“I read the newspapers avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.” So said Labor’s fiery Welsh postwar Minister of Health, Aneurin Bevan. And he had not had the pleasure of reading the political obituaries of the Republican revolution that have intermittently become the stuff of our daily newspapers and weekly magazines.

The gist of the death notices goes something like this: the battle over the budget has revealed to the American people that the new Republican Congress lacks any hint of compassion; that in its zeal to balance the budget it has lost sight of the real needs of, variously, the elderly (Medicare), the poor (Medicaid), the young (education-funding), the disadvantaged (welfare), indeed, everyone who breathes (environmental regulation); and that, in its rush to lower taxes, it has engaged in a plot to divert resources from the needy into the pockets of the already affluent.

But, the obit continues, there is also good news: American voters have either already awakened or surely will soon awake from the stupor into which they momentarily lapsed in the 1994 elections; they have gotten or will get over the childish tantrum that induced them to throw votes at Republican candidates; and they will return in their legions to the fold of the Democrats, whose leader, Bill Clinton now enjoys a comfortable lead over his most likely opponent, Bob Dole, in all opinion polls.

This particular funeral procession, however, is premature. Whether or not the new Republican program does indeed constitute a “revolution,” as that term is generally understood, it is surely not dead. Nor is it likely to expire from wounds inflicted by the President and the Democrats. Indeed, it is nearer the truth to say that the revolution has triumphed—at least so far, and at least in major part. Whether that victory can be consolidated and extended is another question.

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Consider first the triumphs. Shorn of detail, the Republicans’ Contract With America had three major goals: to restore fiscal sanity to the federal budget; to devolve power from Washington to units of government closer to the people; and to begin the process of (to borrow a term from Gertrude Himmelfarb) re-moralizing America. The President himself, in his State of the Union address this past January, all but conceded that the revolution had achieved much of what it set out to do when he pronounced the end of the era of big, high-spending government, extolled family values, and denounced the immorality of much popular culture.

That Gingrich’s troops have won the budget battle is beyond dispute. Spend-borrow-and-tax is no longer a viable platform for an American politician. Nor is it any longer quite so easy to substitute for federal spending by loading the costs of favored programs onto America’s corporations, in the hope that the public will not realize this particular piper has to be paid in the form of higher prices, fewer jobs, or both. It would be a brave politician, indeed, who would propose a new social program on the scale of any of the major components of today’s welfare state and suggest that its cost be met either by new taxes or by issuing a new batch of government IOU’s.

Equally significant, no politician, not even one as skilled in wrapping himself in the mantle of compassion as Bill Clinton, can expect lengthy tenure on the federal payroll unless he bows, or at least is seen to bow, to the public demand that someday, somehow, the federal budget be brought into balance. Clinton did try to resist this demand, and failed, retreating first to a pledge to balance the budget in ten years, then nine, then eight, before finally and reluctantly capitulating to the Republicans’ seven-year timetable.

That surrender to the forces of fiscal rectitude is made all the more surprising, and the Republicans’ triumph all the more complete and astonishing, by the fact that the case for draconian efforts to balance the budget is far from compelling. For one thing, the federal deficit is already falling, both in absolute terms and relative to the nation’s ability to carry its debt. In 1995, for example, when the government spent $164 billion more than it took in, the shortfall came to only 2.3 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP); in the fiscal year ending this October, estimates are that the deficit will fall further to $120 billion, or 1.6 percent of GDP. These figures compare with a deficit of $290 billion, or 4.9 percent of GDP, in 1992 and $203 billion, or 3.1 percent, in 1994.¹

More important, the federal budget fails to distinguish between expenses and investments; if it did, the “deficit” would be far less terrifying than it seems to the untutored eye. Thus, an extravagant trip to India by the Secretary of Energy and her entourage adds as much to the federal deficit as a similar sum spent to buy equipment for the nation’s outgunned law-enforcement officers, or to shore up some bit of the nation’s transport infrastructure. It is as if an individual were to count, as one and the same, money spent for a night on the town and money spent to increase the capital value of his home.

