Among the presidential candidates, Bushism is under siege. So is Clintonism. And there is no reason to celebrate the downfall of either.
The immigration debate is a reminder to the memory-impaired that President Bush ran and won in 2000 as "a different kind of Republican" -- meaning the kind that isn't libertarian or nativist. Bush was orthodox on tax cuts and moral values. But from the earliest days of the nomination contest, he set out policies -- a federal role in improving education, humane immigration reform, Medicare prescription drug coverage -- that borrowed more from Roman Catholic social thought than from Friedrich Hayek.
--snip--
The criticism was insightful. Clinton had run and won in 1992 in much the same way, calling himself "a different kind of Democrat" and reaching out to middle-ground voters early in the primaries when his image as a candidate was still plastic. Will Marshall, one of the main theorists behind Clintonism, recalls that "every time we were down in the polls, and Clinton talked about 'ending welfare as we know it,' he would rebound." Clinton supported the death penalty, promoted global trade and signaled centrism on national security. All these were intended as early contrasts to Mario Cuomo's liberal fundamentalism.
Today, in both parties, fundamentalism is again the fashion; authenticity is the prime directive. Talk-radio conservatism assaults the most obviously Catholic elements of Bushism -- a role for government in compassion and a welcoming attitude toward immigrants. "Purity" is defined as the empathy of Tom DeLay and the racial sensitivity of Tom Tancredo.
Authenticity on the bitter blogs of the left means a revolt against the centrist, Democratic establishment -- a ritual patricide to establish the ascendancy of the politically hungry and uncompromised. On trade and globalization, Clintonism is the enemy. On foreign policy, "blame America first" has become "blame America exclusively."
Should you have missed the impact of this beginning, please go back and re-read it. In Gerson's imagination, Bush had some kind of intellectual heritage. In Gerson's imagination, indeed, Bush won in 2000. In Gerson's imagination, Bill Clinton's intellectually dubious "Third Way" offered a serious alternative to the hard-line neo-cons and the emerging lefty consensus that is available on many left-leaning blogs. In Gerson's imagination, the left-leaning blogs are "bitter", we engage in "ritual patricide" (sic; the word is "parricide", Gerson), and we "'blame America exclusively'" (as if we had responsibility for the actions of other countries).
This set up, creating all sorts of fictions that allow Gerson to mourn our current political discourse, is so wrong on so many levels, one can only imagine that its source lies in discussions Gerson had with colleague David Broder, who is also wedded to the fiction of a political center.
Let us dispose of one thing right away, and that is that emerging theme of "authenticity". Should one care, Bob Somerby at The Daily Howler has a piece today on the way "authenticity" becomes a narrative trope with which Beltway pundits can beat Democrats. "Authenticity" is a word that journalists can use to sound profound, but it all comes down to questions of perception, style, and preference, rather than substantive issues of governance, competence, and policy. It is the media that is obsessed with "authenticity"; we polloi are much more concerned with questions of substance than style. To introduce this non-sequitur into the discussion is a tell-tale signal that Gerson is writing from some Beltway perch, full of all sorts of hand-wringing over the sorry state of our current political discourse, in which people are passionately engaged precisely because there is so much at stake.
Let us be brave and read on, shall we?
Republican and Democratic candidates have generally avoided the most extreme expressions of these movements but seem content to drift in their currents. Few have offered policy proposals that reach toward the middle by challenging the orthodoxy of their party. Mitt Romney has distanced himself from his own innovative Massachusetts health-care reform -- fearful that his hidden virtues of creativity and bipartisanship might be exposed in public. Barack Obama is a teller of uncomfortable truths as a stylistic matter, but he has yet to take stands that defy liberal fundamentalism in the way Bill Clinton did. None of the main candidates for president, including one named Clinton, is attempting to win office in the same way that the last two two-term presidents won office.
There are reasons for this shift. Unlike 2000, Republicans are struggling with an unpopular war that has resulted in an unpopular incumbent president; merely rallying the base seems a large enough task. Unlike 1992, Democrats are reacting to what they believe is a massive Republican failure, not the massive Democratic failure of the Mondale/Dukakis exile; there is little appetite for the politics of introspection and self-correction.
