The Politics of Gestures

...But what more stereotypically liberal statement could one make about government...

...We have watched CNN (among others) do its damnedest to persuade parents and children that they feel deeply insecure—and then minister night and day to that supposed insecurity...

...Greenberg reminds us repeatedly that "Bill Clinton did call on voters to reject the false choice of liberalism and conservatism...

...Given the propensity of Americans to vote for a Presidential candidate on the basis not of policies or beliefs but of personal reassurance as conveyed by television, this development was probably inevitable...

...What exactly does this ubiquitous phrase (long a Republican mantra) mean to Greenberg and Clinton...

...Town meetings," television talk-shows conducted by the President and his surrogates, have from the start been a major element in the Clinton Administration's self-presentation...

...The ritualistic incantation of the phrase "civil rights" unfortunately prevents many liberals from grasping the point...

...In those days, of course, the victims were Leftist groups who opposed the war in Vietnam or U.S...

...Neoliberals have been less successful, but not for lack of trying to reinvent liberalism, a process that has also been going on for decades in the electoral trenches...

...What Clinton "rejected was the distortion of America's party traditions that blocked the Democrats from fighting forthecom-mon person and the American dream...

...The old cliches about a climate of hate and a national loss of innocence have been trotted out yet again...

...The starting point," he repeats near the end...

...While liberalism has been growing feebler in its public appeal, conservatism has been gaining a strength that most liberals disdainfully profess themselves unable to fathom...

...One of the commonplaces of political history is that in American popular usage liberalism and conservatism mean something quite different from what they did a hundred years ago, or mean today in large parts of Europe...

...Bewildered-looking men in camouflage uniforms, who might or might not have any connection with the bombers, appeared on all the networks and, a few days later, on the covers of news magazines...

...In 1996 land use will be a major issue in the West...

...The appeal is to the past, a liberal politics of nostalgia...

...The Age of Federalism...

...The people...

...HOW DID liberal politics become so desperate and impoverished...

...That these practices are closer in mood to what is called conservatism today than to what remains of liberalism may be the most damaging development for the Democratic Party...

...I see," he informs us, "a President who is passionate and engaged, who respects ideas, who enjoys and depends on intellectual combat, who thirsts for understanding, who listens, who has a deep compassion for people, who makes sound judgments, and who has the courage to take on momentous challenges...

...Nothing is more important to the future of liberalism than understanding the appeal of conservatism, without simultaneously expressing contempt for the electorate the way so many liberal pundits did after the 1994 elections...

...From Jimmy Carter in 1976 to the present, each candidate's self-definition has been remarkably similar to that of the one before: a combination of fiscal conservative and social liberal...

...That is an old conservative stereotype—but Congressional Democrats, preoccupied with defending the welfare state, currently seem determined to justify it...

...Liberals believe in big government, keeping both taxes and government spending high...

...It would be more accurate to say, though, that from a confident message of hope liberalism has become a politics almost entirely ruled by fear of what Bill Clinton terms the "dark forces" in American life...

...is the middle class as the center of our politics...

...We have watched a weak, embattled President seize his opportunity to become the national grief therapist...

...Looking and sounding like an average person with no pretensions, denouncing "elitism," hating Washington, and abandoning all but a single syllable of one's given name are now almost universal practices among politicians no matter what their official convictions...

...Another version has it that Democratic enthusiasm since the mid-1960s for affirmative action preferences, set-asides, and other race- and sex-based policies has alienated white men, left white women about where they were politically, and won reliable support only from black voters...

...Historically, liberalism meant devotion to individual liberty above all...

...He is the man who put together all those focus groups in Macomb County, Michigan, as he tells us at length...

...As a movement it long ago shed its sympathy for segregation and racial prejudice, a point that liberals hate to admit...

...Given that the historic "wedge issue" in New Deal-style liberalism had always been economic class, it wasn't very smart of the Democratic Party to deepen the division of the class it depends on into mutually competing factions along lines of sex and ethnic origin...

...Conservatives believe in small government, right...

...In 1993, having attracted many Perot voters the year before, the President made a gesture toward reducing the deficit...

