Nina J. Easton - Gang of Five: Leaders at the Center of the Conservative Crusade

THERE IS A HIDDEN HISTORY in American politics, the other side of the baby-boom generation: political rebels of the Right who emerged on campus in the 1970s and went on to overturn the established liberal order. Raised in Nixons shadow, they matured under Reagans benevolent gaze and were ultimately hardened into a revolutionary band of guerrillas by their own antichrist, Bill Clinton. They are a small group of politically potent ideologues in possession of the means to power. These baby-boom Rightists are the new gatekeepers of modern American policy.

To understand them is to understand what politics has become and what it will be. For not only have they been at the epicenter of every political earthquake for the past decadefrom abortion politics to government shutdowns to political muckrakingthey will also be there on the January morning when the next president takes the oath of office. And no matter who it is, Al Gore or George W. Bush, he can be assured of one thinghe will feel the Rightists force.

For Al Gore, the entanglement will be made visible in pitched battles over judicial nominations, civil rights appointments, or any ambitious attempts to use government to spread the nations new wealth. For George W. Bush, the battles could be even more fierce if his compassionate conservatism seeks to find a complementary role for the federal government in private matters, if his policies arent conservative enough, or if he doesnt find a way to assuage Rightists, who have every intention not simply of walking down the corridors of power but of owning them. The next president of the United States cant ignore these Rightists. It is important that we at least understand them.

This book narrates the intertwined lives of a gang of five, rightist leaders at the center of the conservative movement who work alone, in concert, and sometimes in bitter rivalry with one another, but always for the cause. If their names are only somewhat familiar, their job descriptions jog the memory. One is a former leader of the Christian Coalition. Another is a former chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle. A third is a prominent congressman from the revolutionary Republican class of 1994. Another is a man behind the spread of school choice programs that liberals claim will destroy the public school system. And a fifth leads the foremost anti-tax insurgency in the country.

BILL KRISTOL is known to TV viewers as a political commentator and to newspaper readers as an insightful Republican strategist. On camera, the Harvard-trained political philosopher and publisher of the magazine Weekly Standard displays the offhand wit of someone who understands Washington as a temporal game, but a game that is his obsession. Off camera, Kristols role runs far deeper, for he has been the brains behind many of the Rights assaults on the vestiges of sixties liberalism, especially sexual freedom. Yet Kristol is also an elitist who has far more in common with his secular-liberal foes than they would ever suspect.

RALPH REED exudes a magnetism that makes hard-core Leftists think of goose-stepping troops and hard-core Rightists flock around him like a rock star. For eight years, as the founder and leader of the Christian Coalition, he was the face of the Religious Right and a star in the national media. As he rose to prominence in this role in the 1990s, he attempted to move beyond his own hardball past to build a movement based on moderation, inclusion, and, most of all, respectability. He sought a place at the table of the political establishment, but did his purist followers want that, too? Reed now figures prominently in the 2000 election as a top political strategist and adviser to George W. Bush.

GROVER NORQUIST enjoys a reputation as the movements market-Leninist. He divides the world neatly between Good Guys (conservatives) and Bad Guys (liberals)and is ever on guard for signs of disloyalty within his ranks. Officially, Grover is an anti-tax lobbyist, and the anti-tax pledge he has convinced hundreds of state and national candidates to sign has helped make that issue a calling card for true Republicans. But Grover has an equally important unofficial role: If there is a center to the right-wing conspiracy that so animates Washington liberals, it is located in Norquists conference room, where dozens of Rightists gather weekly to plot their latest offensive against Democrats, unions, and the Left.

DAVID MCINTOSH was a leader of the ideological young freshmen who were elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1994 determined to deconstruct the welfare state and ended up instead overthrowing their revolutions leader, Newt Gingrich. Bearing degrees from Yale and the University of Chicago, McIntosh was emblematic of those conservative leaders who gained their political footing in campus debate societies in the 1970s: brainy, articulate, and looking for a fight. To ascend, McIntosh (like the movement he represents) had to find a more human face for all his bookish free-market theories. His latest test lies in his campaign to be Indianas next governor.

CLINT BOLICK confounds his liberal critics because he is something that is not supposed to exist on the Right: an idealist. His propaganda war against affirmative action has landed him atop the Lefts enemies list. In fact, Bolick spends most of his time as a constitutional lawyer representing the urban poor: He sues bureaucracies on behalf of bootstrap entrepreneurs barred from business and represents poor parents whose children attend private schools on taxpayer-funded vouchers. Bolicks mission is to car-jack the phrase civil rights from the Left, redefining notions of racial fairness from a conservative perspective.

The composition of this cast is not meant to suggest that white males are the only leaders of the modern conservative movement. The Right includes a substantial minority of women (though far fewer nonwhite activists), and many appear prominently in these pages. Rather than fill a race or gender box, I chose these figures for their centrality to the movementeach has helped to build an important institutionand their lasting impact on the national stage. Taken together, moreover, they cover the range of important ideas undergirding the Right, from the Chicago Schools aversion to economic regulation to the Straussian political philosophys ideal of a virtuous citizenry. And they stand in stark contrast to the sometimes popular liberal view of the Right as paranoid militiamen or abortion clinic assassins or any number of racist groups that attach themselves to the conservative fringe.