n069  1710  30 Nov 80
 
BC-REAGAN-INTELLECT
By BERNARD WEINRAUB
c. 1980 N.Y. Times News Service
    WASHINGTON - The intellectual breeze sweeping into Washington has
taken a brisk conservative turn, but the breeze contains some
political crosscurrents.
    ''Suddenly the center of intellectual gravity has shifted
rightward,'' said the author Richard Whalen, an adviser to
President-elect Ronald Reagan. ''The country is simply looking for
new thought and what they've told us is, 'OK, you guys want to drive,
take the steering wheel.' ''
    Whalen is one of at least a dozen writers, economists and academics
who have abruptly emerged as an unofficial brain trust for the
incoming Reagan administration, men and women with disparate
philosophies and backgrounds who generally favor a hard line against
Soviet expansionism and who support deregulation, cutbacks in
government spending, a relaxation of environmental laws and more
authority and decision-making for the states.
    Four strands of conservatism are expected to shape the intellectual
themes of the administration.
    First there is the Milton Friedman group of ''libertarian,'' or free
market, economists, such as Yale Brozen and George Stigler at the
University of Chicago; J. Clayburn Laforce, dean of the graduate
school of business at the University of California, Los Angeles, and
James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock at the Center for Public Choice at
Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va.
    There are also ''traditional'' conservatives such as the columnists
George Will, William Buckley and William Safire; academics at
Stanford University's Hoover Institution such as Thomas Sowell, a
labor and education specialist; Thomas Gale Moore, who is on the
energy and regulatory reform transition task forces, Rita
Ricardo-Campbell, a Social Security expert, and Darrell M. Trent, a
domestic policy aide to Reagan, as well as Martin Anderson, who is
expected to serve as the White House domestic assistant.
    Unlike other administrations in the last decade, this one is
expected to be influenced by comparatively few Ivy League academics.
Among the exceptions are James Q. Wilson, professor of government at
Harvard, and Paul W. MacAvoy, professor of economics at Yale.
    The new administration is not expected to reach into many East Coast
universities for ideas but to focus instead on Stanford University,
the University of Southern California, the Center for Law and
Economics at the University of Miami and Georgetown University's
Center for Strategic and International Studies, where about 15 people
are serving as Reagan advisers.
    A third intellectual strand comprises the ''neo-conservatives,''
former socialists and liberals who have veered rightward in the last
decade. This group, to the dismay and perhaps annoyance of the
others, is the most vocal and widely read and possibly the most
influential.
    ''I admit some of the old conservatives have taken a less than
friendly tone towards me, implying we're latecomers,'' said Norman
Podhoretz, editor of Commentary magazine and author of ''The Present
Danger,'' a recent book that Reagan has termed ''critically
important.''
    Podhoretz added: ''I think a lot of these attitudes and feelings are
in flux.''
    By all accounts a key intellectual force in the new administration
is expeed to be the neo-conservative academic, Dr. Jeane J.
Kirkpatrick, a Georgetown University political scientist and resident
scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, who wrote an article
published in Commentary in November 1979 asserting that the Carter
administration was practicing a double standard in dealing with
foreign strongmen on the right and left.
    The article elicited a one-page, single-spaced letter from Reagan
and resulted in a series of meetings with the candidate. Dr.
Kirkpatrick, who calls herself a ''Hubert Humphrey-Henry Jackson
Democrat,'' served on Reagan's foreign policy task force in the
campaign and is a prominent figure in the transition.
    ''My alienation from the national Democratic Party is rooted in the
rise of the counterculture and the antiwar movement,'' Kirkpatrick
said. ''The counterculture involved a kind of transvaluation of
American values and our whole national experience was reinterpreted
in a light that deprived it of morality and success.
    ''What to my mind is an extraordinarily successful society,
providing more people with the prospect of a decent life than
anywhere else in the world, was reinterpreted as a soulless,
materialistic society. The conquest of nature became the rape of the
environment. Our greatest successes became objects of reproach. The
enemy was us. Well, the enemy isn't us. It's them. Purveyors of
unfreedom. Freedom is our central value.''
    Asked about the differences among the various conservative
groupings, Dr. Kirkpatrick said: ''Surely there are differences
between us on social and economic questions. I have lots of personal
and intellectual ties to the labor movement. I don't think someone
with my views would be appointed to an economic job in the Reagan
administration.''
    The fourth strand of conservatism, which, according to academics,
represents the oldest traditions as well as the newest phenomenon in
the Republican Party, is the New Right, whose views on such social
issues as abortion, prayer in school and the proposed equal rights
amendment run counter to the views of some members of the traditional
and neo-conservative groups.
    
ny-1130 2012est
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