...IMPLICIT in the politics of gestures is the fact that both liberal and conservative politicians have become much more populist than they were even as recently as the 1970s...

...When it comes to substance, the populism of the Right demands lower taxes, abalanced budget, term limits—the main elements in the Republicans' 1994 Contract With America...

...The most bizarre events resulted more from the power of television than from the bombing itself...

...Populism always requires an enemy of the people, preferably a conspiracy, to set itself against?an enemy which, because it is primarily of symbolic importance, can be combated only through symbols...

...The middle class (that is, the working class) has been "forgotten" by recent Democratic politicians...

...Clinton recently appeared on all the networks trotting a borrowed horse through Marlboro Country, try ing his best to look like the second coming of Ronald Reagan...

...Clinton himself declared in 1991, "are crying desperately for someone who believes the purpose of government is to solve their problems and make progress...

...Perhaps the strangest consequence of this search for approbation was an alliance between the American Civil Liberties Union and some of its longtime enemies...

...Voters," he says, "are watching to see whether Clinton and his Administration will create something that middle-class America can believe in, or whether they will fail and breed yet more feelings of disappointment and betrayal...

...It is itself the highest political end...

...After warning against guilt by association when it was initially assumed that the deed had been done by Arabs, the news media embarked on a drunken spree of innuendo and name-calling once the perpetrators appeared to be native Right-wingers...

...Echoing Clinton's speeches, Green-berg's book is filled with sentimental catch-phrases that seem, like the teddy bears of Oklahoma City, to be inadequate substitutes for something no longer there—in this case, analysis and action directed toward solving real problems...

...As the political scientist Harvey Mansfield wrote in The Spirit of Liberalism (1978), "In our day liberals and liberal causes have prospered, but liberalism is in trouble...

...His formulation of the forgotten middle class recalls the imagery and remembrances that remain alive in people's heads—despite the decades of distortion and the sense of betrayal...

...Thomas Jefferson, the founder of the American liberal tradition, would have agreed...

...In 1995, affirmative action having become a hot issue, he ordered a review of all the government's policies on the subject...

...The conservatism of today, though made up of many strands, is on the whole far more libertarian and pacific...

...Correctly pointing out that a tiny band of maniacs represented little threat to the national security, and that probably no change in the law could bring a Timothy McVeigh to the attention of Federal agents until he strikes, the ACLU and a number of conservative Republicans in Congress urged that the bombing not be used to justify undoing limitations that were placed on Federal surveillance after the abuses of the 1960s and '70s...

...For a hundred years, at least rhetorically, most American conservatives have been enthusiasts for free enterprise and smaller government, key doctrines of 19th-century liberalism...

...Like many others, Greenberg believes the "traditional" political parties are "in ruin" and something else, presumably a kind of pollster populism, will take their place...

...Like liberalism and conservatism themselves, neither of these terms is self-explanatory...

...His book purports to show us why the President is uniquely qualified to change America (as you can already guess, most of it was written before last November...

...There is some truth in that version of events, although it raises the question why...

...Gush aside, Greenberg no doubt rightly believes his own contributions as apoll-ster have been crucial in shaping the Clin-ton ideology...

...What the populism of the Left demands is less clear—it once seemed to be demanding health-care reform—but the claim of liberal politicians to ascertain and follow the popular will is as full-throated as that of conservatives...

...It is sad to think that liberalism, at least at the top, has been virtually reduced to symbols calculated by pollsters...

...In any case, the religious Right is of no immediate help to liberals, who have been watching their name turn into mud and their voters into Republicans...

...This suggests that the target audience for Democratic appeals is still defined in economic terms that haven't changed much since the New Deal...

...In foreign policy—on Bosnia, for instance, or on North Korea, China, Haiti?conservatives have if anything been less aggressive of late than liberals...

...Is it simply a story of too much success—too long a domination of Congress, too many programs, too big a dose of basically sound medicine—or has something more fundamental gone wrong...

...While liberal politicians wait for the second shoe to drop in 1996, they offer not so much a program as an endlessly reiterated nightmare prophecy of Rush Limbaugh...

