In the 1980s, conservatives won two great victories whose consequences continue to reverberate. The first was the victory of the West in the cold war; the second, the intellectual victory of free-market economics over economic planning. Those have combined to produce a marked shift to the right in world politics comparable to the world's shift to liberalism after the defeat of the Axis powers and the discrediting of any kind of right-wing authoritarianism in 1945.

Unfortunately, as Margaret Thatcher remarked, there are no permanent victories in politics. Though the Left ought to be more confused than the Right by the ideological flux of the post-cold war world, it is, in fact, moving more quickly to redefine the ground rules of the new political game. Far from retreating at the end of the cold war, the Left is seeking to advance: from planning merely the economy to planning society as a whole, from efficiency to equity as its justifying ideology.

Most of the Left's policies contribute to the larger goal of creating the first democratic multicultural society in history--a truly utopian idea. The Tory philosopher Michael Oakeshott was fond of citing the Tower of Babel as the ultimate symbol of utopian politics. But the project of a democratic multicultural America improves on the Tower of Babel in that its advocates, unlike the builders of Babel, actually intend that everyone should end up speaking different languages. What the Bible portrays as a rebuke to hubris, they embrace as a social ideal.

Long before now, we should have seen a strong conservative reaction to this latest utopian experiment. Conservatism is, after all, reactionary in the literal, nonpejorative sense. It represents the reaction of the solid citizens of society against dangerous social experiments.

Conservative Utopias

But, unfortunately, much American conservative thought is itself marked by utopian strains. This is clearest in libertarianism, where writers such as Murray Rothbard have been openly utopian, devising ideal anarchic societies in which, for instance, law and order would be maintained by the insurance companies. Of course, such imaginings are, in part, a heuristic device, intended to throw light on less remote possibilities. But libertarianism, in general, neglects important aspects of the "metamarket," principally the cultural underpinnings needed to make capitalism work.

The same objection, if to a lesser extent, applies to the supply-side school of conservatism. It, too, can be caricatured as utopian, as offering a panacea in the form of tax cuts and fixed exchange rates to solve all problems. Even if we suppose that fixed exchange rates and tax cuts will produce the best available economic outcome, it still requires a large leap of faith to believe that they will significantly raise the long-term rate of economic growth. A multitude of social and economic factors determines this rate, which has proved unresponsive to policy and even hard to measure with accuracy at times. We cannot rely exclusively on any economic policy to solve the problems of ethnic distrust and social disintegration that other policies are fostering. We must deal with these problems directly.

But there is a third utopian obstacle to such directness, namely, the neoconservative belief that America is not a country but an idea--a "credal nation" held together ultimately by conscious subscription to the liberal political ideas outlined in the Declaration of Independence and entrenched in the Constitution.

There are substantial conservative objections to this notion:

It is incoherent. If America really were reduced to liberal political ideas, it would not be possible to distinguish Americans from liberal-minded foreigners. This is absurd. It is historically false. As John Jay pointed out, the people who wrested their independence in 1776 were united by language, culture, laws, and institutions. Immigrants assimilated into this English-speaking American culture. They also enriched it--and membership in this common culture, which encompasses all the nation's constituent ethnic groups, is currently the best definition of being an American.

It is historically false. As John Jay pointed out, the people who wrested their independence in 1776 were united by language, culture, laws, and institutions. Immigrants assimilated into this English-speaking American culture. They also enriched it-and membership in this common culture, which encompasses all the nation's constituent ethnic groups, is currently the best definition of being an American.

It is practically false. Opinion experiments have shown that many ordinary Americans, if stopped on the street and read passages from America's central political documents, will indingnantly reject the ideas expresssed in them.

Above all, it offers no defense against the utopia of a multiculturalist America. If Americans are not united by a common culture and a sense of common nationhood but merely by liberal political ideas, then there is no reason why traditional American culture should be "privileged" as the culture of the entire American people.

Past versus Future

A final symptom of utopianism is, perhaps, more worrying than all the rest because it may have ordinary Americans, not just Republican politicians and conservative ideologues, in its grip. On the evening of Senator Robert Dole's speech accepting his party's nomination for president, William Kristol was invited to give his judgment of it. Mr. Kristol praised the speech but he expressed a prescient anxiety about one element in it. He worried that Senator Dole's offer to be a bridge to America's better past would prove to be unsettling to an electorate that had generally shown itself to be optimistic and future-minded.

Yet Mr. Dole's point was a perfectly valid argument: an America of safe streets, intact families, and caring communities was not an impossible dream but an achievable reality, since he and many people now living had inhabited just such a country. It was also a deeply conservative argument; conservatives, when describing the kind of society they find congenial, instinctively look to the past, whereas liberals and radicals look to the future.

Where Mr. Dole and his party went wrong was in failing to provide the electorate with any sense that they had policies to restore a golden age--or even to avert the Left's utopia. If anything, they presented themselves as helping to construct the latter. Their convention was a celebration of diversity, victimhood, and the other themes of New Class utopianism.

But a recent poll examining the groups making up the Republican coalition reveals a large body of floating voters whose principal anxiety is the disintegration of America. They are concerned about crime and quotas and about immigration and bilingualism, too. The evidence suggests that these voters are not especially conservative--except on these issues. They account for just under a quarter of the GOP's voters and--more interestingly--for an even larger group among Democrats and independents. They are disproportionately young, female, and situated in the growing regions of the country.

What they demonstrate is that conservative nervousness and Republican passivity over the multicultural fraying of America is politically foolish as well as morally obtuse. These Americans know, with Macaulay, that an acre in Middlesex is better than a principality in Utopia, and they know, with Bob Dole, that their little acre was once safer and better tended than it is today. They would like to restore it to its earlier condition. Their only problem is that conservatives are giving them no one to vote for.