It happens, however, that January 15 is the actual birthday of Dr. King. And in summoning the faithful on this day, the pastor of Saint Paul, Rev. Johnny Ray Youngblood, is trying to rescue the real man from the increasingly inaccurate facsimile.

Marking Dr. King’s birthday on the third Monday in January, rather than on its true date, is the least of the revisionism. Both the left and the right in America have misrepresented Dr. King for their own purposes — liberals by ignoring the centrality of religion in his civil rights crusade, and conservatives by portraying a political radical as an apologist for racial inequality.

“There’s an overarching issue of whether enactment of the national holiday in and of itself weakened the substance and challenge of King’s legacy,” says David Garrow, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Dr. King. “The holiday itself encourages an all-things-to-all-people approach.”

“The nation,” Rev. Youngblood adds, “has sanitized Dr. King to the point that someday he may show up as a white man.”

Opponents of affirmative action have seized upon Dr. King as the champion of a color-blind America. They have reiterated a single phrase from the “I Have A Dream” speech — his wish that his children “will not be judged by the color of their skin but the content of their character” — until it has become a sound bite utterly divorced from context. Now, any conservative who quotes Dr. King or adorns his office with a portrait, as Speaker Newt Gingrich does, can consider himself officially immune from racism. (In the old days, you just had to like the Supremes.)

The black essayist Shelby Steele, Jr. probably started the trend when he entitled his influential 1990 book “The Content of Our Character.” But Steele was making a far more nuanced argument than do many other foes of affirmative action. Yes, Steele maintained that such preferences mistakenly rewarded blacks for adopting the role of victim. But his solution, one decidedly not shared by Gingrich (or the Democratic Leadership Council), is to change the legal designation of discrimination from a civil tort to a criminal felony.

In his famous speech to the March on Washington in 1963, King spoke of an unbiased America as a “dream” for the future, not a present reality. Elsewhere in the oration, he declared, “America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.’” Nothing else in the voluminous record of King’s speeches and writings suggests he would agree with conservatives who contend that it is affirmative action, not the legacy of slavery and segregation, that mars the meritocratic ideal, or that civil rights legislation balanced the scales 30 years ago.

As the journalist Ellis Cose points out in his new book, “Color Blind,” quite the opposite was true. Asked in a Playboy magazine interview in 1965 whether it was fair “to request a multi-billion dollar program of preferential treatment for Negroes or any other minority group,” Dr. King responded:

“I do indeed. Can any fair-minded citizen deny that the Negro has been deprived? Few people reflect that for two centuries the Negro was enslaved and robbed of any wages — potential accrued wealth which would have been the legacy of his descendants. All of America’s wealth today could not adequately compensate its Negroes for centuries of exploitation and humiliation.”

Dr. King was not calling for purely racial reparations. Later in the same interview, he endorsed “a federal program of public works, retraining and jobs for all” based on the poverty rather than the race of the citizen. Far from representing anything conservative, such a socialistic plan was consistent with Dr. King’s leftism on non-racial issues, whether economic inequality or the Vietnam War.

Contemporary liberals, however, lack the moral authority to correct the record, for they, too, have airbrushed the historical King. For the left, King’s spirituality fits uneasily with their own roots in the secular, scientific reason of the Enlightenment. Moreover, many liberals seem to fear that granting the religious nature of Dr. King himself and the civil rights movement in general would give aid and comfort to their enemies in the Christian right, who propound a conservative agenda in God’s name.

“King’s religiosity tends to be pushed into the background,” says Stephen Carter, a Yale Law School professor and the author of “The Culture of Disbelief.” “And that’s part of a larger issue of pushing into the background the religious commitment of the black community. That is an aspect of black America that white liberals try to ignore. One reason is that religion itself is seen as a less-than-rational basis for constructing policy. The other reason is religion is to some extent conservative. And when you get away from social issues, the black community is as conservative as most other evangelical communities.”

So the left has chosen the ahistorical over the inconvenient. A preacher’s son, Martin Luther King Jr. was reared in the theological and political traditions of black Christianity. “In song, word and deed, freedom,” C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya wrote in their authoritative book “The Black Church in the African American Experience,” “freedom has always been the superlative value of the black sacred cosmos.”

