The Buchananite spasm isn't just a war between cultures, but between epochs- with the bitter refugees of the dying Industrial Era lashing out against the onrushing Digital Age
When you first come across Frank R., you'd never guess the truth - that what's going on with the American electorate is, in a way, all about what's going on with him - since Frank possesses certain characteristics that suggest he may not exactly be the average man in the street. For one thing, Frank is an atheist who keeps a crucifix and a Star of David dangling from his rearview mirror ("just in case") and who harbors suspicions about the "gotdam media" so intense that he refuses to reveal his last name to the only reporter who has ever bothered to ask. For another, he makes his living driving a taxi. On the night shift, no less.
Even so, in most respects, Frank is irresistibly typical. A chain-smoker with pallid gray skin and receding, mousy-brown hair, he is of middling age, middling height, middling weight, middling intelligence, and of no distinct partisan loyalty. He is on his second marriage, to a woman who works as an office manager at a local wholesaler. Despite the fact that both he and his wife have been laid off in recent years, Frank thinks things are going fairly well for them - for now, at least. His prognoses for the country's future and his own, however, are somewhat grimmer.
"Everything just seems so up in the air," Frank was saying the night we met, as he drove me through a gentle snowfall to the airport in Buffalo, New York. "Didn't used to be like this. Used to be, the companies took care of their employees. Now you read about all this downsizing, hear about it every day on TV; people losing jobs they had for 20, 30 years. My wife, she likes her job, seems pretty steady, but you can't count on it being there tomorrow. That's one good thing about being a cabdriver. Nobody's gonna downsize you."
Since Frank had picked me up outside a Pat Buchanan rally, and since it happened to be the Tuesday in March that Bob Dole's sweep of Georgia and the New England states put an end to any lingering fantasies that Buchanan might become his party's presidential nominee, I asked Frank what he thought of the Republican field. "Not much," he said. Buchanan? "No way." Dole? "War hero, decent guy, but too old." Lamar Alexander? "Who?" As for Bill Clinton: "I voted for him last time, but he hasn't done anything, or at least not much. And what he did do was way too liberal."
When I asked whether that meant Frank believed politicians have the power to deal with the economy's problems - downsizing, falling wages, and the rest - he was adamant: "Of course they have the power. They are the power! But the only thing they ever seem to do is make themselves rich - them and their lobbyist friends. I mean, it's outrageous. They promise and promise, but things keep getting worse and worse. Look at the crime, the welfare, the drugs, the trash on TVŠ.
"First thing I'd do if I were president? Everything I could to help working people," he went on. "First thing I'd do is call in the heads of all the big companies, all the Fortune 500 guys, and I'd say, Look, you're not getting any more help from the government - no more tax breaks, no more loans, no more pork barrel, no more nothing - until you get rid of the robots and give the jobs back to the working people. Get rid of the robots, I'd tell them, or you're off the government tit. I don't know if it'd work, but you gotta try something. Or else things are just gonna keep falling apart more and more. Used to be, America was the greatest country on Earth. Now, well, probably still is. What I'm worried about is, for how much longer?"
The anxiety expressed so vividly by Frank, and shared by millions in its spirit, if not its quirky specifics, has been the central fact of American political life. The anxiety is bipartisan, ecumenical. "It's almost a cliché it's so pervasive," says Andrew Kohut, director of The Pew Research Center, an independent polling outfit in Washington, DC. "In general, people used to be hopeful about the future. They assumed things would get progressively better. Now, they worry intensely about everything related to the future. They sense a sort of Š unraveling."
Some of the anxiety is whiny - the empty wailing of a society suffering from the delusion that the astonishing, anomalous years after the Second World War were normal. Much of it is natural, a by-product of the chaotic transition from the age of steel to the age of silicon. But whatever its roots, the anxiety has been raw fuel for the larger dynamic driving politics of late: the crumbling of the established order, with its hollow Democratic and Republican hierarchies, in the face of an emerging new world.
In 1992, a recession-addled electorate, filled with foreboding about the transformation of the old economy into the new, inflicted on George Bush a vicious drubbing that left his party with its lowest share of the popular vote in 80 years. In that year, too, Ross Perot defled whatever wisdom still counseled against a blatantly unhinged, bat-eared billionaire running for president, and did better than any independent since Teddy Roosevelt. Then came 1994. This time, voters fearing a future of social and moral breakdown handed over control of both houses of Congress to the Republicans for the flrst time since the 1950s, while delivering to Bill Clinton's Democrats a rout that shook the party's structure from top to toe. Although 1992 favored Democrats and 1994 favored Republicans, the overriding emotions were identical: uncertainty and unease veering into frustration and ire.
