed services to solve this problem, he risks angering his “pro-family” constituency. And if he resorts to the draft, he’ll touch off widespread social upheaval; the riots in Berkeley and elsewhere which greeted his “mandate” in November will become a return of 1960s-type activism and protest. (5) On the other hand, if Reagan achieves his manpower goals by increasing military pay and other benefits, he will launch the U.S. on a policy which will not only require higher taxes, but will also, in a complex and fascinating fashion, set us on a treadmill to national bankruptcy. To understand why, we must digress for a moment on the methods used by the U.S. government to estimate Soviet defense spending—and how they have led to the present clamor for increased U.S. defense spending. Arthur Cox, former CIA official and defense analyst, reported on the matter this way in the _Washington Post_: > In 1976, the CIA made what appeared to be an astounding discovery about Soviet defense outlays. News outlets throughout the country headlined the story, “CIA Doubles Estimate of Soviet Defense Spending.” The media were poorly briefed. Nobody at CIA thought the Soviets had suddenly increased their defense spending by 100 percent. But the impression was allowed to stand and has not been clarified. \[August 17, 1980\] It was then that Congress accepted the myth that the Soviets had doubled their defense spending in real terms during the 1970s. “But,” writes Cox, “the facts are very different. At no time has the Soviet defense budget been increased by more than 3 percent a year.” The reason for the misunderstanding is that the CIA decided in the mid ’70s to use a new method to calculate the dollar cost of the Soviet military: by estimating what it would cost the U.S. to duplicate or buy the whole Soviet defense establishment. But this method is subject to considerable error. There are vast differences in the costs of U.S. and Soviet defense programs— especially in manpower costs. The Soviets have twice the military personnel of the U.S., and the CIA has been estimating the cost of this by multiplying the number of Soviet military personnel by U.S. military pay and allowance rates. In the final analysis, all the scare stories about the Soviets’ having engaged in “the most massive military buildup in history” have resulted from this calculation problem. So if Reagan significantly increases military pay and benefits, what will happen? Given the CIA’s method of computing Soviet defense spending and the Soviets’ 2 to 1 advantage in military personnel, every time we increase military pay and benefits for American servicemen, Soviet defense “spending” will increase by double that amount even though actual spending hasn’t increased a dime. Moreover, every time we initiate a military advantage and the Soviets attempt to match it, since the Soviets have roughly half the GNP of the U.S., their defense spending will increase by more than twice the U.S. increase as a percentage of GNP even though the dollar increase will be only slightly more than the U.S. increase. Thus, the more Reagan attempts to “match” the Soviets, using the CIA figures as a measure, the faster he will be chas-ing his own tail. Given the large percentage of our defense budget which goes for military pay and benefits, the Soviets will be able to sit back and watch Americans spend themselves into bankruptcy. Already, our whole interventionist foreign policy—which not only costs us better than two-thirds of our defense budget every year, but which also produces the opposite of its intended results—is about to fall apart. Already there is considerable foot-dragging on the part of such allies as Britain and West Germany, both of whom are now stalling about increasing their own defense spending by the 3 percent per year in real terms which we recently got them to promise. If we attempt to force the NATO countries to increase that still more, what economic havoc will we produce among our Western allies? If we take a hard-line position of all-out support for Israel, as Reagan has suggested, what will that do to our relations with Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern nations? If we support South Africa, as Reagan has suggested, will we alienate much of black Africa in the process and possibly push it into the arms of the Soviets? And if we do, will we once again take this as an example of Soviet “expansionism,” and increase our own intervention still more in response? Will we again alienate the nations of Latin America, including our neighbor Mexico, by—as Reagan has suggested—giving more massive aid to the gangsters running El Salvador? If we take such a course in our foreign policy, can anyone doubt that after four years of Ronald Reagan, the world will be more chaotic, that American “interests” will look even more besieged than they do today, and that defense spending will escalate to the point where both taxes and inflation are simply out of control? Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy will inevitably be wrecked on the shoals of economic reality, in much the same way that the puritanical social values represented by the “Reaganites” will be wrecked by the coming-of-age of the more “permissive” baby boom generation. ## A new consensus? This is why the time is ripe for a “new consensus” of the sort represented by Ed Clark and the Libertarian Party, a consensus which favors drastic slashes in taxes and spending, complete deregulation of the economy, abolition of victimless crime laws, and a foreign policy of noninterventionism, with matching budget cuts in the Department of Defense. The time is ripe for new ideas that stretch beyond old coalitions. Every public opinion survey shows that Americans want government to get “off their backs,” that they think taxes and spending are too high and that inflation is an abomination for which government is primarily to blame. In their personal lives, they wish to be left alone to pursue their own values. And their demand for an improved national defense is by no means the same thing as a demand for more interventionism or for a continuation of the American role as global policeman. As Ed Clark pointed out in his 1980 campaign for the Presidency, we would be more secure, not less, if we disengaged from our entangling alliances, which only serve as tripwires to involvement in crises. The failure of the Reagan administration will come precisely because, unlike Ed Clark, Ronald Reagan is not an opponent of big government. Capitalism, personal freedom, and a noninterventionist foreign policy must go hand in hand. The relationship between capitalism and personal freedom, or “permissiveness,” has been stated most forcefully by the English writer Samuel Brittan in his masterwork, _Capitalism and the Permissive Society_. “The values of competitive capitalism,” he wrote in 1972, “have a great deal in common with contemporary attitudes, and in particular with contemporary radical attitudes.” Above all, they share a similar stress on allowing people to do...what they feel inclined to do rather than conform to the wishes of authority, custom or convention. Under a competitive system, the businessman will make money by catering for whatever it is that people wish to do—by providing pop records, or nude shows, or candyfloss. He will not make anything by providing what the establishment thinks is good for them. An individual citizen is free to maximize his income by using his abilities...to cater for public tastes. But he does not have to. He can go for the easiest or most congenial job, or the one with the most leisure; or, like most of us, he can find some compromise between these alternatives. In any case his lifestyle is his own. He can concentrate on personal pleasure, social service at home, the relief of poverty abroad, or any combination of these and numerous other activities. Competitive capitalism is far from being the sole or dominating force of our society.... But to the extent that it prevails, competitive capitalism is the biggest single force acting on the side of what is fashionable to call “permissiveness,” but what was once known as personal liberty. Business enterprise can, of course, thrive and prosper alongside a great deal of “moral” prohibitions and prescriptions, whether enforced by law or public opinion. But the profit motive will always be kicking against such restraints and seeking to widen the range of what is permissible.... The profit motive will act both to stretch the existing laws and as a force for its liberalization. As the members of the baby boom generation come of age, they will see this, and, inevitably, they will come to question more closely the underlying assumptions behind our interventionist foreign policy. Growing up in an anti-government age, in the midst of the Vietnam War and Watergate and all the other scandals of the past decade and a half, they will form the core of that new coalition of voters and citizens which will call for moves toward deregulation at home and nonintervention abroad, toward a slashing of taxes here and a slashing of commitments abroad, toward an end to puritanical social views and a growing intolerance of the abuses and authority of government. They will be the center of a libertarian movement which will reject old categories, stereotypes, and political premises and instead break new ground. In homage to Richard Cobden, the great classical liberal who advocated laissez-faire and opposed British imperialism, Samuel Brittan put it best: “The need for a modern Cobdenite movement which would combine a belief in both personal freedom and economic freedom with nonintervention overseas has still to be met. It might attract much more general support than the conventional Tory or Labour politician would suppose.” This is the time bomb ticking today in America, in both conservative and liberal camps. With Ronald Reagan’s victory, the Right has come to power, and it will either fail, or else be forced to drop whole segments of its self-contradictory agenda for the 1980s and beyond. In the meantime, the Left has collapsed. The stage has been set for a new beginning. Garnering nearly a million votes last year, five times their Presidential total in 1976, and nearly 200 times their results in 1972, Ed Clark and the Libertarians have made their mark. As the Libertarian Party and the baby boom generation come of age together, they will have an impact that may be as deep and profound as the American revolution itself. Roy A. Childs, Jr. is The Editor of _The Libertarian Review_.