Dr. King’s words leave no doubt that he saw himself as divinely inspired, called to a life of mission and sacrifice. Shaken by repeated death threats during the Montgomery bus boycott of the mid-1950s, the young minister prayed in his kitchen for divine guidance. “Almost out of nowhere I heard a voice,” he later recalled. “‘Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice. Stand up for truth. And, lo, I will be with you, even unto the end of the world.’”

Thus sanctioned, King organized his crusade in churches and espoused its goals through the Biblical examples of Jesus, the Exodus narrative, and the Old Testament prophets. Fusing the secular and sacred concepts of justice, he told an audience during the Montgomery bus boycott:

“We are not wrong in what we are doing. If we are wrong, then the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong. If we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong. If we are wrong, Jesus of Nazareth was merely a utopian dreamer and never came down to earth.”

It would be unfair to ascribe the distorting of King’s life solely to the paradoxical effects of a national holiday. The years since his death in April 1968 have seen revelations of King’s sexual peccadilloes and his plagiarism as a graduate student. In the black community, the posthumous popularity of Malcolm X has threatened to crowd King out of the pantheon.

Still, if blacks or any other Americans mistakenly view King as merely a moderate political figure — not the Christian radical he was — then the fault must lie extensively with an official hero-making process. Everyone’s hero is no one’s; true universality can arise only from unyielding particularity.

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Quote of the day

Cheers?

Hebron is a cork in the bottle. Once you take the cork out, hopefully other things will start to flow. Then again, you are likely to get more corks.

Unnamed U.S. official commenting on the accord to pull Israeli troops out of Hebron. (From “A Hawk Makes His Nest in a Prickly Peace,” in Wednesday’s Los Angeles Times)

Therein lies the importance of Tuesday’s election. In a year when reasons abounded for voters to strip Republicans of their congressional power, disaster never struck. Despite Clinton’s eight-million-vote margin, despite the House freshmen’s fanaticism in closing the government twice in the last year, despite 75,000 advertisements in Congressional races around the country attacking Speaker Newt Gingrich, despite $35 million in campaign contributions to Democrats from the revived AFL-CIO — despite all of that, the Republican Party actually added two seats to their Senate majority, and retained a workable, if smaller, majority in the House.

Why? Because America, despite re-electing a Democrat to the White House for the first time since Franklin Delano Roosevelt, remains an increasingly conservative country. Despite the right’s excesses, the deep unpopularity of Newt Gingrich and a presidential millstone named Bob Dole around its neck, the electorate gave the Republicans only a mild rebuke on Tuesday. And while the Democrats did recover some ground in the House, the overarching political trends make for a tough road back to majority status.

America has been moving to the right since Barry Goldwater pried much of the South and parts of the ethnic Northeast and Midwest from the New Deal coalition in 1964. The backlash against the GOP after Watergate reversed the flow only briefly. Ronald Reagan, once depicted as too extreme to be elected, has lately been described by former Johnson and Kennedy aide Richard Goodwin as a moderate. The 1994 mid-term election was not, as commonly portrayed, a revolt against incumbency, because few incumbent Republicans lost; it was a revolt against the liberal orthodoxy of Bill Clinton’s first two years in office.

Clinton finessed history in both his presidential races by appropriating traditionally Republican stands on welfare, tax relief, and law and order. It is true that the president captured a majority of the female vote, in particular suburban women (the so-called “soccer moms”), by taking carefully-selected stands in the activist liberal tradition — vowing to protect Medicare, seeking to regulate tobacco as an addictive drug. Yet the architect of those stands, Dick Morris, also warned Clinton he would lose if he did not sign the Republican welfare-reform bill. And despite his adroit straddling of left and right, Clinton still failed to attain the 50 percent majority he coveted.