The same forces are churning today, with a vengeance. But something is different. In 1992 and 1994, the insurgents - Clinton and Ross Perot on the one hand, Newt Gingrich on the other - joined the chorus that America was going to hell, and gazed back longingly on the postwar era. At the same time, however, they challenged the nation to face up to the future: to the fact that the arrival of the information age was indeed disruptive, but also inevitable and full of immense potential. For every Clintonian paean to "a place called Hope," there was a lecture on the new economy. For every Newtian denunciation of the "counterculture," there was a disquisition of the Third Wave.
What threatens to play out before us now is the most pristinely backward looking election in many years. On one level, this is inevitable: whenever an incumbent president runs, the race is mainly a referendum on his stewardship. On another, it has everything to do with the two contestants. In Dole, the Republicans are offering a candidate who physically and spiritually embodies the nostalgia for the postwar years. In Clinton, the Democrats have a standard-bearer who no longer sees much upside in being an "agent of change"; 1992's candidate of hope seems poised to run as 1996's candidate of fear.
Actually, both candidates do. Faced with the raft of disordering, disorienting changes that mark this premillennial moment - from globalization and the Digital Revolution to the rise of an increasingly multicultural America - and mindful of the anxiety-induced upheavals of the past two elections, Clinton and Dole are likely, in different ways and to different degrees, to endorse the electorate's angst. And mollify it. And pander to it. And exploit it. Some days, they will merely hint that America can somehow keep hold of the past. Other days, they will wage war on the future.
It won't be the first time. A hundred years ago, the country found itself in a remarkably similar situation: deep in the throes of the shift from a farm economy to an industrial one, from a rural society to an urban one, and from the old Anglo order to a nation awash with immigrants. "Americans everywhere," writes historian Robert Wiebe, "were crying out in scorn and despair," gripped not just by economic insecurity but by concerns that traditional values were being trampled. In the 1896 election, those fears were given voice by Populist William Jennings Bryan, who represented the reactionary agrarian class ("Destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city") and was beaten by William McKinley, who aligned the Republicans with the forces of ascendant industrialism.
Neither Dole nor Clinton can remotely be compared to Bryan, but the Great Commoner's ghost is very much astir in the 1996 race. It has settled comfortably into the stolid, Scotch-Irish frame of one Patrick J. Buchanan and helped animate a movement whose ultimate impact remains opaque. Buchanan's moment of grace last winter was brief. Nevertheless, the passions and resentments he ginned up were real and broadly felt. Clinton and Dole watched it happen and were spooked - and then altered their rhetoric to echo his, in ways large and small.
In this as in much else, Buchanan has set the tone for the campaign and, perhaps, for what will come afterward. After all, Bryan's defeat in 1896 was not the end for him, or for the constituencies he championed. Their great, dubious, ultimately futile achievement would come later: Prohibition. Just as prohibitionism (which sparked culture wars in its day that make today's look like schoolyard spats) was about something more fundamental than banning alcohol, Buchananism is about something more basic than protectionism or abortion or immigration. It is about attacking progress. Buchanan has never mentioned any plan to instruct corporate America to "get rid of the robots." But then, that may be only because the idea hasn't crossed his mind yet.
Like all great pieces of performance art or stand-up comedy, Buchanan's stump speech was never rendered the same way twice. Only its opening (a lame joke about how he would nominate his wife, Shelley, to replace Hillary Rodham Clinton) and its close (a dead-on imitation of the president oozing, "I feel your pain," followed by, "Friends, you get me that nomination and we'll put him in the crossfire, and he will feel the pain!") were predictable. In between was an ever-changing array of riffs and gags, which Buchanan was constantly honing, to the endless fascination of the reporters who followed him. After every speech you could find them on the bus, replaying their microcassettes like a pack of Deadheads searching for the tiniest variations in a fresh take of "Dark Star."
His supporters were equally captivated for many of the same reasons. Buchanan is one of only a handful of contemporary politicians who treat oratory as an art (following any speech, he was always ready to critique his rhythm, or the timing of his laugh lines), and his work from the lectern was masterful by any standard. More to the point, unlike his main Republican rivals, Buchanan actually had something of substance to say.
