Family Values

(2 of 7)

Now, 21 years later, Pat Buchanan rose before the delegates in Houston to declare what he called "a cultural war" (nothing like a war to obscure the economic issue) and try to help tear off a fat half of America for George Bush. A '50s kind of week in several ways: Buchanan eerily reproduced the punitive, menacing quality of his boyhood hero, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin. The role of threat to the American essence used to be played by communism. But moral squalor at home would do as well. Buchanan pounded at "the agenda that Clinton & Clinton ((meaning Bill and Hillary)) would impose on America -- abortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat units . . ."

Buchanan glared like a Jesuit prefect of discipline and stabbed the air. His rendition was family values in the bully's mode -- an appeal to visceral prejudices, not to American ideals. Barbara Bush and the tableau of Bush children and grandchildren transmitted a softer version, a kind of Pepperidge Farm, white-bread appeal in handsome plenty.

To approach the family-values question, it may be necessary to remember the formula of F. Scott Fitzgerald: he said the sign of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to retain two mutually contradictory ideas in the mind at the same time and still be able to function. The two mutually contradictory but simultaneously valid ideas involved here are these:

1) The issue of family values is the last refuge of a scoundrel -- or of a threatened Republican incumbent. The issue is almost by definition a smokescreen, and a manipulation of voters' closeted fears and prejudices. The Republicans are wary about emphasizing race this year. They are sensitive about criticism of the way they used Willie Horton in 1988. And they have been making progress in attracting black middle-class supporters. So they have switched their emphasis to family values with a sexual subtext -- Murphy Brown, out-of-the-closet gay militance, condom distribution in the schools, sexual flamboyance in publicly funded art projects, and so on. Dan Quayle and others working the values circuit like to encourage the feeling that the American id is dangerously seeping up through the floorboards: Clamp down the superego.

Further, family values, a flashy issue of opportunity, has about it a certain eloquent irrelevance -- something like the old waving of the bloody shirt, or the snake-oil vending that has always gone on in American politics. North Carolina Senator Robert Rice Reynolds, a baroque declaimer of the Southern school of rural demagogy in the '30s and '40s, was a genius of flavorsome insinuation. "Do y'all know what ((my opponent's)) favorite dish is?" he would ask slowly of his "God-fearin', 'tater-raisin', baby-havin' " constituents. Then in a burst of disgusted indignation: "Caviar!" The word came out caw-vee-yah. "You know what caviar is? It's little black fish eggs, and it comes from Red Russia!" A certain amount of family-values rhetoric is mere caviar denunciation.

Another suspect side of family-values mongering: Why are so many conservatives, champions of individual freedom, so hell-bent on coercing people to march in lockstep? Why does the authoritarian impulse win out over the libertarian?

And yet: