Out west in California, where the suns shines brightly all year round, the blue and red Clinton/Gore bumper strips were noticably fading out by early spring on the thousands of cars whose owners were having trouble peeling them off. The quick fade-out seemed an omen for Clinton's spring collapse in the public opinion polls, which was even worse in California than nationally. By June, Rush Limbaugh was announcing the locations of body and fender shops who could remove the seemingly unremovable bumper strips, which had apparently been produced with sufficiently strong adhesive to last through two presidential campaigns.
California, remember, provided Clinton with one-third of this national margin of victory in the popular vote, and is crucial to his prospects for re-election in 1996. Calfornia's rapid disenchantment with Clinton might be explained away as a function of frustration and impatience over the unyielding recession among a people that is unused to such prolonged economic doldrums. It is more likely that California, a high income state with a (once) thriving entrepreneurial culture, came quickly to grasp Clinton's innermost leftward character with the prompt announcement of his income tax hike.
California has seen this before, complete with the therapeutic New Age-speak about the "politics of meaning,"under the regime of Jerry "Moonbeam" Brown. Brown, for all his kookiness of recent years, foreshadowed Clinton in one important respect: he was the first "New Democrat" who affected a moderate rhetoric while implementing hard left policies and appointing far-out lefties (like State Supreme Court Chief Justice Rose Bird). Hence, when Clinton lurched sharply to the left in the early weeks of his administration, Californians were able to see more quickly than others that Clinton had succeeded in winning the election by concealing who he is, and would attempt to govern in the same fashion.
It makes for revealing reading to go back to the references to Clinton in Peter Brown's ironically titled 1991 book Minority Party: Why Democrats Face Defeat in 1992 and Beyond. Clinton not only provided a warm dust jacket endorsement for the book, but is cited throughout on the need for the Democratic party to eschew the politics of class warfare and return to the political center. In hindsight the Brown book reads like a memorandum to Democrats on how to avoid another Dukakis debacle. All the themes of the 1992 campaign are articulated in Brown's book: the calculated public rebuke of Jesse Jackson, the embrace of the middle class, and the solicitude for the suburbs and heartland of America. But the Clinton government—as opposed to the Clinton campaign—has betrayed most of this.
This was not, of course, how it was supposed to tunr out. Clinton was supposed to be the culmination of the Democratic Leadership Council effort to bring genuine moderation back to the Democratic party. In addition to Clinton's own proclamation that he is a "new kind of Democrat," it is worth noting that both the DLC's campaign tract Mandate for Change and even Vice President Gore's recent Reinventing Government initiative adopt the general tone of "the new paradigm" (for lack of a better term) of market forces, individual incentives, and leaner government institutions. Under the Clintonites, however, the prospective program of reform doesn't add up to limited government. At the core of the Clinton Project is the attempt to employ the rhetoric and perhaps even some of the ideas of limited government to serve liberal political ends.
It would be tempting to excuse Clinton by observing that, as the party of big government for nearly a century now, the prospect of moderation in the Democratic party was oversold from the beginning. In addition to the entrenched constituencies and the deep philosophical commitmentto big government, there is the practical problem of personnel. Recalling the old adage that "personnel are policy," even without the perverted policy of "diversity" it is probably true that amongst the cadre of people available to staff a Democratic administration, there are no "New Democrats," or at least not enough.
What the character of the Clintonites shows is the deep imprint the 1960s has made on contemporary liberalism. This imprint can be seen even among—or perhaps especially among—the young bucks like George Stephanopoulos who came of age after the 1960s, for whom it is axiomatic that the radical ferment of the 1960s represents the pinnacle of cultural enlightenment in America. It is not simply that the Clinton administration has extremely liberal ideas as was belied by the Lani Guiner nomination. The entire tone of the Clintonites exudes a smug, post-modern certitude that intentions count for more than ideas, that they are morally superior because of their "caring" and "commitment." For such people, emoting is as good as analyzing.
Michael Oakeshott reminds us in his famous essay "On Being Conservative" that politics is an activity unsuited to the young. "Everybody's young days are a dream, a delightful insanity, a sweet solipsism," Oakeshott wrote. "Nothing in them has a fixed shape, nothing a fixed price; everything is a possibility, and we live happily on credit." A pretty good description, I think, of the youngsters on the White House staff. But it also accurately describes the older set in the White House; say, for instance, Al Gore. Not only has modern liberalism made the activist dreamer the stereotype of the modern politician, but the pervasive moral teaching of the 1960s has inhibited the baby boom generation from ever growing up, from ever acquiring the mature moral virtues necessary for responsible politics. This is noticeable in Clinton, who exhibits clear signs of arrested adolescence from time to time.