A few days after my cab ride with Frank, I caught up with the Buchanan bus - or, as the candidate himself was fond of calling it, the Pitchfork Express - and stayed with it, off and on, for three weeks. Because Dole's triumph was clear by then, the size of the press corps hanging with Buchanan dwindled fast. But the size and enthusiasm of his crowds did not. From Dallas to Detroit, and Oklahoma City to San Jose, Buchanan continued to turn out throngs up to 1,500 strong, long after any hope that he would win the Republican nomination had been obliterated. The true beliefs that drew these true believers varied. What they had in common, though, was a sense, as Harvard political philosopher Michael Sandel puts it that "individually and collectively, we are losing control of the forces that govern our lives."
In some Buchananites, that sense has festered and curdled into a bitter paranoia. A small but significant share of them are out-of-the-closet conspiracists: the sort of people prone to ranting about black helicopters and the New World Order and the subversion of American sovereignty by a treacherous cabal spearheaded by the Council on Foreign Relations, the Bilderbergers, and the Trilateral Commission, and carried out by globalist institutions from the World Trade Organization to the Federal Reserve. "We have to get America back for Americans," one fellow told me at a rally in Nacogdoches, Texas. "The UN's in control now. We've got a Polish general running the Joint Chiefs. I believe this is the end for our country."
This is the language of the militia movement, and Buchanan employs it in ways both obvious (condemning something called "PD 13," a presidential directive he claims "would have created a permanent consignment of United States troops to a New World army, under the command of General Boutros Boutros-Ghali") and subtle (promising to "restore the constitutional republic of our founding fathers' dreams"). An intellectual and a sophisticate in the garb of a populist, he understands full well the elements he's courting when he rails against a Wall Street elite with last names like Goldman and Sachs, Rubin and Greenspan.
But most Buchanan people are not entranced by visions of treasonous plots and Zionist schemes. Looking around, they see a political and financial class taking care of itself, often at the expense of, and certainly without regard for, average working Americans, who in turn find themselves besieged by forces they have vanishingly little power to affect, let alone master. They see immigrants swarming across the borders to take away the few jobs that have not been exported overseas. They see the collapse of the nuclear family and the rise of a dangerous underclass. They see multinational corporations thriving while their own wages plummet. They see liberal-secular bureaucrats ("in sandals and beads") ruining their children's educations ("poisoning their minds, making them despise America"). They see garbage on TV and kiddie porn on the Net. They see, in short, a world gone mad.
The reason the views of the Buchananite fringe matter despite their hero's defeat starts with the fact that those views are not all that unusual - or irrational. They are extreme, no doubt. Yet survey after poll after survey confirms that on matters other than abortion, a great many voters hold milder versions of opinions voiced at any "Go Pat Go!" rally: anti-immigration, anti-free trade, anti-Hollywood, distressed by illegitimacy, dubious about international peacekeeping, dismayed by the state of public schools. And many share the feeling - though they express it more soberly - that things are spinning out of control.
Which is easy enough to understand. In a way, things are spinning out of control. As the forces of technology and trade and economic integration whip across the globe, America's sovereignty is being diminished; at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, this year, 77 percent of participants said that by 2010 the power of the nation-state will have eroded "quite a lot" or "to a great extent." At the same time, the rise of the new economy is transforming the way people work and how much they earn in unpredictable, at times painful, ways. America is on its way to being a nation in which ethnic minorities account for a majority of the population. The Net has flooded homes - and kids' heads - with an unrestrainable torrent of new information. Family structures are breaking down. And so on.
The contours of these changes are often baffling, even to the experts. Ask Laura D'Andrea Tyson, the head of Clinton's National Economic Council, to explain why productivity growth slowed down sharply and suddenly in 1973 and has remained meager ever since, and she candidly admits to herself and the rest of the economics profession that it is "a bit of a mystery." Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan has taken to giving would-be welfare reformers a chart that shows out-of-wedlock birthrates rising in countries all over the world, regardless of their social policies, and explaining that nobody quite understands why this is happening. If these people are confused, imagine the reactions of those Buchanan proudly calls "workers."