Finally, the notion that the deficit automatically places an unfair burden on future generations, thereby stunting the economic opportunities available to “our children and our grandchildren,” is nonsense. Ronald Reagan ran up huge deficits in order to demonstrate to the Soviet Union that it had no hope of competing with the United States as a superpower. He thereby willed to our children and grandchildren both a large pile of IOU’s and a nation no longer under threat of nuclear annihilation. In short, it is not the fact of a deficit but how the money is spent that determines whether the present generation has unjustly enriched itself at the expense of its progeny.

All this is undoubtedly what Jack Kemp had in mind when, in 1981, he declared, “The Republican party no longer worships at the altar of a balanced budget.” Indeed, it is even possible to make an intellectually respectable argument in favor of a perpetually unbalanced budget. For, so long as the economy grows more rapidly than the cost of carrying the national debt, that carrying cost will place a relatively diminishing burden on the nation’s resources.

But so complete has been the triumph of the Republican revolution that even politicians sympathetic to continued deficit financing dare not say so, even in defense of policies which, in their liberal hearts, they favor. Instead, they have been reduced to quibbling over which programs to cut, by how much, and by when. Watch their lips: no new taxes, no new borrowing—at least not so long as the new, Republican-imposed fiscal ethos prevails.

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The significance of this victory goes beyond money. Traditional Republicans, those who learned their conservatism at the feet of Senator Robert Taft and his intellectual progeny, may have been drawn to the idea of a balanced budget by the simple notion that no household—and, by extension, no government—can survive if its outlays consistently exceed its income. But Gingrich’s troops are driven by a far different vision.

To them, the budget deficit is not an evil in and of itself; if it were, they would be less willing than they are to increase it by cutting taxes in a manner that has no hope of increasing the flow of revenues into the Treasury. ( More on this below.) Rather, they see the deficit as an issue around which to rally the forces of less government. As even so new and uncertain a recruit to the revolution as Bob Dole has put it, “This is not a debate about numbers, it’s about policies.” Bill Clinton has formulated the same point with greater heat: the House conservatives “want to end the role of the federal government in our lives.”

I would put it still differently. This is, in fact, a debate about “compassion,” and how to show it. Do we demonstrate compassion by engaging in massive income transfers from the more productive members of society to those in financial or other difficulties (whether impoverished teenage mothers or rich holders of Mexican IOU’s)? Or, alternatively, do we demonstrate compassion by encouraging our citizens to assume responsibility for the consequences of their own behavior, so that when they do need help from their government, they will need it only on a temporary basis and as a last resort?

It is the triumph of the latter vision over the long-dominant consensus in favor of the former that makes the Republican victory in the budget battle so telling. For, unless the voters decide otherwise by returning control of the House and the Senate to the Democrats later this year, the agreement to balance the budget is an agreement to contain the scale and scope of the federal government. Whatever the outcome of specific fights over so-called entitlements, we will get less government in the future than we have had in the past.

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The second goal of the Republican revolution—power to the people, or, at least, power closer to the people—has also been achieved, at least in good measure. With the help of a bipartisan group of governors, the Republicans have already made it extraordinarily difficult for the federal government to continue the dishonorable practice of imposing mandates on the states without providing the funds with which to meet those mandates.

Again, the significance of this victory extends far beyond the dollars immediately involved. For the unfunded state mandate was the last refuge of liberals in search of money, a truly free lunch for any national politician with a new idea but without the will or the ability to impose new taxes on the public or new regulations on business. By making it highly unlikely that such unfunded mandates will receive the necessary congressional approval, the Republicans have cut off the last available source of liberal oxygen. This has not been lost on the press: as the Washington Post lamented, “President Bill Clinton must confront the reality that will face every occupant of the Oval Office for the foreseeable future: he has no money to play with anymore.”

