THE LAND BEYOND LEFT AND RIGHT

— Bill Clinton

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 to navigate past the Scylla of liberalism and the Charybdis of conservatism; steer” around what E. J. Dionne has called the False Choices; and traverse what Bill Bradley refers to as the To Familiar Ruts.

At each turn the Tired Old Libels 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.” 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.

I docked at the Land Beyond Left and Right and was confronted with a fan of roadways, all of them marked, “To the Center.” The sun was shining, and everybody was sitting around watching Ken Bode’s Washington Week in Review.$ N

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. They are new. They are different.” 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. The entire Democratic Leadership Council was there, circulating quickly to make themselves appear more numerous. 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 social scale of politics peaks in the center. And in these prestigious circles, there were no yahoos to be found. People who insist on adhering to liberalism or conservatism find themselves linked. Liberals have to worry about being embarrassed by Louis Farrakhan, while conservatives are tied to Pat Robertson’s books.

But those who have taken up permanent residence in the Land Beyond are tied to no one. They sometimes call on those still clinging to the Tired Old Labels to repudiate their allies, but they themselves never have to repudiate anyone. They categorize others while remaining uncategorized.

Nonetheless, a traveler in their midst is tempted to make a few generalizatio ns. As a group, the Beyondists are reasonable and open-minded. Rarely motivated by personal animosities, they can be generous and fair with people on all sides . In a world in which to be liberal is politically untenable and to be conserva tive is socially unacceptable, it is a wonderful thing to be beyond left and right.

The Land Beyond is, in design, a practical place. Each issue is not just another front in a polarizing culture war. Instead, the Beyondists can begin each problem anew, forgetting bigger fights and getting down to an open exchange about the nitty gritty. “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.

In the Land Beyond, many people are able to rise above politics and the tawdry partisan fray. 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. When David Gergen went to join the Clinton White House, the president praised him for his “sense of patriotism that transcends partisanship.” Beyondists recognize that both extremes contain a grain of truth and the best solution probably lies somewhere in between.

Nor are those Beyond trapped in the past. On the contrary: They understand we are living in an unprecedented age. In the New Democrat, the DLC magazine, Michael Rothschild notes that by the year 2000, 2 billion microchips will flow from factories every week. In the new information age, he says, the left-right divide “will seem as anachronistic as Checkpoint Charlie.” In this new age, the argument” isn’t over more government or less government; it’s over better government.

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. 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 on the second day in this land, clouds appear. Questions nag. For example, why is it always Democrats who argue that labels don’t matter anymore? When Oliver North called him a liberal, Mario Cuomo protested, ” don’t like your labels. I don’t buy shoes that way.” Barbara Mikulski wrote in the $ IWashington Post that the words liberal and conservative “have become cliches . . . with little meaning.” 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.

But even among the intellectuals, Beyondists are likely to have liberal pedigrees. Sometimes they seem loosely akin to the non-aligned bloc in the Cold War, loudly nonaligned, yet somehow usually siding with one side.

E. J. 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; reform welfare by increasing benefits to the working poor; create a national service program for the young. Four hundred pages is a long way to go to wind up back at tax hikes for the rich.

Conservatives, by contrast, seem to be quite happy with the conservative label. They embrace it. It seems coherent and meaningful to them. Republican candidates call themselves conservatives, even if the label doesn’t really apply. It may be that the effort to move beyond labels has less to do with the exhaustion of ideologies than it does with the exhaution of liberalism.

But the peace in the Land Beyond is darkened by a deeper anxiety. The Beyondists have gone past the old creeds, but it is not clear whether those beliefs have been replaced by anything else.

In recent administrations there has always been at least one person who is filled with new ideas and who thinks in new categories. The Bush administration was graced by New Paradigmer James Pinkerton, and until recently, the Clinton administration had its William Galston. Journalists love these visionaries, for they are interesting and provocative. But in the end they get little accomplished. Legislation has to go to Congress and troops must be mobilized. The new thinkers have trouble mobilizing power. Similarly, Congressional Beyondists stride through their careers amidst great press clippings and provocative speeches, but offer little in the way of realigning legislation.

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. In the end Bill and Al probably had no choice but to veer left. On the budget and on health care, they did not try to forge new Beyondist coalitions, but sought traditional partisan Democratic triumphs instead. 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.

And it is not only that the Beyondists are unable to mobilize political power ; intellectually, their best ideas are perpetually just over the horizon. What’s needed, they say, is that we begin a process of rethinking. They are great at beginnings. 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.

Beyondists like Bill Bradley are free-floating individuals, producing documents that are thoughtful but with little resonance. When Bradley announced his retirement, dozens of articles noted that he had given intelligent speeches on subjects like race. Nobody pointed to a single big idea or a novel approach that had been introduced in those speeches. 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.

The central problem with Beyondists and centrists is that they misunderstand the way ideas are developed. 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 There are two flaws in this sentiment. The first has to do with the phrase “come together.” The second has to do with the word “problems.”

“Coming together” was big in the 1960s. Songs, speakers, and pamphlets were perpetually urging people to do it. It was at the heart of the utopianism of the New Left: Conflict is not inevitable; different views are reconcilable; most conflicts can be hammered out with co-operation and better communication These premises, of course, were the basis of the New Left’s approach to the Cold War.