...Whatever its long-term impact, in a city where Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Tom Daschle, and Dick Gephardt face off against Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole while Bill Bennett, Jack Kemp and Dan Quayle sit this one out, being ordinary and familiar seems to be the most important political gesture...

...The ACLU stands virtually alone in its consistency...

...despite 20 years of trying, liberal Democrats have so rarely been able to persuade the middle class that they represent its interests...

...Middle class shows upon nearly every page, as well as in the title...

...The origins of competing political ideologies and parties in post-Revolutionary America are recounted in Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitnck's enthralling 1993 history...

...Maybe what has changed is the nature of the appeal, rather than the potential voters appealed to...

...Far from depriving conservatives of their chief issue, the end of the Cold War freed them to support a smaller, less intrusive government more consistently than they did in the course of crusading against Communism...

...The abstract merits of this hybrid position can be debated, but only two Democratic standard bearers...

...As indicated by the competition between Right and Left to be more populist than thou, populism in itself has ceased to stand for anything in particular...

...In other words, middle class means exactly what working class (or...

...But the increasing unpopularity of those doctrines, or of many policies they gave rise to, is indicated by the reluctance of American politicians to call themselves liberals in the past 20 years...

...Conversely, most liberals since the beginning of the New Deal have supported larger government, increasingly compl icated regulation of business, domination of the private world by the public—much, in short, that conservatives historically stood for...

...I am thinking," Greenberg adds, "of people who fall in the bottom 60 per cent of the income scale...

...Recall that Clinton ran, admittedly not very originally, as a new Democrat...

...Clintons project, obscured as it may be by the needs of day-to-day politics, is to recall old images and memories: the New Deal, the civil rights and antiwar movements?good causes in their day, but not very relevant to governing in the '90s...

...In The Meaning of Conservatism (1980) Roger Scruton, the British political philosopher, explains: "One major difference between conservatism and liberalism consists...

...It sounds as though Clinton wishes to restore the Democratic Party to an older kind of liberalism that has been distorted and betrayed...

...Seventeen years later many liberals exhibit the paranoia that results from finding oneself wholly on the defensive...

...to Marxists, proletariat) used to mean...

...in the fact that, for the conservative, the value of individual liberty is not absolute, but stands subject to another and higher value, the authority of established government...

...In practice, the first has usually meant making a few gestures toward deregulation and lower Federal spending...

...The term 'middle class' has a broad meaning in this work, referring imperfectly to people who work for a living, receive wages or salary but who do not own a business or play an executive role...

...AFTER two and a half years in office, what has the Clinton Administration done to fashion a liberalism and a Democratic Party for the next millennium...

...WHAT IS a liberal, what is a conservative in the Moment of Clinton and Gingrich, when (notwithstanding the complexities of both coalitions) we have a closer approximation to a liberal party and a conservative party than at any time since the Federalists went belly up in 1816...

...the religious Right, the National Rifle Association, themilitia movement, and next year's new demon uniting to starve the young, kick the old off Medicare, and force pregnant women at gunpoint to bear their children amid a susur-rus of mandatory prayer...

...A common response of sympathetic commentators is that liberal policies from the New Deal to the 1960s so enlarged the middle class (in its traditional sense of relatively affluent white-collar brain workers) that what was left of the old blue-collar Democratic constituency could no longer dominate Federal elections...

...The Vision of the Anointed' (Basic Books), derides liberals as a self-congratulatory elite who regard the loyalties and beliefs of average Americans with scorn...

...Yes and no: abolish the Commerce and Energy Departments but keep the Pentagon strong...

...The charge of "racism," after all, is the 1990s equivalent of being "soft on Communism" in the 1950s, a political property too valuable to abandon without a fight...

...Stanley Greenberg, Clinton's pollster during and since the 1992 campaign, provides the most detai led exposition yet of the Clinton vision in Middle-Class Dreams: The Politics and Power of the New American Majority (Times Books, 338 pp., $25.00...

...Every Democratic Presidential nominee since the Mc-Govern disaster of 1972 has claimed to be a new kind of Democrat who represents, in effect, a new species of liberal, though few have used the word...