Whether the Republicans will be as successful in increasing the independence of state governments by transferring to them power now held in Washington is less certain. The President, for one, seems determined to prevent the conversion of federal entitlement programs into block grants to the states. Still, even he has found it necessary to give more and more waivers from federal rules governing the administration of social programs, and he has thereby willy-nilly restored to the states some of their earlier role as laboratories of democracy, freer to develop locally appropriate ways of defining just how government shall intervene in the lives of its citizens.

It matters little that the proposed Republican “devolution” may end up transferring authority from an unresponsive federal bureaucracy to perhaps still less responsive and less efficient bureaucracies in the 50 state capitals. Or that an aggrieved citizen who can hold his Congressman responsible for some act of bureaucratic nonfeasance will probably not know the name of the state assemblyman against whom to retaliate. So far, the devolutionary drive seems immune to such practical criticism. Bob Dole, who has spent a long lifetime participating in the expansion of federal power, now carries with him a copy of the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution, reserving unenumerated powers to the several states and to the people; he receives loud approbation whenever he cites it as one of the bedrocks of his political philosophy. For that matter, even Vice President AI Gore found it necessary to deny that he was defending the status quo when he proposed a series of cosmetic changes under the rubric of “reinventing government.”

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Which brings us to the third leg of the revolution’s stool, the pledge to re-moralize America.

There is certainly no gainsaying public alarm over the consequences of the fraying of the traditional family, over teenage pregnancy, over the lurid excrescences of popular culture, over street crime, over the failings of the public-education system, or over a host of other features of contemporary life. The Republicans—or here I should more properly say the conservatives—saw their opportunity, took it, and won.

William J. Bennett brought mighty Time Warner to its knees, forcing it to dispose of its gangsta-rap subsidiary and thereby to withdraw corporate America’s tacit approval of calls for the slaughter of policemen and the degradation of women, especially black women. Calvin Klein had to reconsider advertisements employing seemingly prepubescent models to sell underwear. According to the American Enterprise, even the talk-show host Geraldo Rivera has registered the shift in public mood concerning “transsexuals and other sexually related” themes that are the staples of his genre. Electronic Media, an industry bible, reports that “virtually unanimously stations are saying they’ve had it with talk shows,” and credits Bennett’s criticisms for the change. Finally, even Hollywood seems to have gotten the message, and to have begun to train its sights on the market for “family entertainment.”

This is hardly to say that the culture these conservatives find so offensive has been wiped away, or that violence on TV and movie screens will soon be reduced to a custard pie in the face, and sexual displays to a goodnight peck on the cheek. But taken together with the eagerness of politicians, including President Clinton, to endorse Dan Quayle’s once-mocked “Murphy Brown” speech, and with the recent commercial failure of some of the more violent and sexually peculiar Hollywood offerings, and with the newfound religion of television producers who pride themselves on being in tune with changes in public tastes and fashion, it certainly seems safe to conclude that the Republicans can reasonably claim some gains in the culture wars.

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So the revolution has kept its promises. But in the process, has it also, as its many critics claim, sown the seeds of its eventual defeat?

Perhaps it has. But if so, it is not because Bill Clinton is now ahead in the polls: Jimmy Carter led Ronald Reagan by 30 points at this time in the 1980 electoral cycle; and in 1988, so few voters had seriously focused on the impending Dukakis-Bush battle that as late as July of that year they were telling pollsters they favored the Massachusetts governor by 54 to 37 percent. Nor does anyone yet know what the ongoing Whitewater and “Travelgate” investigations will bring, or whether the Bosnian adventure will prove a fiasco, or what else may befall the White House in the run-up to the election.

No, the threat to the revolution comes not from portents contained in the polls but from the fact that strains are starting to appear in the coalition that propelled the Republicans into control of both the House and the Senate in 1994.

That coalition brought together economic conservatives who want to rein in the federal deficit and free up private and economic life, and social conservatives intensely concerned with pursuing their vision of a re-moralized America. What went unnoticed in the flush of victory was that these two groups had, and have, very different ideas as to the role of government. The economic conservatives want less of it: less regulation, lower taxes, fewer government agencies. The social conservatives want less of the sort of government they have been getting, but at least some of them want more of a different sort of government, one willing to set and enforce social values.

