The Land Beyond Left and Right: An Allegory
BROOKS, DAVID
The Land Beyond Left and Right: An Allegory By David Brooks On September 1~ in the Year of Our Lord 199~, I undertook a journey to the Land Beyond Left and Right. It was a long voyage, for I had...
...For example, a Charles Murray, someone with a definite creed, will daringly move the welfare debate by arguing an extreme position, and all the Beyondists will be swept a bit toward his position, and will eventually be adding their contribution within the new framework...
...But the peace in the Land Beyond is darkened by a deeper anxiety...
...In the new information age, he says, the left-right divide "will seem as anachronistic as Checkpoint Charlie...
...There are two flaws in this sentiment...
...People who insist on adhering to liberalism or conservatism find themselves linked...
...Michael Novak hits from one side, William Julius Wilson hits from another...
...issues are merely what politicians use to divide the citizenry and advance themselves...
...A free marketeer can go anywhere in the world and have dinner with somebody from the local free market think tank-in London, Jerusalem, Capetown...
...It's probably no accident that many of the people who have declared themselves beyond left and right are, like the president and vice president, children of the 1960s...
...had it right (though he was a little grandiose) when he declared in 1949, "So long as society stays free, so long will it continue in its state of tension, breeding contradiction, breeding strife...
...Conservatives promote another set of virtues, a lot of them having to do with achievement...
...Debates are not dominated by the loosely tethered individuals who declare themselves above the partisan fray...
...They never reconcile, but each side learns from the assault of the other...
...On the budget and on health care, they did not try to forge new Beyondist coalitions, but sought traditional partisan Democratic triumphs instead...
...Beyondists like Bill Bradley are free-floating individuals, producing documents that are thoughtful but with little resonance...
...But on the second day in this land, clouds appear...
...The central problem with Beyondists and centrists is that they misunderstand the way ideas are developed...
...This breeds a sense of tolerance for those whose brand of conservatism may differ...
...there will be photos of politicians and think tankers and academics standing in happy conversational klatches, clutching cocktail glasses against their stomachs...
...Some Soviets, and some Western neoconservatives such as Jean-Fran?ois Revel, thought that the democracies would lose the Cold War because they were always tearing themselves apart with internal disputes between right and left...
...it is the instrument of change...
...E.J...
...In the Land Beyond, many people are able to rise above politics and the tawdry partisan fray...
...They cite Burke or Jefferson or Aquinas...
...Nonetheless, a traveler in their midst is tempted to make a few generalizations...
...They may have shed the content of some 60s ideas, but they absorbed 60s ideas about how the world should work...
...Liberals and conservatives join movements...
...And it is not only that the Beyondists are unable to mobilize political power...
...The visitor can forgive himself for wondering if he hasn't discovered utopia: a place where bright, open-minded people can be seen discussing issues in civil tones...
...When it came to actual votes, Bradley conducted himself as a pretty conventional liberal, with an ADA rating hovering near 90, and with a legislative record that was, after the 1986 tax bill, not distinguished...
...Barbara Mikulski wrote in the Washington Post that the words liberal and conservative "have become cliches . . . with little meaning...
...The Land Beyond has the sparkle of freshness, as old conventions are shed, and people look for new ideas to go with a new era...
...But as the history of modernism shows, while it is exhilarating to begin anew, "fresh" ideas have a way of failing...
...A politically plausible idea-let's stay with welfare reform-rarely emerges full-blown from a single person or group...
...Songs, speakers, and pamphlets were perpetually urging people to do it...
...But as it transpired, these internal disputes allowed the West to remain dynamic and creative...
...Conservatives, by contrast, seem to be quite happy with the conservative label...
...reform welfare by increasing benefits to the working poor...
...Journalists love these visionaries, for they are interesting and provocative...
...Legislation has to go to Congress and troops must be mobilized...
...Nobody pointed to a single big idea or a novel approach that had been introduced in those speeches...
...steer around what E.J...
...The sun was shining, and everybody was sitting around watching Ken Bode's Washington Week in Review...
...intellectually, their best ideas are perpetually just over the horizon...
...The policy gabfests that Bill Clinton so loves are based on the premise that such meetings exist for people of good will to come together and solve problems...
...For conflict is alone the guarantee of freedom...
...different views are reconcilable...
...Beyondists recognize that both extremes contain a grain of truth and the best solution probably lies somewhere in between...
...Beyondists have to start from scratch...
...It may be that the effort to move beyond labels has less to do with the exhaustion of ideologies than it does with the exhaustion of liberalism...
...The idea that the purpose of politics is to solve "problems" has deeper roots-in rationalism...
...But those who have taken up permanent residence in the Land Beyond are tied to no one...
...It is produced by a struggle between left and right...
...Coming together" was big in the 1960s...
...The new thinkers have trouble mobilizing power...
...Not every issue in America is polarized-most Americans occupy a middle ground on abortion and racial matters, and foreign policy disputes are for the moment unformed- but the struggle between left and right reflects something profound...
...it's over better government...