A vital aspect of Clinton's character, and the character of his politics, can be best understood by examining his close connection—some might call it an umbilical cord—to Hollywood. Much has been made of the direct role producers such as the Bloodworth-Thomasons played in both the Clinton campaign and inauguration. But the Clinton-Hollywood connection goes deeper than the tactical advantages of Hollywood image-making. Clinton is plainly among the kind of politician who is drawn to politics partly as an alternative route to celebrity. Such people always have an affinity for the people who have achieved celebrity through the pre-eminent route of popular entertainment. Reagan's connection to Hollywood has obscured this phenomenon, because he related to Hollywood both as a professional peer and as a political dissident.
Liberal politicians like Clinton arrive in Hollywood as supplicants, not merely for money and endorsements, but for the moral approval the creative community supposedly confers. Clinton not only craves the approval of this segment of the "chattering class," but views Hollywood as a legitimate source of moral order. This can only mean trouble for America, as Hollywood has become (along with the universities) the principal repository of the residue of 1960s radicalism.
The Hollywood creative community (which should be understood to include popular music—"Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow"—as well as TV and movies) does indeed consider itself to be a major moral force. "Celebrities don't want to just be called to write checks," said Margey Tabankin, the executive director of the Hollywood Women's Political Committee and the head of the Barbra Streisand Foundation, in the New York Times. "Nobody in Hollywood comes to the table thinking that they have the answers on Bosnia. Come on! But they do come as artists, pained by human suffering, who want to bring their creative skills to the process." (This presumption explains much of Hollywood's fury at Vice President Dan Quayle's famous Murphy Brown remark.)
In recent months Clinton has supposedly heeded the counsel of politicals advisers such as James Carville to tone down the visibility of his Hollywood connections. The first sign of trouble came with Maureen Dowd's front page story in the New York Times in May, which said that "the Clinton White House is extravagantly star-struck," and that things were "spinning out of control on the celebrity front." Dowd reported that Hollywood celebrities such as Barbra Streisand were being treated to policy briefings from cabinet members. (In an effort to burnish her credentials as a serious person, Streisand has declared herself to be a regular reader of The Economist, and several other Hollywood celebrities have even hired their own political consultants to advise them about politics.)
A superficial reticence toward Hollywood and the cultural elite would simply be of a piece with Clinton's general political shrewdness. But even with David Gergen around to restrain the impulses and spasms of the leftward core of Clintonism, the true character of Clinton's politics cannot be concealed or muted for very long. With Gergen around, gaffes like the Guinier nomination are less likely. ("To be Gergenized" wrote Michael Kelly of the New York Times Magazine, ïs to be spun by the velveteen hum of this soothing man's smoothing voice into a state of such vertigo that the sense of what is real disappears into a blur." Precisely what Clinton requires if he is to succeed.) More often, the core of Clintonism will come to view in the form of post-modernism—the sort of preaching you see in Ms. Clinton's "politics of meaning" speech, or in Vice President Al Gore's book Earth in the Balance.
Ms. Clinton said that we must "redefine who we are as human beings in this post-modern age," which will require "remaking the American way of politics, government, indeed life." The idea of "redefining who we are in this post-modern age" implies that there is no human nature, or that whatever human nature there is defines itself through sheer self-assertion. In other words, the human soul can be transformed at will. So for Ms. Clinton to say that we need to remake the American way of politics, government, and life is to imply that government has the right, even the duty, to change man into something he is now not. She believes that this transformation can be achieved through proper administration. This captures the heart of what people glibly describe as ""post-modernism;" it is the view that progress is no longer a material phenomenon, but a moral and spiritual phenomenon in an era that has eviscerated both morality and spirituality. (Hillary's "politics of meaning" speech served won derfully for what the Clintonites like to call a "defining moment." Leon Wieselthier observed in The New Republic that "there is a certain sensibility, for which Mrs. Clinton's generation is famous, and which she perfectly exemplifies, that hates being preceded. Everything it experiences for the first time. When it sees, there is light; and when it fails to see, the whole world is covered in darkness.")