All this may be part of a natural political cycle that alternates consolidation and reform. But this does not change the fact that something is being lost. The centrism of 1992 and 2000 eventually yielded welfare reform, education reform and prescription drugs for millions of seniors. Similar bipartisan efforts are objectively necessary to extend health insurance coverage and to stabilize our entitlement systems. The early stages of the presidential season offer few reasons for hope on that agenda.
The abandonment of Bushism and Clintonism is also leaving many Americans ideologically homeless: Catholics who regard themselves as pro-life, pro-immigrant and pro-poor; young evangelicals more exercised by millions dying of AIDS in Africa than by the continued existence of the Education Department; liberals who do not find their liberalism inconsistent with national strength or opposition to Islamic radicalism, the most illiberal force on Earth. All this alienation may, in a saner time, be the basis of a movement that mitigates polarization instead of glorying in it.
In the meantime, we are left with an odd spectacle: a field of strong, accomplished candidates who seldom say anything that isn't entirely predictable. Instead, they cheerfully reconfirm destructive stereotypes of their parties that Bush and Clinton labored mightily to change.
Let us move backward through this snippet. First, the destruction of Bush Republicanism is welcome precisely because it is itself destructive in practice (outside the kind of fuzzy inconsistent rhetoric Bush engaged in during the 2000 campaign) of pretty much everything in the American Constitution, American law, tradition, history, indeed our very social fabric. Somehow, this all goes unsaid because to take these realities in to consideration would be to be "bitter" rather than realistic. To the description of the candidates in either party, but especially in the Republican Party as "strong" and "accomplished" made me throw up in my mouth I laughed so hard. The media's favorite, Mitt Romney, was described accurately by Barney Frank as the most intellectually dishonest person in the race. The current GOP front-runner, Rudy Giuliani, is a borderline sociopath whose mouth and sphincter seem to be interchangeable. Giuliani's appeal, it seems, comes from the fact that he talks all tough; that is what makes so many of us in the rest of what is called the real world so nervous. We have had enough of this feaux-macho nonsense. He may offer red meat to Republican primary voters, but he sends up red flags to the rest of us.
As for all those millions supposedly ideologically homeless, all I can say is this: who are they? I realize Gerson lists who they might be, but I want to know who they actually are. If this imaginary center were so powerful, where has it been since January, 2001? Why is it not represented in Congress more strongly? Why have neither party appealed to it, except in the recently failed and unlamented immigration "reform" bill? The reason is obvious, except to Gerson - it doesn't exist. The evolving political alignment - most clearly demonstrated by the public unhappiness with Democrats in Congress for failing to stand up to the President on setting a time-table for Iraq withdrawal - is not one pivoting around a center, but rather pitching to the left on a host of issues precisely because of the failures, multiple, continuous, and most likely perpetual, of what he calls "Bushism" and the rest of America knows as "conservatism". Good riddance to bad rubbish.
The idea that none of the candidates in this election cycle seem to be running from some imaginary center, from which, in Gerson's world, both Clinton and Bush ran two successful campaigns, is because it doesn't exist. Clinton ran from the "center" because he was campaigning in a period of Republican dominance. Bush ran from the "center" because he and his campaign were intellectually dishonest. We live in changed times, as Gerson notes (albeit grudgingly, and without a thought that changed times might warrant changed approaches to politics), but he insists that there is some huddled mass out there, missing out on what it yearns for - what Arthur Schlesinger once referred to as "the vital center". It no longer exists, if indeed it ever did, and our politics is a reflection, not of the imaginary polarization due to outside influences, but the very real polarization due to our current situation.
This is the kind of Insider punditry that makes one's blood boil and one feel sad, simultaneously. So full of nonsense and unreality, it cries out for our major media organs to offer commentary that is consistent with the reality offered up by the news pages, not the least of which are poll results. Gerson's piece is but the latest in a long line of Washington elite pieces that desires something that doesn't exist - a kind of status quo ante bellum in which the elites who made the opinions which the insiders used to govern was dispensed for our ritual consumption without question, comment, or interference from the real world.