As it happens, the insistence on these values by social conservatives during the battle of the budget is what created the opportunity for Bill Clinton to wrap himself in the flag of “compassion.” Cutting back on the welfare state was always going to be a politically difficult chore: general support for a balanced budget would not translate easily into support for cuts in specific programs, or even for slowing their rate of growth. The more deeply the Republicans had to cut, the greater the opposition would be. This was not, therefore, a moment to propose reducing taxes, especially after President Clinton had acquiesced in the general goal of a balanced budget. Enter the social conservatives and the child tax credit, which would, in fact, reduce each family’s taxes by $500 per dependent child.

This proposal could not be justified on the ground that, by denying funds to the federal government, it would force it to spend less; the government was already promising to spend less. Nor could it be defended on supply-side grounds—namely, that it would stimulate risk-taking and harder work (aside from the work of child-rearing). Nor was there any hope that the credit, like a cut in the tax rate, would result in an increase in tax revenues, thereby “paying for itself.” Nor, in contrast to the reforms of the Reagan years, would it lop off several million of the lowest-earning taxpayers from the rolls altogether. Instead, the credit would provide taxpaying—that is to say, non-poor—families with funds that many social conservatives were privately saying could be used to help finance parochial-school tuitions, a goal that could not be achieved directly because of constitutional restrictions on such use of federal funds.

The insistence on the child tax credit by social conservatives—in effect, a reward for the support they had given the Republican revolution in the 1994 elections—made budget balancing more difficult, and forced deeper cuts in many programs than would otherwise have been required. And it subjected the Republicans to the charge that they were not so much interested in reforming Medicare and Medicaid in order to save them from impending insolvency as they were bent on cutting programs that benefited the poor, or the elderly, or needy students, in order to fund a tax cut for the middle class and the rich. In paying their debt to the social conservatives, the Republicans gave a hostage to fortune. They also created an opening for the President, who was able both to assert that he would never balance the budget “on the backs” of the poor and, in die end, to coopt the issue at a fraction of the cost by proposing a child tax credit of his own, which applies to so few families that it is not a budget-buster.

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There is more. It was one thing for a William J. Bennett, in his role as a concerned private citizen, to launch a campaign against gangsta rap. It was another thing for Bob Dole to piggyback on Bennett’s initiative and warn movie and television producers, over whom he has substantial power, that he, too, was displeased with their output. Bill Clinton, going Dole one better, took the occasion of his State of the Union address to summon the creators of the nation’s child-entertainment products to the White House, to see how the government might guide them in their artistic endeavors.

Bennett was relying both on moral suasion and on the free market in goods and stock-market shares—even Time Warner’s famously obtuse executives could see that continuing to produce this music would not only become a source of personal embarrassment at their country clubs but might result in consumer-sponsored boycotts of the company’s products, loss of sponsors, and a further sell-off of Time Warner holdings by investors already battered by a series of management misjudgments. But powerful government officials, like the President and the Senate Majority Leader, can do much more than cajole and embarrass; they can decide whether cable rates shall be regulated or deregulated; whether broadcasters will have to pay to participate in the digital revolution or will be given a free ride on their existing allocations of spectrum; and who shall be allowed to enter which parts of the telecommunications business.

Government intrusion, even in a cause agreeable to social conservatives, is government intrusion, and to sponsor it is to run two risks. The first has been alluded to in studies both by Charles Murray and by Gertrude Himmelfarb, and is exemplified by our experience with the welfare system: government action drives out private action. Thanks in part to consumer preferences, as expressed at the box office and in television ratings, and thanks in part to private initiatives of the sort spearheaded by Bennett, the culture does in fact, as we have seen, show incipient signs of undergoing a shift in direction. This turn came about without government intervention. To call government into the fray now might well drive the private armies from the field, and seize defeat from the jaws of victory.