Exacerbating such anxieties is a mainstream media that often treats such epochal changes not with Tyson's and Moynihan's gravitas but with alarmism. The coverage of cybersmut is only the most flagrant example. In March, The New York Times sparked a national debate over downsizing with a series that dwelt in excruciating detail on the pain caused by layoffs, but which failed utterly to provide the crucial context: that the transition from the industrial order to the information age is inexorable; that while jobs are being eliminated in dying industries, jobs are being created in vibrant, emerging ones; that, for all its problems, the economy is in fabulous shape, marked by low unemployment, low inflation, and a five-year stint of growth that makes this the third-longest expansion since World War II.
The source of the myopia about the present and future runs deep: to the nation's obsession with its recent past; to a malady that Michael Elliott, author of a forthcoming book, The Day Before Yesterday (Simon & Schuster), calls "the problem of memory."
"Simply put, the problem is that the years after 1945 were so spectacular that they are all that America as a society can now remember," Elliott argues. "Spectacular in terms of economic growth, in that the middle class and the working class got more prosperous than they had ever before dreamed possible. Spectacular in terms of social cohesion: it was the heyday of the nuclear family; there was extremely little immigration to upset the ethnic mix; there was a singular external threat creating a common enemy. With suburbanization, everyone starts living like everyone else. Television binds people together. And between 1932 and 1960, you have only three presidents, not one of whom holds office for less than seven years - an unprecedented period of political stability."
The trouble, Elliott contends, is not that Americans are wrong to recall the postwar years as a golden age; the trouble is that they recall them as normal. In fact, those years were "a massive freak, an aberration, a total fluke." Not only was America from the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s unique compared with every other country at the same time, but it was unique compared with itself at every other period in its ragged, fragmented, polyglot past. By using that era as a yardstick to measure their current condition, Elliott says, Americans have "elevated the Golden Years into a corrosive national myth."
No politician is more firmly in the thrall of that myth than Buchanan. Like his supporters, when Buchanan looks around, all he sees is the world we've lost. "This is an example of the deindustrialization of America," he said one afternoon in Youngstown, Ohio, as he stood in front of a giant blast furnace at a long-closed steel mill. "It's about the hollowing-out of the greatest manufacturing base the world has ever seen - the transfer toward a service economy. If it continues, the United States is not going to be the greatest nation on earth in the 21st century. Manufacturing is at the core of economic power, which is at the core of national power, which is at the core of global power."
Put aside the fact that very few serious economists think wealth derived from factories is somehow more valuable than wealth derived from fields or silicon. Even if Buchanan's claim were true, he - or any president - is essentially powerless to boost the share of manufacturing employment, which has been falling since the 1950s. Buchanan, naturally, maintains that stiff tariffs would do the trick. But the Stanford economist Paul Krugman estimates that to get manufacturing employment back to even 20 percent of the labor force (it's 16 percent today, compared with 33 percent in 1950), the sector would require a trade surplus of US$200 billion. Since there is now a $50 billion manufacturing trade deficit, the necessary tariff levels would almost certainly lead to a catastrophic trade war.
On immigration the story is the same. Infamously, Buchanan calls for erecting a fence, or a Berlin-style wall, along the Rio Grande to keep out the illegals and he wants a five-year freeze on legal entrants written into law. Draconian as those steps are, however, they will do next to nothing to stop the slide toward the multiethnicity that Buchanan and his fans object to. According to projections by the Census Bureau, between now and 2050 the white share of the population will drop from 75 percent to 53 percent; the black proportion will rise from 12 percent to 16 percent; the Asian total will climb from 3 percent to 11 percent; and the Hispanic slice will grow from 9 percent to 11 percent. This pattern has more to do with fertility rates among those who are already here, especially Asians, than with the number of immigrants who will arrive in the future. So Buchanan's plans would affect the overall ethnic mix only at the margins.
And therein lies the cruel truth about Buchananism: it is futile. A confidant of his once pointed out that "the culture war for Buchanan is not Republican swaggering about family values," and in a sense, it's true; the words rarely pass his lips. Instead, Buchanan's culture war is much more sweeping. Like the prohibitionists, he is fighting on behalf of those who think the warp-speed rush into the future is trashing everything they hold dear, who long for the order and sense of control they once had, or believe they had, over their lives. By whipping up their anger and fear, Buchanan is dangerous - and all the more so because he promises the impossible. As any true conservative would realize, government can encourage or temper the tidal forces the Buchananites dread, but it cannot deny them.
