Politics After Ideology

...The discrediting of grand ideologies, of sweeping metanarratives that purport to explain the present in terms of the past and future, does not mean the end of partisan politics...

...A vision of the market and the state also energized the conservative movement when it was young and dynamic...

...How should we relate to other nations...

...From the 1960s to the 1990s, bipartisan consensus became rare, as many liberals rejected America's anti-Communist foreign policy and as many conservatives confidently denounced not only President Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society but President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal...

...Politics, no less than nature, abhors a vacuum...

...Otherwise the public square will be filled—as it is being filled in the United States at the beginning of the 21 st century—with a Hobbesian bellum omnium contra omnes, a permanent riot among factions that no longer even pretend to restrain themselves for the common good...

...Clinton's strategy of "triangulation," which assigned him the role of a centrist maneuvering between the extremes of Right and Left, succeeded in winning him a second term, at the cost of marginalizing the Left...

...Republican presidential contenders bicker over making opposition to Roe v. Wade a litmus test for nominees to the Supreme Court...

...But the gap on questions of political economy between the likely presidential nominees is a mere ditch, compared to the canyon that separated Johnson and Goldwater in 1964, or for that matter Walter Mondale and Ronald Reagan in 1984...

...Nor does the social-issue Right...

...Ideological politics is universalist, comprehensive, evangelical, and aggressive...

...The conditions created by industrialization, urbanization and the emergence of the United States as a great power required new thinking—thinking the Progressives, Socialists, Social Darwinists and other ideologues, for better or worse, attempted to provide...

...In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Prohibition filled the role in our politics currently occupied by abortion and gay rights and the antismoking campaign...

...The consistent philosophical positions, you would think, would be puritanism and hedonism...

...Bill Bradley and Al Gore quibble about whether or not to make support for allowing open gays into the military a litmus test for the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff...

...Perhaps they will...

...After all, in the century just concluded tens of millions of human beings were slaughtered and starved by ideologues in power attempting to create Utopias on the basis of crackpot theories about race or class...

...On the contrary, the end of ideology may emancipate partisanship...

...One must not forget, however, that even critics of ideological mania like Aristotle, Adams and Edmund Burke had their own, more or less systematic notions of the general good...

...But in essence their argument is not about conflicting methods of achieving goals everyone agrees on, like improved education for all Americans...

...How should we be governed...

...As the politics of interest eclipses the politics of ideas, the connection between the positions of the two parties and the principles they persist in invoking becomes ever more tenuous...

...the opportunists of the New Left merely endorsed them, once the maj or battles had been won...

...Programs like racial quotas for blacks and Latinos, or bilingual education, by definition benefit only a part of the American public, not the whole...

...Not for nothing did John Adams, reflecting on the disastrous course of the French Revolutionary experiment with philosophical politics, describe ideology as "the science of idiocy...

...Ideology has died before—only to revive later, in a different form...

...Multiculturalism and Christian conservatism are often described as examples of "ideology," when in fact they are nothing more than examples of specialinterest partisan politics...

...What the New Left denounced as "corporate liberalism" is what the New Right vilified as "statism": the U.S...

...partisan politics—as the temi suggests— is motivated by the interests of parts of society...

...The partisans of affirmative action and school choice are just that—partisans, not ideologues...

...the partisan wants to protect his turf, or to cautiously expand it...

...But the Left was already marginal...

...The controversy is being fueled by the desire of many Protestant evangelicals—along with some Catholics and Orthodox Jews—to win public subsidies for private schools in which their religious subcultures can be perpetuated...

...They crumpled like tinfoil in head-on collisions with American welfare capitalism...

...A CASE CAN BE MADE that the decline of ideology is something to be celebrated...

...What put the "left" in the New Left was its luminous vision of Democratic Socialism and participatory democracy...

...For the last half decade, though, ideology has dramatically declined as a factor in American politics...

...Democratic Socialists and Rooseveltian liberals and libertarians and conservative nationalists—ideologues all—would try to answer such questions...

...At the same time, New Left radicals were preparing their assault on what historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr...

...To be more precise, the government shutdown in 1995 and President Bill Clinton's reelection in 1996 signaled the end of the epoch in American politics that began in the 1960s...

...Politicians had to be for or against Prohibition...