Second, government enlistment on one side of the culture war may well jeopardize Republican claims to be the party that will get government off the backs of the people—a theme, if polls are to be believed, which is as popular as ever with the electorate. According to Fred Barnes, writing in the Weekly Standard, 64 percent of Americans say that big government is a greater threat to the country than big labor or big business, 62 percent think the government is doing too much, and 47 percent say the Republicans have not gone far enough in cutting government down to size.

Of course, when it comes to an industry that engenders as little sympathy and is so monolithically liberal as Hollywood, even pure economic conservatives may be willing to make an exception to their general distrust of big government. And it would be foolish to contend that political leaders should be prohibited from commenting on an issue—the moral tone of the nation—that is of such deep concern to the electorate. But there is a line, however hazy and indistinct, between the proper use of high office as a bully pulpit and putting pressure on a highly regulated industry to conform to a government official’s notion of what separates the acceptable from the unacceptable; Dole and Clinton may have crossed it. After all, a government that interferes in the cultural life of the nation because it disapproves of the products being sold and bought can as justifiably interfere in the business life of the nation by ordering manufacturers to produce cars fueled by electric batteries, even if motorists prefer the lower cost and superior performance of gasoline-powered vehicles; and so on.

Nor is this by any means the sole area of conflict within the uneasy coalition that makes up the ranks of the Republican revolution. Newt Gingrich has already incurred the wrath of social conservatives by opposing their plan to place government controls on the Internet, in the hope of eliminating material they find objectionable. On the deeply agitated issue of abortion, a bright line of principle divides, say, the editors of National Review and Ralph Reed’s Christian Coalition from other conservatives, including Bob Dole, who seem to be wavering in their support of a constitutional amendment to ban all abortions. Another line separates Pat Buchanan and a number of other conservatives from those who, on economic grounds, favor a broadly welcoming policy on immigration. And, needless to say, the question of the place of religion in the “public square,” and in the public schools, elicits no less impassioned and no less antagonistic views.

I do not mean to exaggerate. By and large, the crafters of the Republican coalition are acutely aware of their interdependence, and of the dangers to their respective programs of turning their guns on one another. Although social and economic conservatives may disagree on the specifics of tax policy, both share a desire for lower taxes. (Economic conservatives would reduce those that retard economic growth, social conservatives those that discourage the traditional family.) And both would prefer to achieve this goal by cutting entitlements rather than by swelling the deficit, which they would like to see eliminated. Then, too, although they may disagree on prayer in the schools and abortion, both groups come together on other important aspects of social policy, favoring workfare over welfare, more severe punishment of career criminals, and an end to those programs that encourage illegitimacy.

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But the need to concentrate on areas of agreement—and on differences with liberals and Democrats—is very great, and all the greater if the Republicans are to build public support for the major goals of their revolution. Because a good part of the spending cuts that have been agreed to by the President and the Congress are “back-ended”—that is, they will fall into place only as we approach the target date of 2002—the consensus the Republicans have formed in the country will have to hold for a goodly length of time. Already there are signs of public discontent, as manifested in the precipitous decline in Newt Gingrich’s popularity. Only if voters begin to see some benefits—lower taxes, lower interest rates, more and better jobs—are they likely to support the crucial cuts that are yet to come. And only if the two wings of the Republican coalition hold together are those benefits likely to be realized.

If the revolution’s troops fail to march together, they may well lose their majorities in the House and Senate, and theirs may prove to have been a short-lived blip in a trend toward ever-bigger government. Instead of the enduring Republican revolution now in prospect, we would be left at best with the status quo, at worst with the New Deal redux. That would be an exceedingly high price to pay for disunity in a movement that set out so smartly and so bravely to bring us fiscal sanity and smaller government, a devolution of power, and a re-moralized America.

¹ For perspective, the superconservative German fiscal authorities have decreed that only those European nations capable of reducing their fiscal deficits to 3 percent of GDP will be permitted to join Europe's projected single currency. The U.S. already meets this stringent standard, which is more than most other industrialized nations, including Germany itself, can claim.