T o their credit, the Republican leaders in Congress have had a highly strategic view of the uses of policy in consolidating political power. Newt Gingrich and his colleagues set themselves a clear agenda and they have stuck to it, conscious that their first priority, more important than any single piece of legislation, has been to demonstrate the capacity to govern and to make good on their word. They have put issues first that united them and deferred those that divided them. Rather than repeal liberal policies one by one, they have chosen broad legislative measures, such as block grants, that cancel out decades of legislation all at once. On everything essential, especially in the House, they have maintained party discipline--moderate Republicans may bite hard on some votes, but they have stuck with their leadership far more than conservative Democrats have stuck with theirs in the last Congress or the present one. What unites the Republicans despite their rivalries and fissures is...

T hey claim to be riding a wave of historical change. The wave is global in its reach and unstoppable in its force. Those who get in the way are representatives of an old, obsolete order; they may put up a fight, but they will be beaten in the inevitable transformation. So Newt Gingrich and other conservatives describe their movement and the fate of its opponents. If the picture sounds familiar, it is because it recalls other movements, notably Marxism, that claimed a mandate of historical inevitability as well as popular will. Just as Marxists consigned their liberal and social democratic opponents to the dustbins of history, so conservatives are now loudly and confidently doing the same. And just as many liberals lost self- confidence in the face of communism's triumphs in the first half of the twentieth century, so many have resignedly accepted the conservatives' claim to own the future. The recent history of the future suggests skepticism. Many once-popular visions besides the...