The nation’s real ideological divisions were reflected more clearly in individual House and Senate campaigns. In some ways, the contest for Congress could be seen as a showdown between the AFL-CIO and the Christian Coalition, each representing the activist wing of its party. Christian Coalition leader Ralph Reed may have overstated the case in claiming victory for the Christian Coalition, but exit polls showed quite simply why an either/or choice worked to the Republicans’ advantage: Far more people identified themselves as conservatives than as liberals. Moreover, even in a presidential year, with voting turnout declining as the contested offices go from national to statewide to local, grassroots efforts of groups like the Christian Coalition weigh more heavily.

This disparity between the presidential vote and what in boxing is called the undercard also explains why Clinton won much of the suburban vote, but the Democrats didn’t. Nearly 50 years ago, the conservative senator Robert Taft prophesied that the urban-oriented Democratic Party would not succeed until it understood the importance of suburbia. Since then, the suburban share of the presidential vote has steadily increased, surpassing the 50 percent mark in 1992. One of Bob Dole’s drawbacks was his inability, as a son of the small-town Great Plains, to convincingly speak to the suburban experience. Congressional Republicans, many of whom spring from the suburbs, and particularly in the new South had no such difficulty.

Having acknowledged that, congressional Republicans would be unwise to interpret Tuesday’s results as a mandate to kowtow to the National Rifle Association, indulge the lunacy of the militia movement, and shout “Shut it down!” about the government as if they were gangsta rappers ranting about Korean groceries in the ghetto. Michael Pappas never disavowed his social conservatism, but he did downplay it in favor of the low-taxes, less-government gospel espoused by New Jersey’s popular governor. Other pro-gun, anti-abortion candidates, like Woody Jenkins in Louisiana and Guy Millner in Georgia, failed to take Senate seats even in the Republican stronghold of the South.

And all is not lost for the Democrats. They retook several state legislatures, in California and Michigan, for example, and they may yet find longer-term salvation in the millions of immigrant voters Republicans are self-destructively alienating with the nativist rhetoric heard in debates about welfare, immigration and even “foreign money.”

Still, Republicans can take more heart from comparisons with FDR than can Clinton and the Democrats. In the 1938 mid-term election, just two years after FDR had won the greatest of his landslides, the Democratic Party lost 89 seats in Congress. Voters were punishing the president for overreaching his mandate — specifically by trying to pack the Supreme Court with pro-New Deal judges. The resulting Congress, emboldened by Republicans and conservative Southern Democrats, refused to enact even modest New Deal legislation. In 1938, the voters seized the ideological pendulum, saying “no farther to the left,” and there the pendulum of New Deal liberalism remained for decades. In 1996, voters appear to have said “no further to the right.” But it’s the conservative agenda that is likely to remain in place now.

Quote of the day

Don’t spare the rod

“In our therapeutic society, we’ve paralyzed parents into believing that any kind of punishment will
indelibly mark a child for the worse … adults have lost confidence that they have a right to subject a child to the normal consequences of their behavior.”

— William Kilpatrick, a Boston College education professor and
author of “Why Johnny Can’t Tell Right From Wrong” (From “When Parents Decide To Take Charge
Again,” in Thursday’s New York Times)

Leslie had a different theory. As she saw it, Bill Clinton had run “a mainstream American campaign.” By that, she meant that he had run as a virtual Republican, rejecting New Deal tax-and-spend prescriptions in his campaign speeches and co-opting the conservative issues of crime, welfare, tax relief and reverse discrimination.

Now, as the Democratic Party opens its 1996 convention, Maeby and her Republican comrades have more reason than ever to complain that Clinton is stealing their program. Having been punished by voters in 1994 for the liberal orthodoxies of his tax increase and health-care plan, Clinton has been listing to the right ever since, most recently by signing a welfare-reform bill ending a 60-year federal guarantee of cash assistance to the poor.

Far from grousing, Republicans ought to accept this presidential mimicry as the highest praise. No matter who wins the November election, Clinton’s strategy proves that conservatism has already won the ideological war.

Clinton may liken himself to Harry Truman as the “Comeback Kid.” But when Truman was faced with an obstinate Congress and a restive electorate heading into the 1948 campaign, he did not disown the liberal tradition and hire a conservative consultant like Dick Morris. Rather, he deluged Congress with Fair Deal legislation and waged class warfare with a ferocity that owed as much to Andrew Jackson as to Franklin Roosevelt.