...but in an era of partisan frenzy like our own, it is the idea of the public interest that must be defended against the cynical and the corrupt...

...The defeat of Right-wing radicalism in 1995 did not translate into gains for the American Left —thanks, ironically, to the first Democratic President since FDR to serve two terms...

...Anglo-American nativists, who were not averse to a drink, saw Prohibition as a way of inflicting pain on beer-loving German-Americans and Catholics whose Masses required wine (depriving one's rivals of their pleasures can be a pleasure in itself...

...but the same argument can be made for any targeted subsidy or entitlement...

...Precisely such aphenomenon has been evident in the United States during the past several electoral cycles...

...Both defenders and opponents of the public school system appeal to principle...

...The silent majority, it turned out, had been no more than a loud minority all along...

...The subjects of greatest concern to the Religious Right—abortion, homosexuality, media censorship, public subsidies for parochial schools—have nothing to do with the great, perennial questions of statecraft...

...In each case, the central issue is the right of a subcultural minority—defined by race, ethnicity or religion—to public recognition and public subsidy as a distinct group, rather than as a collection of individuals...

...In reality, each of those campaigns had their own constituencies...

...Now that they lack deep disagreements about political economy, Democratic and Republican presidential candidates devote most of their time to taking the positions on narrow partisan matters that their core constituencies demand...

...In the perennial debate between Platonists and Aristotelians (to use a metaphor of Richard Rorty's), it is surely safer as well as wiser to take the side of the Aristotelians...

...Acasecan be made that New Left radicalism peaked very early, between the late '60s and the early '70s...

...What is the best economic system...

...Our political conversation has been limited to partisan squabbles over symbolic minutiae before...

...and if they were in favor of it, they had to declare whether they were "dry" or "bone-dry...

...On issues like these, the identity-politics Left has nothing to say...

...Between the mid-'60s and the mid'90s, the ideological insurrections of the Left and the Right both failed, for the same reason...

...Even ideologies that do not sanction the extermination of whole races or classes, in the way Marxism-Leninism and National Socialism did, may be dangerous because they encourage otherwise intelligent people to ignore discrepancies between facts and ideals...

...It is possible, of course, to argue that these programs will ultimately and indirectly produce a better America...

...On the Right, Eisenhower's Modern Republicanism and Taft's Old Right, both rather mild-mannered, were about to be swept aside by the militant "movement conservatism" of Arizona's Senator Barry Goldwater and California's Governor Ronald Reagan...

...This fact is obscured by New Left veterans in the academy, who are rewriting history to give organizations such as SDS credit for lasting reforms like the end of segregation, feminism, gay rights and environmentalism...

...In some instances, the issues that at present divide the two parties are the result of bizarre historical contingencies...

...Democratic and Republican Party affiliation...

...The distrust of big business and international finance by the American Religious Right is old and deep, even if it is seldom acknowledged by Religious Right leaders hoping to maintain a coalition with Wall Street in the Republican Party...

...No sooner had the Republican Right begun to recover from this disillusionment than it learned, in the course of the Clinton impeachment, that a majority of Americans rejected its moral puritanism as well...

...Then, as now, what appeared to be divisions over high principle were often electoral gambits targeted at particular constituencies...

...The great ideological struggles of the last third of the 20th century in the United States, though, were primarily about political economy...

...American politics was on the verge of being transformed by ideologues on the march...

...The Socialist and libertarian Utopias had been mirages...

...Then, as now, the decline of the ideological battles that had earlier agitated the country emancipated apartisan politics of tribalism— regional, religious and racial...

...The American Founders were wary of "a too frequent recourse to first principles"—but followed Machiavelli in recognizing the need for occasional renovations and revolutions when a government or social order had become dangerously corrupt or anachronistic...

...True, Democrats and Republicans continue to differ on issues like health care and tax cuts...

...From the '60s through the '80s the activist Right was driven by a combination of economic libertarianism and states' rights localism...

...Ideological politics, when it returned in the early 20th century, had nothing to do with the issues of the 19th century, like slavery and territorial expansion...

...By the end of the century, it had become clear to all but a few fringe thinkers that American welfare capitalism was neither going to metamorphose into Democratic Socialism nor regress to the tadpole stage of laissez-faire...

...What is the multicultural program for health care, or taxation, or national security...