Whether Buchanan knows this or not is an open question. One day at an airport in South Carolina, he was describing his time as a young journalist in Saint Louis in the 1960s. "We'd send our copy over by these vacuum tubes and I'd go over and work with these printers, these linotype operators," he said. "They had a huge number of these guys over there. And they made more money than I did. They could support families on what they made. But you know, they aren't there anymore. Those jobs are gone. They're all gone. The printers are gone. The linotype operators are gone. Journalists are doing very well. But we've got to concern ourselves with folks who work with their hands and tools and machines."
Later, I pointed out to Buchanan that foreign trade hadn't wiped out the printers and the linotype operators; computers had. Unfortunately, the only way to have saved the jobs of his old friends in Saint Louis would have been to repeal the information age.
It's the one thing I've ever said to Buchanan that's left him, for a very long moment, at a loss for words.
God only knows what would leave Bill Clinton that way.
It's late September 1995, on a night flight back from San Diego to Washington, and the president is hanging around with a handful of reporters aboard Air Force One. At a series of fundraisers across the country this week, Clinton has taken his re-election themes out for a test drive, with a new speech about how America is living through its most profound changes in 100 years. Now, squatting on a carry-on bag, wearing jeans and cowboy boots, he's fleshing out the theory, talking farm-to factory and industrial-to-info, spinning and whirring, shucking and jiving - being Clinton.
"I'm trying to get people out of their funk," he says. "I think the change is quite exciting. And I believe human beings, particularly the American people, are capable of enduring a lot of difficulty and a lot of tumult and upheaval if they understand it. What makes people insecure is when they feel like they're lost in the funhouse. They're in a room where something can hit them from any direction, at any time. They always feel that living life is like walking across a running river on slippery rocks and you can lose your footing at any time."
Six months later he's at it again, this time on a flight home from Israel - kibitzing off-the-record (to avoid a repeat of the "funk" publicity) for two solid hours. Much on his mind is the approach of the millennium. He speaks of the information age and the perils of instant data; of how organized crime might use the Net; of how biology will be to the 21st century what physics was to the 20th; of the promise of computers in schools; of getting a laptop in the Oval Office so he can email Al Gore. It is, in every sense, another classically postmodern performance.
Meanwhile, Bob Dole's doing his thing as the premodern man. The day before the primary in California, where he would formally nail down the nomination, Dole pays a call on his hometown of Russell, Kansas. It would be agonizingly trite to note that Russell is a place straight out of the past, except for the fact that it's so plainly true (on the eve of Dole's visit, a crime wave breaks out: a mob of kids open four fire hydrants on Main Street) and so plainly the reason Dole is here today. Russell is the perfect backdrop for his politics of nostalgia.
"Why do I want to be president? Because I will not permit the slow decline of a nation I love so much," Dole tells a crowd of 3,000 in the high school gym. "It is my deepest belief that the coming generation deserves an America like the nation I have known. And it is my deepest fear that this administration is squandering an inheritance it does not value - undermining values that it does not even understandŠ. The world changes, but principles remain. And those principles will always lead me back to Russell - back to you."
Listening to Clinton and Dole talk about where the country is and where it's going, the contrast in styles is stark. Here is Clinton, prolix and improvisational, displaying a Gingrichian fluency with Tofflerite lingo, spieling about a "world in transition." And here is Dole, stoic and taciturn, consumed by his memories, telling a group of supporters in the gym in Russell, "You can go home again."
Yet beneath the stylistic differences, Clinton and Dole are offering messages that are more alike than either would ever admit. The man from Hope, who in 1992 pledged to help the American people "make change their friend," now pledges to shield them from it, while the septuagenarian senator promises simply to turn back the clock. They are profiles in anticourage. At a moment when people are genuinely worried but also genuinely excited by the prospect of tomorrow, neither Dole nor Clinton is putting forward - in the strict sense of an overworked phrase - a positive vision of the future. Indeed, what both are telling the public is that the future is scary, and will be even scarier if the wrong man is elected.
Like everything about Dole, his attempts to prey on the anxieties of an enervated electorate have been awkward and halting, but nonetheless transparent. In February, after the folks of New Hampshire alerted him to the fact that economic insecurity was alive in the land, Dole sounded out some populist themes. "These are the best of times for those who work on Wall Street, but they are also the worst of times for many who live and work on Main Street," he said. Cravenly, he began hedging on his lifelong commitment to free trade, bemoaning American jobs "put at risk by unfairly traded goods from abroad" and declaring that given the choice again, he would not support NAFTA. Gazing on in disgust, George Will ridiculed "Dolenomics" as little more than "watery Buchananism."
