This week features the last presidential election of the 20th century. I say this not to associate myself with the pedants who insist the 21st century doesn’t begin until January 1, 2001. I say it because this campaign has been about the familiar issues of the latter part of this century, not about the big questions of the next.
There’s not necessarily anything wrong with this. Social Security, tax cuts, integrity in the Oval Office — all these are legitimate and important issues, if somewhat familiar ones. Elections are usually about familiar issues, featuring familiar debates and positions, and there’s no reason this one should have been different. In fact, one could go further: The common refrain that elections are (or should be) about the future, not the past, is silly. Past performance is what we know a lot about. Voters have the information on which to make retrospective judgments; prospective ones are much trickier. And voters are more comfortable weighing familiar issues than novel ones.
Still, it’s fair to point out that the debate this year hasn’t given us much guidance about the fundamental issues of the next few years. It’s also fair to point out that this year’s election may tell us little about what lies ahead. What decade stands out in our minds as one of unprecedented change and turmoil? The 1960s. What election utterly failed to foreshadow the dominant trends of that decade? The election of 1960. That campaign was a conventional contest between 1950s moderate liberalism and 1950s moderate conservatism. John F. Kennedy’s campaign barely prefigured the huge developments on the left in the 1960s — the civil rights revolution, student radicalism, feminism, etc. And Richard Nixon’s campaign offered almost no hint of the rise of modern conservatism to dominance in the GOP via Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan.
The election of 2000 will, I suspect, look to historians much like that of 1960. The results either way (this magazine is being printed 72 hours before the polls open) will not speak to certain fundamental issues of the decade ahead.
America’s role in the post-Cold War world? Minimally and confusingly debated this year, with a focus on the least illuminating questions (Is the military overextended? Is there enough burden-sharing in Kosovo?) rather than the more important ones (America’s relations with China, our role in Colombia’s drug wars, our acceptance or rejection of a neo-imperial role in the world).
Reviving real citizenship and self-government? Only glancingly addressed by Gore and Bush, with very little discussion of curbing the courts or reforming campaigns or enacting school choice or challenging corporate welfare. The prospect of Brave New World-type “advances” in science and technology? Ignored. Religion in politics, gay rights, the defense of the family and of the unborn — nervously avoided (by both sides) as much as possible.
I don’t know what the next decade will bring. But I strongly suspect we will spend much of our time debating these kinds of issues. The 2000 campaign hasn’t given us much help in this task. As Eric Cohen pointed out in last week’s issue, we’ve had a small election despite the fact that big issues loom before us. But the big issues won’t go away.
This suggests that the winning party especially should be careful when it extrapolates from the results this year. It won’t necessarily be on a roll. Losing parties as a matter of course try to reinvent themselves for the next round. This time both parties may need to rethink the future.
William Kristol
