Talk about odd fusions. You'll find none more implausible than the Arizona Biltmore in Phoenix, a resort hotel designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in the 1930s. Somehow, the famous architect and his acolytes got it into their heads to combine outsized art deco with a brush of native Southwest. They pulled it off, too. The Biltmore was an immediate success. Hollywood stars like Clark Gable swarmed to it during the winter months. After 60 years, the Biltmore still works and delights the senses.
Over New Year's weekend I flew to Phoenix to see if another odd fusion might work: the fusion of libertarians with social conservatives into a coherent coalition. The setting was the Dark Ages II conference at the Biltmore. You may have heard of Dark Ages. It was hatched last year at a Miami resort. The name itself is a witty rejoinder: The founders wanted something fun and clever to upstage that mewling sob-fest called the Renaissance Weekend, held to polite applause every New Year's weekend in Hilton Head, South Carolina, starring the Clintons and a thousand other Third Way bubbleheads. Dark Ages, by contrast, promised cigars, strong drink, Robert Bork, and lots of warm Phoenix weather. Who could resist?
Saturday, December 28. Opening night. The reception crowd in the Biltmore's Gold Room seems thin, well short of the 350 people the Dark Ages organizers had touted. But why quarrel? It's early, and enough starboard ballast is on hand already. I spot The Weekly Standard's Bill Kristol, and, yes, he's talking to that old '60s pink, now reformed, David Horowitz. Dark Ages cofounder Laura Ingraham takes the microphone to welcome us. Ingraham is a spectacle. On MSNBC, she stars as the right-wing chick, a blonder and hipper version of the species' alpha gal, Mary Matalin. (Somewhere, liberal television producers are sniggering in their Chardonnay about this strange creature they've created, the right-wing chick.) Ingraham is striking, loud, commanding -- and funny. Welcoming the attendees, she deadpans a few howlers on Ebonics, AK-47s, and Bill Clinton's penis. The crowd enjoys it, and Dark Ages II is off to a good rowdy start.
Next morning, Sunday, begins with a plenary session called "Should Government Care About Culture?," moderated by Arianna Huffington. Huffington is in fine heft. She looks less exotic than before, less chic, a little doughier, more like a headmistress. Her once red plume of hair has been bobbed short for TV.
First on the panel is Grover Norquist, who gives his usual speech about defunding the left. I've always liked Grover's straightforward pitch. Cut a government program, any program, and, QED, you will slap the left harder than the right. Burly and bearded with 1980s-style owl glasses, Grover is possessed with a nerd's intensity and certitude. Alone, Grover predicted the Republican landslide of 1994. (See "Happy Warrior," February.)
Christina Hoff Sommers, author of Who Stole Feminism?, is up next. The academic left, Sommers says, is conducting a war on science and logic. Bad enough that this 200-year- old Rousseavian tree is rotted, dropping its branches on Western Civ curriculums like firebombs. Worse, it has ruined a generation, turning out chowderheads unfit for real jobs. The chowderheads turn to government. Which now means that the government, and its amen corner in the taxpayer-sponsored arts and media, teems with young dodo-brains overtly hostile to science and technology, reason and logic. These are evil things, tools of enslavement. The consequences? Exhibits funded to teach fifth graders about technology are turned into hand-wringers about Three Mile Island and the Challenger disaster.
Sommers appears a sweet soul. Though a professor, she has the look of a psychologist you'd confess deep things to. As she reports these anti-rational fevers and lunacies to the Dark Ages audience, she looks sorrowful.
She is followed by the Family Research Council's Gary Bauer. Like many conservative- libertarians, I am truly conflicted about Gary Bauer. Many REASON readers will laugh at this, but I take Bauer (and Focus on the Family founder James Dobson) seriously and with respect. I've seen lots of phonies and poseurs in my time -- some here at Dark Ages II -- but Bauer is sincere. I'd trust him to raise my children.
But not to regulate the Internet. Unfortunately, right now, on the dais, Bauer is pumping hard for exactly that. Bauer's talk is gathering steam..."pornography"..."our children"..."only a few clicks away"...and, worse, the audience is sweating with him. The more Bauer squeaks, the more one feels Internet bloodlust rising up in the audience.
A woman from Oakland doesn't like Bauer's trajectory any more than I do. But, free of my inhibitions (e.g., cowardice), she grabs the audience mike and explains that, as a mother and conservative, she is satisfied to let capitalism protect her kids with filters, agents, blocking software, fair market pricing of bits, and the like. No need for censorship. Let the market work. The Oakland woman is cheered -- by me and about three others.
Bauer shoots back something about the insufficiency of markets. After all, capitalism gave us rap video, porn. Capitalism can't police itself. He is cheered by the other 300. Internet bloodlust! Soaring on the audience's approval, Bauer cranks it up. The conservative vision...will fail!...if it leaves behind social conservatives. You analyze the votes of every conservative win. Look who got you there. Reagan Democrats. Social conservatives. Forget them at your peril.
After brunch, I take a walk to clear my head. I really must work on my pro-market arguments. I change clothes and hike from the Biltmore along a canal past the old Wrigley mansion, and then toward Squaw Peak. Tonight will be a debate between The American Spectator's executive editor, Wlady Pleszczynski, and David Horowitz. At issue: "Is the Left Winning the War -- Or Is It in Retreat?"
I have no doubt that conservatives -- at least conservative-libertarians -- are winning, and big. For all the steam over Ebonics, this sad little sideshow is dwarfed by how fast the Internet is propagating the English language worldwide. If you like Western Civilization and the American Way of Life, you have to love that. I do. Even liberal CNN assures me the Berlin Wall is still down, and nowadays global capital markets are forcing every country, state, and city into a keen competition for capital and smart people.
That's hugely good news. Capitalism is spreading like wildfire. And capitalism is inherently moral. It celebrates diversity, not of color or gender, but of something far deeper: individual talents and tastes. It asks people to work hard, show discipline, practice thrift, and serve their fellows. Capitalism gives more than it takes. It encourages the winners to reinvest, thus spreading their wealth in the most deserving fashion. How is that not good? How is capitalism's riotous spread worldwide not a clear sign of winning?
Squaw Peak is a deceptively hard climb. The trail soon becomes a series of never-ending tall steps carved into rock. The 70-degree weather suddenly feels hotter than that, and I have forgotten to bring a water bottle. But I like an honest sweat. Reaching the top, 2,850 feet, is not easy, but of course that is precisely why it feels so good. Honest effort, tangible reward. You can't lobby or carp your way to the top. Nobody lets you start halfway up. Maybe that's why competitive athletes tend to be libertarians and conservatives.
Back at the bottom, the air is smoggier. Pollster Frank Luntz walks onstage to kick off the Wlady vs. Horowitz debate. With the 1996 election receding into memory, Luntz has let his beard grow wild and his stomach flop over his belt. He looks like a lumberjack in search of a pancake and sausage house. Luntz introduces the debaters and announces the rules: Oxford style, during which anyone in the audience can interrupt at any time.
Horowitz begins. Horowitz, most people know, is one of the 1960s left's biggest defections. During his tenure as editor of Ramparts magazine, members of the Black Panthers in Oakland murdered his former secretary. Horowitz was outraged -- first by the murder, second by the spectacle of his colleagues on the left defending the Panthers against all evidence. Today Horowitz lives in Los Angeles, in the belly of the Hollywood-liberal beast, where he runs something called The Center for the Study of Popular Culture, publishes books and pamphlets, and otherwise torments his old friends. He is a gifted polemicist and a stylish writer. At the podium he looks confident. His eyes twinkle.