...The Bush administration was graced by New Paradigmer James Pinkerton, and until recently, the Clinton administration had its William Galston...
...If you watch David Gergen over time, you can trace which way the frame of debate has moved, but you cannot expect to learn where it is about to move...
...They are loose groupings- conservatism emphasized Kempism in the 1980s and emphasizes Kasichery in the 1990s...
...In short they are above the fray...
...In Why Americans Hate Politics, Dionne laments that "over the last 30 years of political polarization, politics has stopped being a deliberative process through which people resolved disputes, found remedies and moved forward...
...It was a long voyage, for I had to navigate past the Scylla of liberalism and the Charybdis of conservatism...
...Beyondists point to contradictions between those who call themselves conservatives, and so declare that the labels have no meaning...
...It's a long competition between virtues...
...Republican candidates call themselves conservatives, even if the label doesn't really apply...
...The Beyondists have several disadvantages when they enter the battle of ideas...
...I docked at the Land Beyond Left and Right and was confronted with a fan of roadways, all of them marked, "To the Center...
...Bill Bradley tolerated the muck of politics for as long as he could, but in August it became too much for him, and he announced his retirement from the Senate...
...They have done so because they represent two worldviews that are not compatible...
...The Land Beyond is, in design, a practical place...
...Voters then choose which approach will dominate...
...But even among the intellectuals, Beyondists are likely to have liberal pedigrees...
...Four hundred pages is a long way to go to wind up back at tax hikes for the rich...
...They sometimes call on those still clinging to the Tired Old Labels to repudiate their allies, but they themselves never have to repudiate anyone...
...Each foot soldier makes an unconscious deal: He dispossesses himself of the privilege of being uncat-egorizable and completely autonomous, and in exchange he gets a place in the larger movement...
...Their boast, echoing President Clinton, is that we are in an unprecedented age demanding new thinking...
...Bill Clinton and Al Gore were there, having gained entry in tribute to the words that appeared in their 1992 book Putting People First: "Our policies are neither liberal nor conservative, neither Democratic nor Republican...
...The first has to do with the phrase "come together...
...They are dominated by people who are self-conscious about their premises and firm in their conclusions, who nail their theses to a door...
...Dionne has called the False Choices...
...They contain diversity (from Ralph Reed to P. J. O'Rourke) while maintaining solidarity...
...They must endure the tedium of inaction, and bear the constant sense of irritating helplessness...
...Sometimes they seem loosely akin to the non-aligned bloc in the Cold War, loudly non-aligned, yet somehow usually siding with one side...
...In a special corner Colin Powell was holding court with the great post-ideological hopes of yesteryear: Senator Bradley, Gary Hart, and Michael Dukakis, the latter still mumbling that the real issue is "competence, not ideology...
...The labeled have an even greater advantage over the la-belless...
...So one leaves the Land Beyond Left and Right remembering what the 19th-century journalist Walter Bagehot said of the post-ideological politicians of his own day: "They are betwixt and between, and make distinctions which no one heeds...
...that is a sad reality...
...Bill Clinton...
...Instead, the Beyondists can begin each problem anew, forgetting bigger fights and getting down to an open exchange about the nitty gritty...
...The ones that work have been tested over time...
...In the first place, they always start from square one...
...There was a crew of Washington Monthly alumni, led by Dionne, whose book Why Americans Hate Politics described the shortcomings of the choice between left and right...
...They embrace it...
...The Be-yondists are big on solving problems...
...In a world in which to be liberal is politically untenable and to be conservative is socially unacceptable, it is a wonderful thing to be beyond left and right...
...The social scale of politics peaks in the center...
...It seems coherent and meaningful to them...
...They are great at beginnings...
...It was at the heart of the utopianism of the New Left: Conflict is not inevitable...
...they live in a debatable land, which each party attacks and neither defends...
...A cynic might conclude that what these liberals are really trying to move beyond is the number 43-the percentage of Americans who vote for liberal presidential candidates...
...Asking that categories be as rigorously enforceable as scientific taxonomy is asking too much...
...People with definite creeds don't have to reinvent the wheel...
...The second has to do with the word "problems...
...Another species may think more acutely in an atmosphere of friendship and cooperation, but for most people, a good motivation to argue well is to humiliate the sons of bitches on the other side...
...most conflicts can be hammered out with cooperation and better communication...
...In the war of ideas, battalions do well...
...An evangelical Christian finds himself linked with, and learning from, Orange County libertarians and New York Jewish neoconservatives...
...They are new...
...Things are often irreconcilable...
...Nor are those Beyond trapped in the past...
...In the end Bill and Al probably had no choice but to veer left...
...Conservatives and liberals inherit intellectual traditions...
...In recent administrations there has always been at least one person who is filled with new ideas and who thinks in new categories...
...And in these prestigious circles, there were no yahoos to be found...
...They are different...
...Look at the newsletters put out by the CATO Institute or the American Enterprise Institute...
...Questions nag...
...At each turn the Tired Old Labels sang to me in the seductive voice of the Siren, and I could have been sucked back, as an editorial in the Democratic Leadership Council's magazine warned, into "the ideological and interest group battles of the Industrial Era...
...Well, in engineering, problems may be solved, but in politics it's never over...
...Man is not a perfectible creature, so any effort to address one fault inevitably opens up other (and hopefully smaller) faults...
...The choice we face is not between progress with conflict and progress without conflict...
...One of the virtues of being a member of a movement is that it takes you outside your own narrow concerns and forces you to consider others unlike yourself...
...A symptom of the problem, he writes, is that Americans talk about "issues" instead of problems: "Problems are solved...
...Movements nurture the young...
...Each issue is not just another front in a polarizing culture war...
...These premises, of course, were the basis of the New Left's approach to the Cold War...
...At their worst, they seem like Kevin Phillips-solitary complainers who inveigh against a world that will not live up to their standards...
...We need politics to deal with the things it is good at dealing with-the practical matters like schools and roads, education and jobs," Dionne writes...
...But at long last I crossed the meridian into a new, post-Cold War/Information Age/Global Economy era that requires fresh approaches and new thinking...
...When Bradley announced his retirement, dozens of articles noted that he had given intelligent speeches on subjects like race...
...It is this web of friendships that gives a creed its dynamism...
...Conservatives go around wearing Adam Smith neckties...
...Liberals promote one set of virtues, a lot of them having to do with compassion...
...They offer mundane things like job opportunities, but they also impart education and give their members a sense of higher purpose...
...Such people don't think about the center but force the center to move toward them...
...Conferences and bulletin boards, parties and dinners reinforce the bonds...
...In the New Democrat, the DLC magazine, Michael Rothschild notes that by the year 2000, 2 billion microchips will flow from factories every week...
...Similarly, Congressional Beyondists stride through their careers amidst great press clippings and provocative speeches, but offer little in the way of realigning legislation...
...Liberals may be out of fashion, but they still stand for big policies (national health insurance) and they still have the institutions (the AARP and NOW) and the political might to mobilize behind those policies...
...The choice is between conflict and stagnation...
...On the contrary: They understand we are living in an unprecedented age...
...When David Gergen went to join the Clinton White House, the president praised him for his "sense of patriotism that transcends partisanship...
...it is, above all the source of discovery, the source of art, the source of love...
...As a group, the Beyondists are reasonable and open-minded...
...It also explains why members of the Christian Coalition are more tolerant of outsiders than outsiders are of them...
...What's needed, they say, is that we begin a process of rethinking...
...Clinton and Gore campaigned as Beyondists and still talk the game, but when it comes to governing, they have produced just two Beyondist policies, Americorps and Reinventing Government, neither of which is a realigning reform...
...People gossip, people talk...
...they can learn from lines of thinkers who shared their basic precepts...
...That's a political movement in action...
...And no other programs could have done so because important political problems are not solvable in any final sense...
...and traverse what Bill Bradley refers to as the Two Familiar Ruts...
...It isn't over how to solve a plumbing problem...
...They categorize others while remaining uncategorized...
...Domestically, conservative and liberal magazines form their own communities...
...I don't buy shoes that way...
...The labels "liberal" and "conservative" have survived at least a half century of charges that they are obsolete...
...A pre-1960s liberal, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr...
...The entire Democratic Leadership Council was there, circulating quickly to make themselves appear more numerous...
...For example, why is it always Democrats who argue that labels don't matter anymore...
...But in the end they get little accomplished...
...The War on Poverty did not "solve" poverty, affirmative action did not "solve" racism...
...Though they are the best of rulers for the world, they are the last persons to be likely to rule...
...When Oliver North called him a liberal, Mario Cuomo protested, "I don't like your labels...
...And the champions of these two "ideologies" spend their time struggling to give greater weight to their own constellation of virtues...
...At their best they are acute observers, but observers only...
...The Beyondists have gone past the old creeds, but it is not clear whether those beliefs have been replaced by anything else...
...The problem is that unless they reach a compelling conclusion, they remain more defined by their desire to stay in The Land Beyond than by their ability to actually arrive at something else...
...Rarely motivated by personal animosities, they can be generous and fair with people on all sides...
...This is a time of such profound change that we need a dynamic center, that is not in the middle of what is left and right, but is way beyond it...
...Dionne wrote a 400-page book on the need to go beyond the old false choices, and in his final chapter he lays out some key policy ideas: Make the tax code more progressive by raising taxes on the rich...
...And it is a healthy competition...
...The Beyondists are above the compromise that membership in a movement entails, as they are beyond partisan politics...
...More recently, Milton Friedman, Lionel Trilling, James Burnham, and others did some heavy lifting...
...create a national service program for the young...
...It is the "ideologues" who set the agenda by moving out in front of the debate, and they define the field of play by defining the ground over which the debate will be fought...
...In this new age, the argument isn't over more government or less government...
...This was the song of the modernists about a hundred years ago too...
...it's not necessary for today's conservatives to do it all over again...
...Liberals have to worry about being embarrassed by Louis Farrakhan, while conservatives are tied to Pat Robertson's books...
Vol. 1 • October 1995 • No. 3