War record notwithstanding, Clinton resembles an inverted version of Dwight Eisenhower far more than he does Truman. Commentators
interpreted Ike’s landslide victories in 1952 and 1956 as the death knell for New Deal ideas. They could not have been more wrong. President Eisenhower raised Social Security benefits in 1954 and 1956, increased the minimum wage by one-third in 1955, spent $1.3 billion on slum clearance during two terms and initiated a massive public works program with the interstate highway system.

“Social Security, housing, workmen’s compensation, unemployment insurance, and the preservation of the value of savings,” Eisenhower declared, “are the things that must be kept above and beyond politics and campaigns.”

Put another way, not even a Republican dared incur the wrath of voters who had survived the Depression and reached the middle class partly through the intervention of the welfare state. “We are all New Dealers today,” the eminent historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., wrote of the Eisenhower era.

Now we are all Reagan Republicans. Bill Clinton may not have gone so far as to bust a union, as Reagan did with the air traffic controllers, but he affronted organized labor with his support for the North American Free Trade Agreement. How paradoxical that a Democratic leader would leave it to Patrick Buchanan to become the spokesman for a working class made expendable by the global economy.

On social issues, Clinton has endorsed not just welfare reform but such conservative proposals as school uniforms and curfews for teenagers. Half of the Democrats in Congress voted for welfare reform. Just how far the political consensus has moved to the right is symbolized by Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the most outspoken opponent of the welfare reform bill — the same man who was branded a racist 30 years ago for his report on the collapsing black family.

For all the talk about the failure of Newt Gingrich and his legislative agenda, he managed to wrest concession after concession from Clinton. He forced the president over a period of months to submit four separate budgets to Congress, the last one consenting to the Republican demand for a balanced budget in seven years.

In Clinton’s defense, he has been forced to operate under striking constraints. The key swing voters who delivered the White House to Ronald Reagan in 1980 and Congress to the GOP in 1994 were middle-class Catholics. Republican activists like Leslie Maeby had captured these wavering voters with the gospel of social conservatism and smaller government. Under the tutelage of Dick Morris, and earlier, pollster Stanley Greenberg, Clinton has had to compete on those terms, distinguishing himself from the Republicans by degree rather than by belief system.

So Clinton will try to have it both ways in Chicago this week, appropriating Republican stands while deriding the GOP as extremist. The audience no doubt will hear and see much about the president’s support for an increase in the minimum wage and about supposed Republican designs to dismantle Medicare. If the charges stick, the Republicans will only have their own absolutism to blame. Indeed, one might date the resurrection of Clinton’s political life to the day last fall when House Republicans let the federal government close rather than strike an extremely favorable compromise with the president on the budget. The Americans who called for less government never imagined that national parks from the Grand Canyon to the Statue of Liberty might be padlocked in the process.

Still, the inability of the Republicans to push through their entire program does not indicate a resurgence of liberalism. Every political movement reaches its limits, as even as masterful a politician as Franklin Roosevelt learned in the late 1930s. In 1938, six years and several billion dollars of public works into the Roosevelt presidency, America’s unemployment rate stood near 17 percent. In the mid-term elections that November, the Democratic Party lost 89 seats in Congress. An emboldened opposition of Republicans and southern Democrats defeated even comparatively mild measures on housing and spending.

Yet, the liberal coalition spawned by that era, and the ideas it brought from the left into the center, persisted for decades more, even under Republican presidents. A few years ago, Leslie Maeby’s mother, Vilma, was
severely injured in a car accident. Testing Vilma for brain damage, a doctor asked her who the president was. “A Democrat,” Vilma replied. Today, that answer, even if Bill Clinton wins a second term, would not be nearly so clear.

Quote of the day

Word on the street

“Word doesn’t tend to filter through that accurately. So the word on the street is you’re not going to be treated in the hospital if you’re not a citizen. Word on the street is if you owe a couple dollars on a parking violation, you may be deported. So there’s widespread panic.”

