November 18, 2002 7:09am EST

THINKING THINGS OVER

BY ROBERT L. BARTLEY Monday, November 18, 2002 12:01 a.m. EST

"If you like God in government, get ready for the rapture," Bill Moyers told his PBS audience the Friday after the election. Republicans will have "monopoly control" of the government, and will "turn their radical ideology into the law of the land." This means "forcing pregnant women to surrender control over the own lives," and "using the taxing power to transfer wealth from working people to the rich," as well as "giving corporations a free hand to eviscerate the environment."

Every time I hear one of Parson Moyers's sermons, it reminds me that he came to public attention as head flack for Lyndon B. Johnson. "Chief companion to the conscience of the president," Theodore H. White called him. The conscience was also majordomo of the primordial attack-ad campaign against Barry Goldwater during the 1964 campaign: the girl incinerated while picking a daisy, hands tearing up a Social Security card. The one with a girl licking ice cream contaminated by radioactive fallout was, Mr. White says, "as cruel a political film as has ever been shown."

In March 1965, four months after the landslide bolstered by suggesting his opponent would blow up the world, President Johnson landed Marines in Vietnam, the first commitment of U.S. ground units. The bumper sticker ran, "They told me if I voted for Goldwater we'd have 500,000 troops in Vietnam."

I bring this up not merely to pick on Mr. Moyers, but because it captures the tenor of a good share of liberal commentary on the election. If defeated Democrats look to their pundits and intellectuals for guidance, they'll mostly find hysteria laced with name-calling.

The venerable Helen Thomas, for example, also complains that President Bush is "now in position to ram his conservative agenda" through Congress. He has "right-wing judicial nominees" as well as the "arch-conservative Justice Antonin Scalia." Democrats lost by "rolling over for Bush" and "need to stiffen their rubber spines." She asks "what's wrong with tying the Senate up in parliamentary knots to fight off the Bush proposals that are simply dangerous ideas?"

Garrison Keillor says "The Old GOP of fiscal responsibility and principles conservatism and bedrocks Main Street values is gone, and something cynical has taken its place." Another Salon contributor says that big GOP turnout in the rural South saddles Republicans with "their debt to pro-Confederate flag voters."

In Texas, Molly Ivins says the GOP victors are "one of the most entrancing crews of dipsticks in the history of our state." Joe Conason, who made his mark by volunteering for the grimy task of defending Bill Clinton, says that when critics call Nancy Pelosi a San Francisco Democrat--echoing Jean Kirkpatrick's rhetoric on the heady-liberal 1984 Democratic convention there--they're guilty of "queer-baiting by proxy."

Do not think these themes are confined to the fringe, unless you decide the New York Times has moved there. Columnist Bob Herbert talks of "a right-wing assault from all sides" while Paul Krugman complains of "the power of our burgeoning plutocracy." On the courts, the Times editors talk of "ideological extreme nominees" and "Justice Department ideologues" who "favor taking away the right to abortion, striking down reasonable environmental regulations and turning back the clock on race."

Even Thomas L. Friedman, winner of a richly deserved Pulitzer Prize for his commentary on the Middle East, writes of "Bush hard-liners," who want war but won't help build a better world. He calls on Colin Powell and other "de facto Democrats" to restrain them. Yet the State Department and CIA resist helping Iraqi democrats, and top "hard-liner" Paul Wolfowitz worked at State to midwife democracy in the Philippines.

That the hysteria evokes a caricature of Bush positions scarcely needs to be elaborated; the electorate recognizes this well enough. In this day and age, no one is going to outlaw all abortions, and the electorate is happy to impose more limits, as on the gruesome partial-birth procedures. The Bush judicial nominees are safely in the mainstream, unlike the San Francisco judges of the Ninth Circuit, who the other day received three summary reversals by a unanimous Supreme Court.

A lot of people aspire to join "the rich," and indeed longitudinal studies show that they do move up the income ladder. Anyway, the top half of taxpayers pay 96% of the income tax. Social Security reform, with recipients investing some of their tax money in stocks and bonds, has been tried successfully in Chile and also Great Britain.

Far from being radical, that is, the agenda of the Bush GOP represents today's only reform agenda. And it is rapidly occupying the mainstream, both politically and intellectually. Liberal hysteria is a symptom that at some level liberals understand this themselves. The recent elections represented only a small tilt toward Republicans, after all, but it looks like an eruption because the volcano has been rumbling ever since Ronald Reagan arrived in 1980.

Even liberal pundits say that Democrats suffer in failing to stand for any idea bigger than drugs for granny. Yet politicians are wholesalers of ideas; generating and honing them is the work of intellectuals and pundits. If the liberal class can't offer anything but hysteria and name-calling, the future of their cause looks bleak indeed.

Mr. Bartley is editor of The Wall Street Journal. His column appears Mondays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.

-- Anonymous, November 18, 2002