Vice President Gore similarly makes clear in Earth in the Balance that what is at stake in the environmental controversy is not merely the physical and economic calculations of natural resource use, or even the political implications and incentives that govern the environment, but rather the spiritual quality of the human soul itself. For both the first lady's "politics of meaning" and the vice president's environmental ethic, to disagree on grounds of reason is to display a disorder of the soul. Like the premises of "political correctness" on the college campus, carried to its logical extreme this is the basis of tyranny. Oakeshott, again, reminds us that "the conjunction of dreaming and ruling generates tyranny."
It is probable that these tyrannical urges will be confined chiefly to rhetorical extravagances like the "politics of meaning" speech, chiefly because the actual policy ideas (such as worksite-based holistic therapists—an actual proposal of Hillary's guru Michael Lerner) remain inchoate or will not receive much enthusiasm in a Congress that is in the surprising position of finding itself to the right of the executive branch. The most serious political initiative of the Clintonites is, therefore, the crusade to revise public opinion about the 1980s.
We are told repeatedly that the prospecrity of the 1980s was false, that only the rich got richer, and that economic ruin is just around the corner unless we raise taxes and enlarge the government. This tactic shows the seriousness of Clinton's political aims. It would be easy for him simply to attack George Bush and "the last four years," and let the more popular Reagan off lightly. Instead, Clinton is going after the entire decade, in a bold gambit to discredit the entire conservative philosophy of governing. (In this crusade Clinton is receiving immense help from the news media. After presenting the facts about economic growth in the 1980s to a senior producer at ABC's "World News Tonight" recently in New York, the producer replied to me: "It can't be as you say. Everywhere we go and talk to the man on the street, people think the 1980s were bad.")
There is an eerie parallel to this revisionism. As readers of Thomas B. Silver's standout book Coolidge and the Historians will know, for two generations liberal historians have protrayed the prosperity of the 1920s as false and shallow, and favoring only the rich. The Republican leadership of the 1920s, especially Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover, is portrayed as ignorant, inept, and mean. Henry Steele Commager, for instance, wrote that "the mark of failure is heavy on these years… Rarely in our history have so many mediocrities been counterbalanced by so few men of talent." Other prominent historians like Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. made the case that the private sector, operating irresponsibly under ill-conceived low taxes and free market policies, caused the onset of the Great Depression.
None of this was true, as subsequent counter-revisionist historians have shown. Paul Johnson pointed out in his blockbuster Modern Times that the 1920s was one of the most fortunate decades in American history, with prosperity widely diffused. Johnson also points out, as has Milton Friedman and other economic historians, that it was the mistakes of government, not the private sector, that brought on and aggravated the Depression. And Silver's Coolidge and the Historians dispels the liberal slanders against Coolidge, and makes the case that Coolidge was one of the most intelligent and thoughtful leaders ever to occupy the White House.
Just as the denigration of the 1920s was a necessary part of the aggrandizement of the New Deal, today's revisionism of the 1980s is intended to aid the cause of a new phase of expanding the size and scope of government, which is why the Clinton administration is using the same playbook as the New Dealers, self-consciously citing the New Deal as its model and inspiration. The Clinton political program is an instant replay of the New Deal propaganda machine. This is why the new middle class entitlement of health care—rather than a welfare program for the underclass or minorities—is the centerpiece of the Clinton domestic agenda. The object of this revisionism is to cram Reagan and the 1980s down an Orwellian memory hole, and revive the old Democratic electoral coalition.
The real challenge of the opposition to Clintonism is to keep alive the Reaganite themes of limited government, low taxes, and deregulation. The good news is that the results of the 1993 off year election suggest that there is latent sentiment among voters for these themes. The test of the 1990s will be to see if the realignment in public sentiment that Reagan's victories helped to generate can be converted into a realignment of partisan preferences below the presidential level. Clinton's most-modern liberalism, if it can be effectively exposed, will be a powerful aid. This will not be as easy as it may have seemed in the spring of 1993, when Clinton was stumbling with every step. We should be chastened by the Bush campaign, which was merely a spectacular example of the routine Republican talent for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Clinton cannot be relied upon simply to be Jimmy Carter redivivus. We will have to make our own luck.
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