Consequences of the Clinton Victory: Essays on the First Year Edited by Peter W. Schramm

At first sight, the chatter about Michael Lerner, the first lady's house philosopher, and his sloganeering "politics of meaning" has almost nothing to do with what has actually happened in the past year. Quite likely Nancy Reagan's astrologer had as much impact, i.e., almost none, on the eighties as Mrs. Clinton's Yoda will have had on the events of the early nineties.

Two things stand out in the last year's political doings: first, a fairly bumbling adjustment to being in power, accentuated by intellectual arrogance and naivete (e.g., the fiascoes of Bosnia and Somalia and the domestic disasters of the travel bureau and the Guinier nomination), and distorted by a touching desire to be universally liked; second, an administration that, whatever its radical tendencies, seems to be settling into an unprincipled centrist course that on occasion reminds me of nothing so much as its immediate predecessor. (It may be of course, that the image of bumbling, Bushy centrism is largely a mask and that the administration deserves credit for cunning long range leftism. For instance, the corporatist deal with Detroit could be read, a la Schumpeter, as getting the candidates for hanging to clamor for the rope. And perhaps it is not just conspiracy addicts who could suspect that the evidently underfinanced health care plan is designed to fail so that a public that has learned to expect universal care will arrive at "single payer" as the only alternative.) Still, I had certainly expected, going in, that the ideological Left of the party would do better than it has on its pet issues; I was surprised that Clinton withdrew Guinier's name and it seems that Ruth Bader Ginsburg is no Lawrence Tribe.

Overall, while it has been a liberal administration, Clinton's hasn't been a very liberal one. On the budget, caught in the vise grip of years of deficit spending, voted by Democratic Congresses, permitted by Republican presidents, Clinton has, it seems to me, done very little good but perhaps done harm mostly only by doing merely symbolic good. (Here it is worth referring to Irving Kristol's 1980 prophecy that even the failure of supply side economics would leave the Democrats in the mess they usually make for Republicans.) On health care, the difference between Clinton and the Republicans, while important and while characteristic of overall outlooks, seems in many ways technical and compromisable. And the decision to undertake the task in the first place, the greatest obvious difference between Clinton and Bush, is less attributable in my view to the leftist desire to tinker with absolutely everything than to Bush's smug belief that it was sufficient to have a domestic policy of frustrating whatever the Congress wanted. (To paraphrase Patrick Henry, if this was federalism, Bush sure didn't make the most of it.) In short, medicine has advanced so much in the last half century that our life chances really do depend greatly on the amount and kind of medical care we get and as a result, as Congressional Republicans now also admit, in a democratic society devoted to risk reduction, access to it can't be left to catch as catch can. Bush thus blew an opportunity and Clinton, tutored by James Carville, deserves neither great praise nor blame for noticing it.

On NAFTA, Clinton deserves credit for supporting it but seems to have left it till it is likely too late. Here is an issue which does not divide neatly right and left anyway; it is largely an elite vs. populist issue in which the populist side is thumpingly wrong. It was issues like this that led the Founders to arrange to have the Senate indirectly elected and the states to establish property qualifications for the vote. That is, it is an issue where immediate pain for some is traded for immediate, medium and long term gain for all. In politics, interests can hardly help screaming when hurt, (though the shortsightedness of the unions on this one doesn't do much to clear them from the charge of reaction) nor is the greater invulnerability of the monetarily unchallenged much to their moral credit. The fact remains that this kind of issue is a test of a nation's political health. The elites have to be confident enough to stand the barracking they will get from the Naders, Kirklands, Buchanans and Perots. Clinton's job here is to stand up against public opinion; indeed, here is where some of his New Class arrogance would (and Al Gore's has) come in handy. As I write, the vote hangs in the balance, and while Clinton has given it the old Yale try, it remains that he has not followed William Kristol's intelligent advice of giving an Oval office speech to the nation, putting all his prestige on the line and making of NAFTA first and foremost a national security issue.

And on foreign policy, Clinton's course has been determinedly centrist. His support of Yeltsin took some guts, given an elite media that is full of a strange spite against democratic Russia. (Not so strange perhaps; it can partly be explained by the lazy habit of applying ACLU standards to every regime that is friendly to us, partly too by a Gorby-crush they haven't gotten over yet and of course partly too—cf. Stephen Cohen's rebarbative presence on CBS and PBS—by the shame at having their rejection of the very possibility of democracy in Russia—which in turn functioned as backhanded apologias for the communist USSR—repeatedly shown up.)

