AT THE BOTTOM OF A BONG IS THE PARADOX OF CONSERVATISM

The guy behind the polished-oak counter at the De Dampkring coffee
shop recommends a gram of the White Widow: "You need it. It's a deep,
dark body stone that will put you in communication with your real
self." That sounded scary, so he suggested the Laughing Buddha: "It's
more of a maintenance high - it'll let you get through your day, just
with more understanding."

But he also had a warning. "You might want to think about stocking
up, because this might be the last time I can serve you. The new law
will prevent me from selling to foreigners like you - it's the
conservatives in power now."

Well, it's certain conservatives. In fact, if you want to understand
one of the great mysteries of our age - why it is that a solid blue
swath of right-wing governments across the Western world is not
managing to have any sort of united program or message, and in fact
seems to be divided hotly against itself - you might want to spend
some time in one of Amsterdam's resin-scented coffee shops.

There, in the fresh-packed bowl of your bong, is the paradox of conservatism.

Is cannabis a freedom, or a crime? Is it a classic private activity
beyond the business of the state, like gun ownership, or is it an
alien infringement on the well-being of our children, like porn? Is
it a market opportunity, or a law-and-order policing opportunity? Is
it a local tradition to be protected from immigrant groups who oppose
our freedoms, or is it a link to foreign crime gangs and their influences?

This week saw pot befuddle Republicans in California, who ultimately
defeated a referendum to decriminalize it, against some complaints
from minimum-government Tea Partiers. It is a looming issue in
Britain, where David Cameron's Conservatives are divided over whether
to reverse the Labour Party's decision to reclassify the stuff from
Class C (basically legal) to Class B (a serious drug).

The Dutch debate is a microcosm of the problem. On Oct. 14, the
parties here finally organized a coalition government, four months
after the election. It is a coalition between the Christian
Democrats, who tend to have a more moral view of conservatism, and
the Liberals, who see conservatism as being more a matter of free
markets - and it's supported by an unprecedented "toleration
agreement" with the Freedom Party of Geert Wilders, whose entire
platform revolves around a dislike of Muslim immigrants.

These three flavours of conservatism - social, economic and ethnic -
had proven to be an extremely awkward match in coalition
negotiations, just as they've had a hard time mixing in other
countries. In Canada, there are similar frictions between the two
bodies that make up Canada's Conservatives, the socially
conservative, minimal-government, free-market Alliance branch and the
socially liberal, big-government, free-market Tory branch.

In the Netherlands, one of their sources of tension revolved around
the coffee shops. Since the 1970s, these have been Europe's leading
source of legal pot, hash and hallucinogens, introduced in an effort
by earlier conservative-liberal coalition governments to turn
soft-drug use into a legitimate business that would yield tax
revenues and reduce criminality.

The Christian Democrats, who are the smaller party in this
government, have never liked the coffee shops, which they see as
emblems of moral decline. In this, they have been joined by another,
somewhat unlikely conservative group: Amsterdam's large
Moroccan-dominated Muslim community, which had similar moral objections.

This posed a major dilemma for the Freedom Party, which is opposed
both to Muslims and to those who would use moralistic laws to
restrict classic Dutch freedoms. And it posed a slightly smaller
dilemma for some members of the dominant free-market Liberal VVD,
whose views have led some of its members to support the fragrant shops.

In the end, there was a half-baked compromise: The parties agreed to
turn the coffee shops into private-members clubs open only to Dutch
citizens (who are among Europe's least frequent cannabis users).

This gave the Christian Democrats and the Muslims the moral victory
they wanted. The Liberals could say they didn't destroy a market and
a tax opportunity. And Mr. Wilders could say he helped drive away the
foreigners.

But in their four-month debate, we witnessed all the dark paradoxes
of conservatism, and their fissures stretch across Europe and North
America: Unlike in the 1980s, today there is no Ronald Reagan or
Margaret Thatcher to resolve those contradictions with uniting
rhetoric. Today, when a joint gets passed to the fellow in the blue
tie, he gets freaked - in its haze are all the dilemmas of the movement.