–Manuel Matos, executive director of the Northern Manhattan Coalition for Immigrant Rights, on the fear and confusion among immigrants about the new welfare law. (From “For Aliens in New York, Anxiety Over U.S. Welfare Reform,” in Monday’s New York Times)

But one of the Republicans voting no was Sen. Barry Goldwater, and his candidacy stirred an inexorable migration of blacks into the Democratic camp. Ronald Reagan’s famous optimism did not preclude his spinning tales of “welfare queens,” and George Bush, a longtime champion of the United Negro College Fund, conflated crime and blackness in the Willie Horton commercial. An opinion poll conducted earlier in this campaign season estimated that the GOP would win but 6 percent of the black vote in the presidential election.

Now, with the selection of Jack Kemp as Bob Dole’s running mate, some experts predict the party could double that percentage. Much more importantly, the presence of Kemp might force the Democrats into a battle for black hearts and minds, an intellectual contest that could only help both parties and black America itself. No public good has been served by the abdication of millions of black voters to a party that, in the person of Bill Clinton, has ignored and even humiliated them in the full knowledge that, speaking electorally, they have nowhere else to go.

Has anyone forgotten that in the midst of the Gennifer Flowers “bimbo eruption” during the 1992 New Hampshire primary Clinton flew back to Arkansas to execute a black convicted murderer who was already brain-damaged? Or that he deliberately misconstrued a months-old interview with Sistah Souljah in the Washington Post to find an excuse for publicly embarrassing Jesse Jackson? The Clinton strategy of attracting Reagan Democrats relied heavily on such pieces of political theater.

Perhaps this year black voters, and all Americans who care about issues of race and poverty, will profit from a genuine debate. A self-proclaimed “bleeding heart conservative,” Kemp has combined passion about the inner cities with advocacy of financial incentives and Judeo-Christian values that may well find willing ears among blacks. His abrupt about-face on affirmative action, a program he supported until last week, does hurt him; but many centrist Democrats already hold the identical position.

The Clinton administration has already adopted one of Kemp’s favorite ideas, enterprise zones. Two other Kemp strategies, school choice and tenant ownership of public housing, will likely prove even more appealing to a broad band of the black electorate. The combination of self-help and social conservatism underlying both proposals taps into deep reservoirs of black sentiment.

One logical audience contains blacks of West Indian heritage, as represented by Gen. Colin Powell. Having come to the United States as immigrants rather than slaves, these blacks share with white ethnics an emphasis on upward mobility, personal propriety and home ownership (or “buying house,” as the phrase goes). Nowhere is the potential appeal of Kemp greater than in black churches. It seemed no coincidence that Congressman J.C. Watts, a third-generation minister, established such rapport when he spoke to convention delegates who were heavily drawn from the Christian Coalition.

God-talk is a language that crosses racial lines, and what works for the liberals of the National Council of Churches has begun to work for the Christian Right, too. The West Coast leader of the Rev. Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority was a renowned black pastor in Los Angeles, the Reverend E.V. Hill. William Bennett has successfully collaborated with a black woman, C. Delores Tucker, in his campaign against gangsta rap. Even in that bastion of liberalism, New York City, the Christian Coalition made common cause with many black and Hispanic congregations in its successful campaign to bar an elementary-school curriculum teaching tolerance for gay lifestyles.

The black churches are also likely to look favorably upon Kemp’s proposals on schools and housing. Innumerable churches operate their own elementary schools as alternatives to the inner cities’ beleaguered public schools. These days, the high school of choice for the black working class is often a Catholic one. Bishop Loughlin High School in Brooklyn, nearly all-white when New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani graduated 30 years ago, now is overwhelmingly black and Hispanic. And for the bus drivers and nurse’s aides of the black working class, struggling mightily to pay $2,000 or so in annual tuition, a school voucher of even a few hundred dollars would hold enormous appeal.