...a liberal is a conservative who got a government subsidy...

...This analysis likewise has a good deal of truth...

...Populism goes back a long way in American politics: Another recent book, The Populist Persuasion by Michael Ka-zin (Basic Books, 364 pp., $24.00), analyzes its historical ambiguities at length and urges a revival of its positive emphases on the Left...

...Remember that during his first two years in the White House he was widely seen as having betrayed the hopes of virtually everyone who had taken him at his word, from the supporters of Lani Guinier and homosexuals in the Armed Forces on one part of the spectrum to believers in the promised middle-class tax cut and ending welfare as we know it on another...

...The tired jokes are even less help than they used to be: A conservative is a liberal who got mugged...

...That Clinton in the same speech described his prescription as a rejection of the old categories was sheer self-deception...

...More grotesque still, we have seen teddy bears handed out to people who lost members of their families in the bombing...

...it frequently verged on Mc-Carthyism in identifying Communism with all sorts of unrelated phenomena...

...Now as then, opposition to government intrusion may be mostly a matter of whose ox is gored...

...Conservatism, on the other hand, meant devotion to existing authorities and institutions...

...the second has meant continued support for affirmative action, the right to abortion and programs for the poor...

...Hence, among a myriad of possible examples, such gestures as the Administration's post-Oklahoma City tough-on-domestic-terrorism posture and, on the other side of the aisle, the renewed drive for a constitutional amendment to ban flag burning...

...Nevertheless, he draws back from pronouncing the Democratic Party unnecessary to his kind of liberalism...

...The President and Attorney General called for the death penalty before any suspects or motive had been identified, and soon demanded that Congress pass the Comprehensive Antiterrorism Bill giving Federal agencies new powers to cope with people who might commit terrorist acts in the future...

...As Lord Acton put it in 1877, "Liberty is not a means to a higher political end...

...Starting in the 1980s, Kazin explains, the term became "a convenient label for Left, Right, Center, and anyone simply out to make a profit, a handy way to signify that one was on the side of the real people...

...To be sure, the power of the nonlibertarian religious Right, though gleefully overrated by liberal commentators, presents a difficult problem for the unity of the conservative movement, even if the long-expressed prediction that the Republican Party will split on this issue is probably wishful thinking...

...The defection in 1994 of people who "work hard and play by the rules"?not only "angry white men," as liberals in the media sneeringly described them, but white women as well—was one predictable outcome...

...The title of a forthcoming book by Thomas Sowell...

...Twentieth-century America has not been kind to either of these definitions...

...More significantly, neoconservative thinkers have had a major, if sometimes exaggerated impact on conservatism as a political movement...

...In 1994, he made a gesture toward campaign-finance reform...

...The conservatism embodied there was not just strongly anti-Communist (an attitude the majority of liberals then shared...

...policy in Latin America...

...Part of their problem is that conservatism too has changed drastically since the New Deal, even since the 1960s...

...All three of these evasions have been overtaken by events in Congress, in the Supreme Court, or (an unlikely birthplace for political reform) at an old-people's picnic in New Hampshire...

...Civil liberties, however, continued to be generally thought of as a liberal cause, even though it sometimes militatedagainst other, more recent liberal goals, such as protecting members of minority groups from insult...

...If one defines contemporary liberalism as the set of doctrines and attitudes that derive from the New Deal, modified in some respects by influences from the New Left, the era of liberal dominance in American politics lasted from the Depression until 1994...

...You have to go to the footnotes to find out...

...Carter and Clinton, have been elected since 1964...

...Still, the unusual alliance represents a good opportunity to reflect on the slipperiness of our political terminology half a century after World War II, when the Cold War has been won and a party whose leaders describe themselves as conservative revolutionaries has suddenly taken control of Congress for the first time in—well, you know the figure...

...It consistently opposed the civil-rights movement, thumped for states' rights in their most segregationist form, praised Right-wing tyrannies abroad, and belittled the dangers of nuclear war...

...Anyone who doubts it should read a few issues of National Review dating from the Kennedy or early Johnson administrations...