In fact, watery Buchananism captures the essence of Dole's whole agenda. You could see it the weekend before the California primary, as Dole went from a bomber factory, where he said more B-2s should be built; to the border, where he said the state's anti-immigrant Prop. 187 should be adopted nationally; to San Quentin, where he said more killers should be killed. Dole is too much a corporatist to attack big business, and too much a moderate to launch a culture war. But his tour of California made clear that no less than Buchanan, Dole hankers after the America of the Golden Years: a place with safe streets, secure borders, and a defense industry churning out an endless stream of secure, well-paid jobs.
Dole's nostalgia provides a ripe target for Clinton, and one only made riper by Dole's own spectacularly insular lifestyle. In the days ahead, the president and his people will be laying out the case - subtly, politely, but entirely correctly - that a man whose universe for the past 30 years has basically consisted of the Senate, the Watergate, K Street and Bal Harbour, Florida, is not exactly in touch with modern America, let alone capable of helping it navigate the passage through a portal of relentless change. To a very real degree, Clinton's critique of Dole will boil down to: We can't go home again.
But while, unlike Dole, Clinton is no fossil of a bygone age, the grand image of him as a man of the future is somewhat - as his press secretary might put it - inoperable. A large part of the reason Clinton is the favorite today, after being written off for dead at the start of last year, was his hugely successful, and deeply demagogic strategy of painting the Republican effort to curb Medicare spending as a plot to demolish the program. A large part of his campaign against Dole will rest on the assertion - buttressed by the senator's having bragged about voting against Medicare when it was created in 1965 - that if Republicans win the White House and hold onto Congress, demolition is sure to follow.
As politics, Clinton's Medi-scare ploy makes sense; his strongest support, like Dole's, comes from the elderly. It is also perhaps his most disgracefully irresponsible, retrograde position. Along with Social Security, Medicare is a ticking time bomb. Runaway spending on these two entitlement programs is already at the heart of the deficit. Left unreformed, they will spiral wildly as the baby boomers retire. If the government is to have any money whatsoever after the turn of the century to invest in education, training, infrastructure, and the environment - the new-style spending Clinton calls vital - there will need to be even tougher cuts in Medicare's growth rate (not to mention Social Security) than the Republicans have proposed. Assailing these cuts now, and in effect pledging not to make them in his second term, Clinton is selling out the twenty- and thirtysomethings, and their children, who actually are the future.
Nor has he been kind to the technologies that will be so central to that generation's culture and economy. Last time around, Clinton cast his lot with the electronic commonwealth - choosing a cyber-savvy running mate, recruiting Silicon Valley execs as endorsers, turning the infobahn into a glitzy campaign issue. In those heady days, it seemed inconceivable that his most consequential high-tech accomplishment would be to sign a law inflicting the censor's tyranny on the Net. Four years later, it was an inescapable fact.
Clinton's signature on the Communications Decency Act was more than an abuse of a basic civil liberty; it was his own version of watery Buchananism. Describing the underpinnings of prohibitionism, Robert Wiebe writes, "Uneasy people could turn here as they had for generations, with assurance that in attacking liquor they fought beyond question for the sanctity of the hearth." Substitute the words "child porn" for "liquor" and the implication is plain: welcome to the age of neo-prohibitionism. So, too, with Clinton's beloved V-Chip, a mindless and unworkable scheme that amounts, in the words of Wired's media critic, Jon Katz, to "the president saying he's going to stick a gizmo inside TV to make it moral."
In a way, Clinton's flirtations with watery Buchananism are only the most vivid signs of how far he has fallen. In 1992, he tried to soothe the anxieties of a rattled society and to hold himself out as the reformist figure who would align his party with the future. Today, these anxieties are raging so fiercely that Clinton feels compelled to capitulate to them: practicing faux Republicanism on social issues, echoing the mantra about downsizing, daring not to take credit for his lasting achievements, GATT and NAFTA. Meanwhile, not only did Clinton fail to reform the Democratic Party, but both by design and by accident, he bolstered the burnt-out liberalism of Richard Gephardt and David Bonior, a reactionary creed that sounds like nothing so much as the Buchananism of the left.
