COLUMN ONE : The Right Seeks New Purpose : Conservatives deal with an identity crisis as threats from the Soviet Union and big government fade. Their post-Reagan role may be more populist and government-oriented.

WASHINGTON —  “Conservatism today must pay the price of its own success,” New Right activist Paul Weyrich warned in a memo to a recent ideological summit convened here to chart a new course for conservatism in the post-Cold War, post-Reagan era.

Another such assemblage planned next month in Atlanta will tackle an agenda headed: “Where are we going and why are we not governing America? And if we’re the political mainstream, why do we always pray for a low turnout?”

The political right is restive these days, and one evident reason is the departure of Ronald Reagan from the national political stage, where he had been at the forefront of the conservative movement for nearly a quarter of a century.

“For the first time in my adult life, we have no clear leader,” frets 56-year-old Stanton Evans, former chairman of the American Conservative Union.

More fundamentally, the two targets that energized and unified conservatives in the past are shrinking. The turmoil in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe has eased the danger of communism, while the federal budget deficit has curbed the growth of big government.

“With these things gone,” says Richard Williamson, a former Reagan White House aide and longtime conservative activist, “conservatives are going through an identity crisis.”

Searching for new political worlds to conquer, some conservatives are focusing on waging their own war on poverty. Others are targeting a range of local problems, from potholes to pollution. And still others such as Weyrich herald the advent of a new form of populism that uses the might of government to advance their traditional values.

“They really do sound to me like old Hubert Humphrey Democrats,” says UC Berkeley political analyst Austin Ranney, himself a longtime Humphrey-style Democrat.

And that’s just the problem, as some conservatives see it. After all, American Conservative Union Chairman David Keene points out, government action is just the thing conservatives got into politics to stop.

“Some of us still believe that you ought to oppose whatever the government is doing,” Keene adds, “because that’s the only way to keep ‘em honest.”

That concern defines one of the central problems facing conservatives as they plot fresh strategies and ponder new directions: how to use government to serve their ends without stumbling into the traps of excessive government intrusion and spending, as their liberal adversaries did.

Significantly, even as they probe the channels of government power, conservative leaders are careful to try to set their efforts apart from past endeavors promoted by liberals.

“I’m for an activist but non-bureaucratic government,” says Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), the House Republican whip and leader of next month’s conservative gathering in Atlanta.

Edwin J. Feulner Jr., president of the Heritage Foundation, an influential right-wing think tank, acknowledges the need for conservatives to deal with social welfare problems that they have long overlooked. Nevertheless, he adds: “We just don’t believe in being compassionate with other people’s money.”

The soul-searching and brainstorming on the right coincide with a similar surge of reappraisal on the left, in reaction to the evident anti-government mood of the electorate.

Thus Democratic Gov. Mario M. Cuomo of New York, a leading liberal spokesman, has conceded that “government often does good things badly.”

Subsidies for Firms

Michael Harrington, co-chairman of the Democratic Socialists of America, has called for subsidies to big corporations, the left’s traditional nemeses, to encourage such firms to create jobs in high-unemployment areas.

“Keynesian liberalism of the 1960s, the ABCs of the Democratic left, no longer works as it once did,” Harrington admits.

But the quest on the conservative side seems more intense and urgent. Having seized the ideological initiative in the 1980s, conservatives are determined not to surrender it in the ‘90s.

“Liberals are willing to look for new paradigms,” points out Housing and Urban Development Secretary Jack Kemp, the hero of a recent cover story in the liberal magazine, New Republic, which described him as “a bleeding-heart conservative.”

“Conservatives,” Kemp says, “must themselves be willing to rethink the premise that laissez-faire capitalism is the answer to conditions of poverty and lack of opportunity.”

Heritage’s Feulner adds: “It’s not enough any more to discredit liberalism. Conservatives must show we can succeed where liberalism has failed.”

Conservatives are planning new offensives on three major fronts with some ideas that are already being tested and others that are in the blueprint stage.

The Poverty Problem

Picking up where Lyndon B. Johnson and the Great Society left off, conservatives are contemplating their own assault on poverty--but with a very different strategy that they call “empowering the poor.” Instead of depending on Washington’s wallet and regulatory muscle, conservatives propose to use the federal government mainly to provide incentives, while freeing the downtrodden from the burden of bureaucratic control and supervision.

Such plans are motivated as much by self-interest as humanitarianism.

“It’s vitally important to reach some solution to the poverty problem,” says the American Conservative Union’s Keene. “If we are in fact two countries, one poor and one well off, then all of society is unstable.”

Political motives enter the picture too. “By supporting empowerment,” argues Stuart Butler, the Heritage Foundation’s director of domestic policy studies, “conservative policy warriors can trigger confrontations between the poor and the welfare state that serves them so badly.” Such confrontations, Butler suggests, will help conservatives build political coalitions.

