There are times when things are good and “societies rest and the human race seems to take breath,” Tocqueville wrote. In such times, as in the American 1830s he was describing, a nation’s civic affairs appear “firmly settled on certain fundamentals” and its people lose interest in the risk or possibility of any different future. “Great men seem to disappear suddenly, and minds withdraw into themselves.” And “great political parties” — those “more attached to principles than to consequences” and “to ideas rather than to personalities” — are nowhere to be seen.
What pass for issues in such a satisfied era are mostly “wretched trifles” tossed back and forth in the course of “incomprehensible or puerile” factional quarreling. But the lust for public office remains permanently intense, Tocqueville noted. And because “it is difficult to turn the man in power out simply for the reason that one would like to take his place,” politicians are eager to insist that they are about something nobler. That is to say, they are always “concerned to discover whether by chance there may not be somewhere in the world a doctrine or a principle that could conveniently be placed at the head” of their platform of trifles. Then they might pretend to represent more than just their own ambitions. Then they might claim to embody an actual Philosophy.
Were he alive today, amidst the generalized contentment that is contemporary America, Alexis de Tocqueville would instantly recognize our “New Democrats” for what they are. It isn’t much.
Two weeks ago in Washington, Democratic Leadership Council president Al From held a press conference to report, as he is periodically wont to do, that President Clinton, the New Democrats’ man among men, has been the dominant personality in American politics in the 1990s. Which is undoubtedly true. From went on to say that national discourse now revolves around a “vital center” of public opinion — which has almost never not been true — and that “a majority of Americans and the vast majority of independents and swing voters now embrace” this vital center. Which is true, if tautological. Then From issued what Tocqueville would think a bit of inevitable grandiosity. The New Democratic vital center, From proclaimed, “is not merely a halfway point between the old left and the old right.” It is “a new center, a progressive center” grounded in “an increasingly coherent set of core principles and beliefs.”
Which plainly isn’t true. And never has been true in any serious respect, as is unintentionally made clear by Kenneth S. Baer’s just-published Reinventing Democrats, a highly sympathetic history of the DLC and its allegedly distinct “public philosophy.” Al From and his allies are intelligent and honorable men who became convinced in the early 1980s that the Democratic party’s “liberal fundamentalism” — its libertarian morality, Washington-centered economics, and timidity about foreign affairs — was outmoded and wrong. But as Baer tells the story, the question how (or even whether) liberalism might have gone wrong as a political idea seems not to have concerned the new DLC. The organization was intent simply on persuading its fellow Democrats that the party’s left-leaning orthodoxies, clearly expressed, were a losing political strategy. Winning, From & Co. argued, would depend on the ability of “New Democrats” to occupy the same mainstream territory lately so successfully colonized by Republicans.
It was the DLC’s genuine insight that this project might be carried off purely at the level of headquarters rhetoric. The group did no grass-roots organizing or advocacy. It did no legislative lobbying in Congress. It was, Kenneth S. Baer explains, exclusively “an organization of political elites” designed to help other political elites appeal to already existing, half-articulated popular impulses. And after 1988, Baer reveals, it was also an organization almost entirely mortgaged to the career of its deliberately chosen, perfect salesman. DLC chairman Bill Clinton, wheedler par excellence, would promise to “mend it, not end it.” Clinton would propose that abortion be “safe, legal, and rare.” Clinton would begin his 1992 presidential campaign by declaring — in a line lifted verbatim from a DLC pamphlet — that being a New Democrat “isn’t liberal or conservative; it’s both and different.”
The essential emptiness of this “philosophy” is suggested by the ease with which it has since been adopted by the very same old Democrats who once reviled it as apostasy. In the formative late 1980s, liberal stalwarts like Ann Lewis, Ron Brown, Harold Ickes, and Sidney Blumenthal all derided the DLC as an appeaser of conservatism. All later went directly and happily to work for the appeaser-in-chief’s administration — either because they decided Clinton didn’t really mean it, or because they convinced themselves that keeping Republicans out of the White House was the most important principle of all. Even Jesse Jackson, who once called the New Democratic party an attempt to be “all things to all people . . . kind of like warm spit,” has made himself the president’s best friend. They are all New Democrats now.
Hillary Clinton, Senate candidate, says “I’m a New Democrat.” She says government is not the solution to our problems. She proposes a million different ways government can be a solution to our problems, of course: more micro-credit vouchers for Mom and Pop start-ups! But those are just policy details. She, too, is New. The mood’s the thing, and the slogan alone is sufficient to establish the mood.
Al Gore, presidential candidate, wins the endorsement of liberal fundamentalism’s high church, the AFL-CIO. The very next day, he gives a DLC convention audience a screeching, old-religion sermon about how Republicans are having “private meetings” with “the right-wing extreme groups” and plan to turn the next three Supreme Court appointments over to “Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson.” The DLC applauds. Then Gore spends the next few months slaughtering Bill Bradley for betraying the entitlement-program treasures of the New Deal and Great Society. The DLC applauds again. Al is their boy, as New as they come.
What can all this possibly mean?
It means nothing. We have had a “third way” presidency for seven years now. It has produced just a single large-scale, ideologically significant reform of law and social practice, and that only reluctantly: the repeal of cradle-to-grave welfare dependency. New Democratic politics has otherwise produced nothing but the cross-tabulated results of an endless stream of focus groups and telephone surveys: a 24/7 effort to figure out what voters want before they even know they want it — and then give it to them, so long as it’s really small. Better nutrition labels on supermarket juice cans? The president is prepared to address the nation on the subject.
Apologies to Al From, but warm spit does not make for a “coherent set of principles and beliefs.”
In the rich and happy and peaceful present, warm spit does make for popularity and success at the polls, to be sure. That is to be expected, as Tocqueville advised. And it might even be okay — for a while. The country is entitled to an occasional breather from the unsettling demands of genuine political thought and argument, after all. The vacation will cost us little. Until, that is, today becomes tomorrow. And tomorrow brings some renewed or novel difficulty. And we are once again obliged to figure out our collective troubles and argue among ourselves about the solutions and somehow make them work.
The New Democrats, having spent their Clintonian regency shining the public’s shoes and fleeing controversy, will be useless when this happens; they have forgotten how to guide national debate — on purpose. Republicans, by contrast, have remained at least partly alive to the messy play of big ideas these past few years. Will they be willing to run that risk again? Or will they, too, succumb to the blandishment of third-way brainlessness? That, it seems to us, will be the key question in American politics for the rest of 2000. George W. Bush and John McCain — and soon enough, just one of them — will have to answer it. We hope they answer wisely. It would be nice to have at least one political party that isn’t stupid by design.
David Tell, for the Editors