With Clinton having abandoned the forces of progress, and with Dole utterly clueless as to what the forces of progress might be, the campaign that stretches out before us already feels dated and useless. The question is what will come next. In his new book, They Only Look Dead (Simon & Schuster), E. J. Dionne argues that Gingrich has emerged as the Republican Party's main modernizer. Gingrich, Dionne says, is mimicking the strategy adopted in 1896 by McKinley - and concocted by McKinley's fixer, Mark Hanna, one of Gingrich's great heroes - by seeking to cast his party as "the conscious agent of the global, information age economy."
Gingrich's political futurism goes beyond his deregulatory views on telecommunications and his insistent spouting of Third Wave slogans. As the Democratic Leadership Council's boss, Al From, points out, Gingrich's twin-pronged gambit in 1995 - scaling back Medicare and offering a tax cut for families with children - was about more than balancing the budget. Despite its failure, it was a shrewd bid to ally Republicans with younger voters - a maneuver that contrasted sharply with Clinton's prostrations before the elderly.
Gingrich, however, has a reactionary streak a mile wide. He also seems destined to face a potent rival in his quest to shape the new Republican Party: Buchanan. On the night of Super Tuesday, when he was beaten in every primary, Buchanan stood deflantly in a ballroom in Youngstown and declared, "Our time is coming, my friends, our time is coming." He was dead serious. After November, especially if Dole loses, Buchanan will wage war with Gingrich for the party's soul. And although Gingrich's position as Speaker of the House is stronger than Buchanan's as an unemployed pundit, it is not clear what the result will be. Buchanan is unlikely to win outright, but he could split the party in two in the process.
Similarly, the Democrats face their own internal struggle. Dionne writes of the need and virtual inevitability of a new progressivism: market minded, antibureaucratic, and experimental; enthusiastic about the new economy, internationalist, and in favor of strengthening the institutions of civil society. Such a new progressivism has its advocates within the party, such as From and his colleagues at the DLC, who have been laboring to flesh out these ideas for more than a decade. What it does not have is an obvious leader; Vice President Gore and Senator Tom Daschle come closest. Yet the neo-progressives will continue to run up against staunch opposition from the Gephardts and Boniors. The old-liberal wing will not easily be severed.
The last time the century turned, the Democratic and Republican parties confronted similar choices: not surprisingly, since the country itself was, as Elliott argues, living through a period so similar to our own. Then as now, America was, as he puts it, "a messy, fragmented place." Then as now, there were gaping social cleavages and brutal culture wars. Technological advances were shrinking the globe. There were masses of immigrants with unfamiliar customs and passionate drive. And, then as now, underlying everything was an economic transition that produced both insecurity and vitality. Hence the choice the parties then faced: resist the irrevocable forces propelling the country, or embrace them and then offer solutions to the problems wrought by change. Sensibly, each party chose, in its own way, to throw down with the future.
To no small extent, the failure of both parties to do the same thing now - the failure of both parties to get real about the future - is at the heart of the frustration coursing through the electorate. America cannot go back to the postwar years, and even if it could, it shouldn't want to. The new economy is creating real dislocations, which need to be dealt with; but it also promises a prosperous future for an America whose standard of living is already high compared with any other country in the world. Immigrants are changing the face of the nation; but they've done so before, invariably to its beneflt. Information technology may create new opportunities for mischief; but most good things do, and in this case, the good thing happens to be a source of tremendous social, cultural, and economic energy. Yes, the values of many kids are screwy; but no more so than before, and anyway, that is nothing the government can cure. Yes, there are things to be anxious about; but as Senator Bob Kerrey has said, "A certain amount of anxiety is good for you - it keeps you on your toes."
For a moderately brave politician, reciting these heresies might prove a worthwhile gamble. They would sound refreshing, unscripted. They would also have the virtue of being true.
But 1996, it seems, is not a year for such wagers. Instead, the men who would be President (and Senator, and Representative) are set to spend this summer and autumn looking backward, their eyes full of old movies, their voices full of fear. The exploitation of anxieties about the future is, however, a funny thing. Not only does it crowd out discussion of the real issues and choices: how to pay for health care and pensions for an aging population, or how to repair the catastrophic system we now use to educate our children. It also has the effect, in the end, of making voters ever more angry and disenchanted with the governing class. By promising what politicians can never deliver - freedom from change, a perpetual yesterday - the leaders of the two major parties think they are being clever. In fact, they are feeding the beast that will eventually devour them.