One scheme advanced for years by conservatives, notably Kemp, calls for giving tax breaks and reducing regulatory burdens for businesses that locate in impoverished areas known as “enterprise zones.” Another, an alternative to federally subsidized public housing, would provide low-income families with rent vouchers that they could apply toward rent at housing of their own choice, not the government’s.

Conservatives also favor putting tenants in charge of managing public housing. That, they contend, helps to control crime, cut costs and even reduce unemployment.

Local Government

Though conservatives have traditionally claimed a special admiration for local government because of its closeness to the citizenry, it is the level of government at which their ideology is least applicable.

The large issues of anti-communism and economic policy, which have helped their cause on the national level, do not have much relevance in local communities. There, voters look at government as a way of solving practical problems in their everyday lives, a reality that conservatives have been slow to recognize.

“At the local level the issue is not left versus right, it’s movement versus stagnation,” says Marty Connors, organizer of the conservative strategy session next month in Atlanta. The agenda drafted by Connors will cover the gamut of local problems, from urban blight and suburban growth to crime and health care.

“Joe Sixpack is not as worried about communism now as he is about potholes on the highway and getting a clean stream to fish in,” Connors says.

Rep. Gingrich sees local governments, particularly school systems, as ideal testing grounds for his dream of an activist but non-bureaucratic government. In their education reform schemes, he and other conservatives emphasize parental choice, to be achieved by giving vouchers to parents to permit them to pick the schools in which they want to enroll.

“Turning parents and children into customers will achieve dramatic change,” Gingrich predicts, “because the school system will respond to its customers the way a private business does, not like a bureaucracy responding to a client.”

Value System

Convinced that they have won the debate over economics and foreign policy, conservatives are now turning their attention to values. These guideposts to private and public behavior are described by the Rev. Richard John Neuhaus, the activist cleric who convened the recent Washington summit of conservative ideologues, as “the social and moral questions now at the center of public debate.”

In the past, values have emerged in political campaigns as so-called “social issues,” linked to such matters as abortion and the American flag. Because values have such visceral appeal, some conservatives now see them as the cutting edge of their ideology and their most powerful weapon for mobilizing support in post-Reagan, post-Cold War America.

This was the premise advanced by Weyrich in his memo to the Washington summit meeting, which was chaired by conservative intellectual leader William F. Buckley and attended by such luminaries as former federal appeals Judge Robert H. Bork and former U.N. Ambassador Jeane J. Kirkpatrick.

Weyrich is a man known to take values seriously. It was his testimony charging former Sen. John Tower with drunkenness and womanizing that led to the Senate’s rejection of Tower as defense secretary last year.

In his memo, Weyrich called upon conservatives to take on “the role of defending and fostering basic American values” and to adopt “a populist approach which expresses trust in popular majorities.” This strategy, he explained, would find expression through use of such traditional populist weapons as ballot initiatives and referendums, voter recall of some elected officials and term limitations for others.

Among the policy goals of Weyrich’s value-oriented brand of populism would be such measures as conditioning a mother’s welfare aid on her children’s attendance in school, curbing abortion by creating “a new sense of moral responsibility” rather than by simply outlawing it, and expanding the use of testing to detect drug abuse.

Whatever the merits of these various proposals, uniting conservatives behind any of them in the post-Reagan era will be no easy task.

“The conservative movement is made up of many strands,” points out Williamson, the former Reagan White House aide and longtime conservative activist. “There are country-club conservatives who want the budget balanced, supply-siders who don’t worry about deficits, the religious right which stresses moral fundamentalism and libertarians who are against any government interference at all.”

Many conservatives, particularly those with libertarian inclinations, adhere to the view that individual freedom is the greatest good and that government is its greatest enemy. Consequently, some have misgivings about the apparently larger role for government that is contemplated in many of the new approaches now being formulated.

But proponents of the new conservatism claim that their ideas conform to the grand tradition of freedom.

“It’s not inconsistent with conservative values to want to switch our government welfare programs from perpetual conditions of dependency to a helping hand for people to pick themselves up,” says HUD Secretary Kemp.

Kemp says his approach to poverty represents a middle ground between libertarian conservatism and liberalism.

“Libertarians basically say, ‘I picked myself up by my bootstraps, why can’t (the poor)?’ ” Kemp contends. “They only look at the ladder of opportunity.”

Liberals, he says, look only at the “safety net” for the poor who cannot make it on their own.

“We’re trying to provide a safety net,” Kemp says, “but also a ladder out of poverty.”

Gingrich maintains that the new conservative approaches, for all their tinge of government activism, are consistent with Ronald Reagan’s own beliefs. Citing Reagan’s “new federalism” proposals to increase responsibilities of state governments, Gingrich calls Reagan “a structural reformer.”

“Reagan never talked about abolishing the U.S. government,” says Gingrich, “yet he had pretty good credentials as a conservative. I think we stand on Reagan’s shoulders.”