THE RISE OF THE COUNTER-ESTABLISHMENT
From Conservative Ideology to Political Power
Sidney Blumenthal
New York: Times Books, 1986
369 pp., $19.95
For some years, Sidney Blumenthal has been writing a highly entertaining and informative series of articles in The Washington Post about conservatism in the Reagan era. The series has been entertaining for two reasons. First, most conservatives, especially those subjected to Blumenthal's scrutiny, are not used to seeing their names in print in the national media, and some swelled heads have interpreted the attention they have received as evidence of their own cosmic importance. Secondly, while Blumenthal is a liberal and shares many of the liberal superstitions about the American Right, he is unique among liberal critics of conservatism because he has read and assimilated a large amount of conservative literature - books, periodicals, and works of serious thought and research as well as polemical matter - and possesses an understanding of it that surpasses that of some conservatives themselves.
The Rise of the Counter-Establishment is not a collection of Blumenthal's articles from the Post, but it does show their influence. Although the book is ostensibly an essay in political sociology and contains some valuable insights from this perspective, it tends in the course of its 330 pages to become a series of biographical sketches of leading conservative activities and writers. Moreover, Blumenthal emphasizes almost exclusively the publicists of the neoconservative wing of the conservative movement and gives little attention to their predecessors on the Right, and he often appears not to perceive the fundamental philosophical and sociological differences between the two groups. It is doubtful that many well-informed conservatives will find much of interest in Blumenthal's account, though they may conceivably be led to some new ideas about themselves and their movement. Persons who are less sympathetic to conservatism than Blumenthal, however, but not as dispassionate, would be well-advised to read his account, which they will find informative and seriously but not hysterically critical.
Blumenthal argues that the conservative movement that underpinned Ronald Reagan's political ascent has itself ascended to the status of a new elite, a "counter-establishment" that replicates and challenges the power of what conservatives have generally regarded as the "Liberal Establishment," symbolized by such structures as the Brookings Institution, the Council on Foreign Relations, the New York Times, and Harvard University, among other prestigious ornaments.
He thus comes close to granting the premise, often unspoken, on which much conservative activism and thought have been predicated: Liberalisms the ideology of the powerful forces in the American government, economy, and culture, the formula that rationalizes the power of a new elite, and not as it usually claims to be, the unquestionable result of enlightened thought or a body of ideas morally dedicated to reform and the struggle against injustice. To understand liberalism as a means of justifying established power and authority is to go far toward rejecting its claims, just as the Progressivist understanding of conservative and laissez-faire ideology as the formula of vested interests in the early part of the century went far to
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