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. They may have shed the content of some 60s ideas, but they absorbed 60s ideas about how the world should work The idea that the purpose of politics is to solve “problems” has deeper roots — in rationalism. The Beyondists are big on solving problems. In Why Americans Hate Politics,$ N 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.” A symptom of the problem, he “writes, is that Americans talk about “issues” instead of problems: ” Problems are solved; issues are merely what politicians use to divide the citizenry and advance themselves “ 

Well, in engineering, problems may be solved, but in politics it’s never over. The War on Poverty did not “solve” poverty, affirmative action did not ” solve” racism. And no other programs could have done so because important political problems are not solvable in any final sense. Man is not a perfectible creature, so any effort to address one fault inevitably opens up other (and hopefully smaller) faults.

A pre-1960s liberal, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. 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 tenion, breeding contradiction, breeding strife. . . . For conflict is alone the guarantee of freedom; it is the instrument of change; it is, above all the source of dscovery, the source of art, the source of love The choice we face is not between progress with conflict and progress without conflict. The choice is between conflict and stagnation.”

Things are often irreconcilable; that is a sad reality. Liberals promote one set of virtues, a lot of them having to do with compassion. Conservatives promote another set of virtues, a lot of them having to do with achievement. And the champions of these two “ideologies” spend their time struggling to give greater weight to their own constellation of virtues. The labels “liberal” and “conservative” have survived at least a half century of charges that they are obsolete. They have done so because they represent two worldviews that are not compatible.

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 isn’t over how to solve a plumbing problem. It’s a long competition between virtues.

And it is a healthy competition. Some Soviets, and some Western neoconservatives such as Jean-Francois Revel, thought that the democracies would lose the Cold War because they were always tearing themselves apart with internal disputes between right and left. But as it transpired, these internal disputes allowed the West to remain dynamic and creative. 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.

Debates are not dominated by the loosely tethered individuals who declare themselves above the partisan fray. They are dominated by people who are self-conscious about their premises and firm in their conclusions, who nail their theses to a door.

Such people don’t think about the center but force the center to move toward them. 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 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. If you watch David Gcrgen 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.

A politically plausible idea — let’s stay with welfare reform — rarely emerges full-blown from a single person or group. It is produced by a struggle between left and right. Michael Novak hits from one side, William Julius Wilson hits from another. They never reconcile, but each side learns from the assault of the other. Voters then choose which approach will dominate.

The Beyondists have several disadvantages when they enter the battle of ideas. In the first place, they always start from square one. Their boast, echoing President Clinton, is that we are in an unprecedented age demanding new thinking. This was the song of the modernists about a hundred years ago too. But as the history of modernism shows, while “it is exhilarating to begin anew, “fresh” ideas have a way of failing. The ones that work have been tested over time.

People with definite creeds don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Conservatives and liberals inherit intellectual traditions; they can learn from lines of thinkers who shared their basic precepts.” Conservatives go around wearing Adam Smith neckties. They cite Burke or Jefferson or Aquinas. More recently, Milton Friedman, Lionel Trilling, James Burnham, and others did some heavy lifting; it’s not necessary for today’s conservatives to do it all over again. Beyondists have to start from scratch.

The labeled have an even greater advantage over the labelless. Liberals and conservatives join movements. 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. Domestically, conservative and liberal magazines form their own communities. Conferences and bulletin boards, parties and dinners reinforce the bonds. “

It is this web of friendships that gives a creed its dynamism. People gossip, people talk. Look at the newsletters put out by the CATO Institute or the American Enterprise Institute; there will be photos of politicians and think tankers and academics standing in happy conversational klatches, clutching cocktail glasses against their stomachs. That’s a political movement in action.

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. An evangelical Christian finds himself linked with, and learning from, Orange County libertarians and New York Jewish neoconservatives. This breeds a sense of tolerance for those whose brand of conservatism may differ. It also explains why members of the Christian Coalition are more tolerant of outsiders than outsiders are of them.

Beyondists point to contradictions between those who call themselves conservatives, and so declare that the labels have no meaning. Asking that categories be as rigorously enforceable as scientific taxonomy is asking too much. They are loose groupings — conservatism emphasized Kempism in the 1980s and emphasizes Kasichery in the 1990s. They contain diversity (from Ralph Reed to P. J. O’Rourke) while maintaining solidarity.

Movements nurture the young. They offer mundane things like job opportunities, but they also impart education and give their members a sense of higher purpose. In the war of ideas, battalions do well. Each foot soldier makes an unconscious deal: He dispossesses himself of the privilege of being uncategorizable and completely autonomous, and in exchange he gets a place in the larger movement.

The Beyondists are above the compromise that membership in a movement entails, as they are beyond partisan politics. In short they are above the fray. At their worst, they seem like Kevin Phillips — solitary complainers who inveigh against a world that will not live up to their standards. At their best they are acute observers, but observers only.

So one leaves the Land Beyond Left and Right remembering what the 19th-centur y 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; t hey live in a debatable land, which each party attacks and neither defends. . . . They m ust endure the tedium of inaction, and bear the constant sense of irritating helplessness.

Though they are the best of rulers for the world, they are the last persons to be likely to rule.”