On Somalia, muddled thinking and neglect made an overt botch out of what was probably an implicit botch when Bush undertook it. After all, what was supposed to happen when we had fed the starving and pulled out again? Either more civil war and more starvation or feeble, UN-based efforts at nation building. On Bosnia, as far as William Safire, whom I trust, can tell, Clinton's humane instincts came up against either Christopher's incompetence, his timidity, or his cold-blooded State Department professionalism, and lost. The policies that emerged in both places, while disasters, are certainly recognizably centrist disasters. On Haiti, ditto, though as I rewrite, it is (ever more faintly) possible that Clinton may even come off looking good, if the renewed embargo actually causes the military rulers to cave and allow the elected ruler, with all his rumored faults, to take over.

In the Middle East Clinton has had the good sense not to push the Israelis too hard when they were pushing themselves, to make their life a little easier at the time of the effort to exile the Hamas leaders, and to give extremely necessary moral support to Israel as it undertakes its momentous gamble. Of course Warren Christopher failed to get the Arab boycott of Israel lifted, even when no excuse for it exists any longer, but this does not suggest that he was not using his persuasive powers, such as they are, to the very maximum. Again, a centrist policy, and this time a generally sensible one.

The "politics of meaning" then would seem to be a stylistic excrescence, about the same thing for Clinton as Bush's "new world order," his desperate grasp for something in the "vision thing" line. We actually have before us a politics of re-election, tempered somewhat by a desire to do a liberal's view of good whenever it's electorally safe. And so, safely ensconced in Yes Minister land, we can see the importance of having court poets or philosophers to give the illusion, so helpful to getting reelected, that one is not just interested in getting reelected but absorbed by the "politics of meaning." The meaning of the politics of meaning would thus be its meaninglessness.

If we look at the Clinton administration, as we have, from the viewpoint of Washington, of adherents and enemies, this line of argument makes sense. But if we look at it from outside, from the point of view of what is going on in the country the administration largely only pretends to govern, the politics of meaning has a real, and genuinely foolish, meaning.

The politics of meaning, in Hillary Rodham Clinton's version, as she explained it to Michael Kelly in the Sunday New York Times of May 23, 1993, is pretty thin and familiar stuff. She knows what she wants all right, e.g., Western society to be made anew, America rescued from a sleeping sickness of the soul, new meaning for our individual lives and our collective life, a community for each of us where we belong no matter who we are. And, like all good democrats since the hypocrite Meletus, she knows "who will lead us out of this spiritual vacuum," namely, of course, "all of us." However, when encouraged to descend from the purely to the merely partly gaseous, she has problems. "I don't know, I don't know," she confesses, "I don't have any coherent explanation." Still, like the A student who knows it's only a matter of turning her great and efficient brain squarely on the problem, she promises that "I hope one day to be able to stop long enough actually to try to write down what I do mean… because I have floated around the edges of this and talked about it for many, many years with a lot of people.… " Still, when forced to the wall, she admits (in oddly Bushian idiom) that the very core of what she believes is "this concept of individual worth." She has discovered that if you "break down the Golden Rule" and the command to love your neighbor as yourself, "there is an underlying assumption that you will value yourself." (Whew!) And pressed for specific examples we get three tips to Lady Bountiful: say to yourself, 1) "you know, I'm not going to tell that racist, sexist joke. I don't want to objectify another human being;" 2) "you know, I'm going to start thanking the woman who cleans the restroom in the building that I work in.… I want to start seeing her as a human being;" and 3) "how much are we paying this woman?"

Of course, we have not advanced one step beyond the nonsense of the Port Huron Statement, that terminal document of rentier capitalism. (Remember how it begins? "We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.") Mrs. Clinton's tone is, like its predecessors, Port Huron and Carter's notorious "malaise" speech, vaguely uneasy and the substance is, even more than its predecessors, simply vague. The class comedy comes in with the question of who is the butt of some of the examples. Does the first lady mean that she has to take conscious thought before remembering that the cleaning woman is human? Or is she ever so politely pretending that she is referring to herself (after all, would she ever dream of telling a racist, sexist joke or objectifying another human being—not counting cookie bakers who stand by their men), while she is actually referring, in contemptuous and objectifying terms, to other bourgeois types to whom she believes herself superior? The breathtaking assumption that this drivel is thought, and that all she needs is time to write it all out in order to provide us with a rule of life, is both comical and troubling when we reflect that she is what passes for an educated person today. But for all that, this does represent the essential feelings of those New Leftists who decided to live cautiously enough to be where they are now, our rulers. As such, it is worth attention.