Bob Dole surely touched some black nerves in his acceptance speech when he assailed Bill Clinton for opposing school choice while paying $10,000 a year to ensconce Chelsea in the rarefied air of Sidwell Friends. Clinton may owe teachers’ unions loyalty, but black parents, who often warred against those unions for control of ghetto schools in the 1960s, are bound by no such constraints. It is revealing that a black state legislator from Milwaukee’s slums, Polly Williams, united with Wisconsin’s conservative governor, Tommy Thompson, to pioneer a voucher program. In New York City, a coalition of black and Hispanic churches created an alternative high school within the public-school system through an alliance with the Manhattan Institute, a neoconservative think tank.

As with schools, black churches have created their own dramatic alternatives to public housing. The affiliates of the Industrial Areas Foundation in Brooklyn, the Bronx and Southern California — all of which draw members primarily from black and Hispanic congregations — have erected thousands of low-cost, owner-occupied row houses in the Nehemiah program. Nehemiah operates from the conservative premise that people take care of what they own better than what they rent, particularly if the landlord is a bureaucracy. In Brooklyn, nearly half the Nehemiah homeowners have come out of the projects.

“Never do for anyone what they can do for themselves,” holds the Industrial Areas Foundation’s “Iron Rule.” What the foundation’s groups have asked for in Nehemiah is not government largesse of the welfare-state variety but rather incentives that fit easily into the Kemp scheme, such as the title for vacant public land, government-backed low-interest mortgages and tax abatements.

“No permanent friends,” goes another of the foundation’s slogans, “and no permanent enemies.” With Jack Kemp on the stump, black voters could live by those words for the first time in 30 or 40 years.

This is the second of three articles on the Republicans and Democrats by Samuel G. Freedman. A former New York Times reporter, Freedman is the author of “Upon This Rock: the Miracles of a Black Church” and “Small Victories: The Real World of a Teacher, Her Students and Their High School,” which was a National Book Award finalist. His latest book, “The Inheritance: How Three Families and America Moved From Roosevelt to Reagan and Beyond,” (Simon & Schuster) will be published in September.

Quote of the day

Royal coffee mugs, anyone?

On the reforms proposed by the British royal family’s “Way Ahead” planning committee, which reportedly include an end to public subsidy of the Windsors:

“What they are doing is what so many other institutions have been doing since the arrival of Mrs. Thatcher. This is the biggest privatization of them all… This would make them more like any other noble family, living off its estates… It is going to have to flog itself very hard.”

– Dr. David Starkey, lecturer in history at the London School of Economics, quoted in today’s Electronic Daily Telegraph

It was a transformative moment for Carey, who is now a senior appointee in the Republican administration of New York Gov. George Pataki, and typical of a dynamic new breed of Republican. After his discharge, Tim attended the State University of New York at Albany, and fell in with a group of young Republicans who called themselves the State Street Gang. They were the children of a butcher, a janitor, a carpenter, a warehouse manager, a scrap-metal dealer and a farmer who doubled as a school bus driver — of parents, in most instances, of unshakable Democratic loyalty. Carey’s mother was a Democratic poll-watcher; his grandmother was a Democratic committeewoman.

Out of that cadre emerged men and women who would figure prominently in the conservative revolution, the field troops for Ronald Reagan and George Bush, Jack Kemp and Alfonse D’Amato. As a field representative for the Republican National Committee, Tim Carey would help elect Pataki as governor of New York, as well as Christine Todd Whitman as governor of New Jersey and Rudolph Giuliani as mayor of New York.

Surely, Tim Carey was not who the Democratic pollster Patrick Caddell had in mind when, during the Carter presidency, he espoused the idea of “generational politics.” By Caddell’s thinking, the millions of baby boomers radicalized — or at least liberalized — in the late 1960s would ripen into a voting majority for the Democratic Party. In the aftermath of Watergate, a brief reversal of the nation’s conservative drift, it was possible to believe he was right.

And if the septuagenarian Bob Dole loses resoundingly, as the polls predict, to that quintessential boomer, Bill Clinton, it is tempting to misread history yet again. Every time the Dole campaign emphasizes their candidate’s heroic record in World War II — a conflict that ended 51 years ago this month — it underscores that Citizen Dole is also Senior Citizen Dole.