...For example, on political talk shows, when hosts ask joumalists or pundits for a "liberal" or "conservative" perspective, they are invariably answered with references to Democratic or Republican strategy...

...As late as 1995, Republican House Majority Whip Dick Armey would compare the "statism" of FDR to that of Stalin and Mao...

...David Hume, that merciless critic of political and religious enthusiasm, wrote an essay outlining what he believed were the features of the ideal commonwealth...

...The post-ideological Gilded Age of the late 19th century, in which politics revolved around ethnoreligious issues like Prohibition and regional issues like the tariff, followed the Civil War—a conflagration at once ideological and literal...

...Taken together, they augur a transformation of civilization as profound as the shift from an agrarian to an industrial society that took place a few generations ago...

...This is factional politics of the purest sort...

...The government shutdown was the Thermidor of the Republican Congressional revolution of 1994, and arguably the high-water mark of the three-decadeold conservative movement...

...The point is that these sorts of debates have little or nothing to do with the great questions ideologies have always tried to answer: What is the good society...

...version of the "social market" synthesis that developed in the industrial democracies around the same time after World War II...

...a crude and overly simple ideology can only be displaced by a subtle and complex ideology...

...the history of the political Left since then has been one of illusory revivals punctuating genuine decline...

...The ideologue wants to change the world...

...In the absence of an ideological Left demanding a dramatic expansion of the role of government, and of a confident ideological Right demanding an equally dramatic contraction in the government's size, the two national parties increasingly have begun to define their differences in terms of symbolic, noneconomic issues...

...issues like abortion and gay rights became significant relatively late in the movement's career...

...How else can one explain the peculiar fact that many of the same liberals who want to stamp out smoking favor legalizing marijuana—and that many conservatives who want to send people to prison for possessing a marijuana cigarette defend tobacco subsidies...

...Two failed putsches, and the conservative revolution was over...

...Today any of a number of discoveries and innovations, in fields ranging from computer science to neuroscience and genetic engineering, are beginning to change the way we live and work...

...partisan politics, more often than not, is factional, defensive, territorial...

...The present cycle of postideological partisan politics, as I have noted, is less than a decade old...

...It might be objected that there is more to ideology than economics...

...It is important to make a distinction between ideological and partisan politics...

...Ideological politics takes as its object society as a whole...

...Indeed, identity politics in the United States today is so far from being ideological, in the proper sense, that it has no connection with any overarching scheme for reforming American society or guiding American foreign policy...

...When the Left and Right were going concerns, the phrases "liberal" and "conservative" were not synonyms for, respectively...

...has called the "vital center" tradition of the New Deal...

...The partisan politics of interest cannot supply the new answers to old questions that the times require, but—in the absence of a new politics of ideas—partisan politics may supply the wrong answers...

...In an age of ideological frenzy, one must protect the particular and the local from those whom Jakob Burckhardt called the "terrible simplifiers...

...When Socialism was discredited and libertarianism was rejected, all that remained of the American Left and Right were clusters of previously peripheral causes, like barnacles that continue to drift together for a while even though the whale they were riding has disappeared...

...Ironically, its project of voluntary ghettoization is the mirror image of the Left's identity politics...

...The connection between the pulpit and the country club is an alliance of convenience, not a crusade based on shared principles...

...When the public blamed the budget stalemate on Congress rather than President Clinton, the antigovernment radicals in the Republican House and Senate discovered to their shock that the American people did not share their enthusiasm for amputating whole limbs of the Federal government...

...The Religious Right is less interested in taking over American society than in gaining the prerogative to retreat into reservations that are publicly funded but privately controlled...

...Many Protestant fundamentalists happen to be conservative on economic issues, but quite a few are not...

...THE CLASH over school choice is a classic example of a partisan contest camouflaged as an ideological one...

...An ideology is a comprehensive vision of the public good, with pretensions to consistency, that usually comes attached to theories of history (a "metanarrative," in the jargon of the academy...

...It was to be expected, though, that the small partisan questions would come to the fore once the big ideological ones were no longer being asked...

...THE END OF IDEOLOGY does not mean the end of partisanship...

...Too often the two are confused...

...Whether reconfiguring the United States as a nation of groups instead of individuals is a good idea or not can be debated (I think it is a bad idea...

...Defined in this way, it has been conspicuously invisible in the United States since the mid-1990s...