But not much. Still, one thing does stand out in most versions of the Gospel of the Sixties, including the first lady's. From Port Huron on, the New Left essentially accepted the description of American politics and institutions which was current among the sophisticated social scientists of the 1950s, itself an inheritance from the pragmatists and Progressives of an earlier time. What was announced as a refreshing break with the old constitutional piety by the likes of Woodrow Wilson, became the self-congratulatory hard-headedness of a Robert Dahl and was then turned into the lament of Tom Hayden and now Lerner-Clinton. Of course, what Dahl celebrated as pluralist, Hayden's master C. Wright Mills denounced as elitist. But the disagreement was founded on a considerable descriptive agreement. Because, the New Left saw the hard, skeletal structure of American politics as "value-free," and essentially instrumental, for use solely in interest conflict, (and thus wholly usable by the evil elites) it was compelled to find "meaning" only in the soft, amorphous, mollusk-like moistness in the interstices of the body politic. Hillary Rodham Clinton's incoherence faithfully follows Port Huron and for the same reason. Rational thought about the moral character of a nation by means of a consideration of its laws and institutions, had been forbidden (in fact forgotten) by the wise but evil forefathers like David B. Truman. All that was left, in both senses of the word, was a kind of colloidal piety, concocted, like a Jello recipe, of several vaguely related flavors, including a secularized Christian piety, vulgar Rousseauianism, vulgar Marxism, and contemporary feminism.

But whatever flavor dominates this confection, it can never be of much use, because from the outset it is designed as an attitude (above all an attitude of the morally self-conscious rich). It asks the well-off to recognize the humanity of cleaning women. It never asks the cleaning woman anything at all (and as such guarantees that it will never actually recognize her humanity, which of course includes her responsibility). It is invariably self-reflexive and narcissistic. Underneath it one can always hear the anxious hum of "how'm I doing?" It touches upon institutions without ever thinking about them, their inner nature, their implications. Thus, sufficient maundering about one's need to recognize the humanity of cleaning women leads the first lady to comparable worth, the policy as an expression of piety.

In this, the politics of meaning begins to reveal the fundamental failure of the generation of New Leftists who decided to work "within the system." Where there should be an intellectually consistent continuity between ends and means, from the highest theoretical and moral considerations to the most practical questions of instrumentality, with this generation there is a gaping discontinuity. On the one hand, the wooliest and most abstract pieties, on the other, the pettiest and narrowest kind of interest politics, and nothing much in between. Hence a plethora of quasi-Christian quasi-Machiavellis.

What makes the emptiness of the politics of meaning sad and frightening rather than merely comical or pathetic, is that the unease about our country that Hillary Rodham Clinton feels today seems to me far more justified than that of her model, Tom Hayden, thirty years earlier. The Clinton administration has not begun to face the real problems we face any more than did the Bush administration. Put simply, we are becoming increasingly barbarous. The request by the mayor of Washington D.C. for the militarization of the nation's capital isn't so much a straw in the wind as an RV in a tornado. So too are all those odd news stories about murders over a pair of socks, or chewing gum or (this morning on Columbus TV) a "dispute about coffee," (eh?) In these lurid stories we can trace the rebirth, in large parts of the nation, of an honor culture, a culture of hot-tempered, short-sighted, profoundly stultified and ignorant warriors. Indeed, I expect that a graph that would show the growth of preached standards of tolerance and sensitivity as well as the growth of mutual hatred and touchiness, might actually need only one line for the job. Indeed, the increasing ignorance, vulgarity, murderousness and above all touchiness of the population and especially the young, are all fairly reliable and traditional indications that down the road a couple of decades even our solidest traditions of ordered liberty and self-government may be in big trouble. The Perot phenomenon is warning enough that a people that governs itself has to have some capacity to govern its fears and passions, for which education and moderation are needed. Frightened, superstitious and perpetually angry people make ideal Fascists but lousy Americans.

The first lady and her mentors are right that there is indeed a need for moral change and education in this country. But a strategy of moralism and pious ejaculations is, as they like to say, part of the problem, not part of the solution.

For there is an alternative to the diluted, mamby-pamby religiosity of the politics of meaning, one which largely comes out of and not against our laws and institutions. Put tersely, it would be renewed thought about the implications and responsibilities of citizenship. Thus, a standard of citizen responsibility might reveal the indignity and folly of the current mania for group rights which seems to have brought us not only back to the days of race-based education but to those halcyon days of race-based (in)justice as well. Forgetfulness of the implications of citizenship lies behind affirmative action, which, by making group allegiances more important than citizenship, is the fundamental legal and political cause of that current domestic Balkanization so vividly illustrated once more by the Balkans themselves. Emphasis on citizenship might begin to rescue us from the corruption of taxation by amusement in the form of lotteries or from the libertarian excesses that deform every issue from abortion to gun control. There is, of course, some serious talk along these lines, to be found even among members of the Clinton administration, e.g., William Galston. Still, overall their voices are scarcely heard, drowned out by the drone of the dogmatic Old Left and the cant of the aged and saccharin New. And as long as the class and generation that rules America has only got the daily politics of barter and blame to work with, and the wet noodle of the politics of meaning to wave about in a feckless bid to avert vampires, the real and serious troubles of this country will continue to get more real and more serious.