But it is neither coincidental nor quirky that Dole’s director of communications, John Buckley, was himself a rock critic for the now defunct New York alternative weekly, Soho News. And he worked with Tim Carey both in Lewis Lehrman’s gubernatorial race against Mario Cuomo in 1982 and in Jack Kemp’s 1988 race for the Republican presidential nomination. Two other members of Dole’s inner circle, campaign manager Scott Reed and strategist Vin Weber, were also young protigis of Kemp’s.

Win or lose in November, Dole will likely be seen as the last remnant of the quintessential, 1950s, small-town Midwestern Republicanism of Robert Taft. But the Buckleys and Webers and Reeds and Careys will remain — the latest in wave after wave of young activists who have driven the conservative movement in the party and in the country as a whole. As controversial as the New Right’s stands on certain social issues continue to be, its libertarian views on reducing government and cutting taxes now cross party lines in their appeal to younger voters.

That movement was born of insurgents in their 20s and early 30s. John Buckley’s uncle, William F. Buckley, Jr., created the ideological base of the New Right with his magazine “The National Review,” which he founded barely out of college. Two of his contemporaries, William A. Rusher and F. Clifton White, led a conservative ascendancy in the Young Republican Federation in the late 1950s. White, who led the successful campaign to draft Barry Goldwater for the GOP nomination in 1964, had an approach to politics that sounded more like Tom Hayden than Tom Dewey: “Power started in the streets,” he wrote, “and filtered up to the top.”

The Young Republican Federation served through the 1960s and 1970s as a training ground for conservatives, replete with camps, schools and internal elections. Rather than follow a messianic figure, as young Democrats did in the forms of Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern, their Republican peers learned how to operate a political party, the better to seize its controls.

One of Tim Carey’s comrades in the State Street Gang, Frank Trotta, attended a Republican camp for New Yorkers as a teenager. His counselors included Roger Stone, who would later hold leadership positions in the Reagan and Bush campaigns, and Terry Dolan, who later became the director of the National Conservative Political Action Committee. From them, Trotta imbibed a brand of conservatism so irreverent and audacious that it made being square seem positively subversive. To the tune of “Yellow Submarine,” the campers sang:

“We all live in a welfare state
New York State, New York State
We all share a socialist fate
socialist fate, socialist fate.”

The use of a Beatles tune for a conservative chant is instructive. Michael Kelly, writing in The New Yorker, characterized the GOP’s 1994 sweep of Congress as the “revenge of the nerds.” Indeed, the partisans of the State Street Gang acted conventionally during the counterculture — joining fraternities and sororities, drinking beer instead of smoking dope, aspiring to marriage. This sense of being alienated from one’s own generation has invested the conservative movement to this day with an underdog’s impassioned sense of aggrievement.

At the same time, the New Right also learned from the New Left’s tactics and rhetoric, particularly appropriating its distrust of government. During high school, Frank Trotta saluted an equally conservative classmate with a clenched fist and the cry, “Power to the individual!” A few years later, he printed buttons advising, “Make Love, Not Laws.” The very forces of ideological purity tearing at the Republican Party, most notably on the abortion issue, resemble nothing so much as the uncompromising elements of the New Left, those that arguably cost Hubert Humphrey the 1968 election.

Even if Bob Dole meets a similar fate in November, it remains clear which version of the 1960s has prevailed. Yes, Norman Mailer received a Pulitzer Prize for writing a book about the siege of the Pentagon, a book that celebrated it as the day the anti-war movement threw off its “damnable mediocre middle.” But that middle, so abruptly spurned, would soon be occupied and turned rightward by the Tim Careys of the country.

This is the first of three articles on the Republicans and Democrats by Samuel G. Freedman.

Quote of the day

Pissing in the wind

“This is really not a bad economy. It’s nothing for the Guinness Book of Records, but it’s not a bad economy. And it’s sustainable. . . It’s certainly performing in Clinton’s favor.”

— Murray Weidenbaum, former chief of the Council of Economic Advisers under Ronald Reagan. (From “The Outlook: Brisk Economic Winds Blow in Dole’s Face,” in Monday’s Wall Street Journal)