Mark 1993 as an ominous turning point in the history of America. This was the year that Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal was finally completed, some sixty years after it was first launched. The Striker Replacement and Family Leave Bills and the Clinton's proposed Health Care Plan represent the last few building blocks needed to complete FDR's blueprint for an American welfare state.

As a consequence of FDR's ultimate victory, the liberalism of our Founding Fathers, the traditional American respect for reason, individualism, property rights, limited government and market capitalism, may now be officially laid to rest. All the principles, symbols, values and virtues that were once instinctual and thought peculiar to Americans are long gone. And with their loss comes a fundamental change in the nature of what it means to be an American citizen. The American soul has been transformed in some fundamental and important way.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there was little government in America relative to the other countries of the developed world. Government in the United States before the First War was lilliputian compared with today. There was very little government at the federal level, and indeed, very little even at the state level. Instead, there was a radical implosion of political power at the local level.

Government in America before the New Deal and certainly before the Civil War had limited power to do things: its primary responsibility was to protect the nation from foreign invasion, to preserve the peace and to adjudicate disputes between citizens. Much beyond that is dare not go. It was a common expression in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that those governments which ruled least, rules best. The Founding Fathers began with the premise that the individual was sovereign and that he must be left free in order to prosper materially and spiritually. Thomas Jefferson said it best when he wrote that the sum of good government was "a wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned."

But the Founding generation also know that the system that promoted individual liberty and the acquisitive spirit was also the system that best fostered responsibility and community. It should not surprise us to learn, then, that the American community was much stronger in the nineteenth century than it is today. There was much less government and a great deal more of civilized society. Political power was weak, but social authority was strong. Communities were thought to be self-governing principally because individuals were self-governing.

During this period of American self-government most institutions or services that we today consider absolutely necessary—hospitals, fire department, nursing homes, asylums, road building and maintenance, poor relief, etc.—were provided for by voluntary associations. Churches, fraternal organizations, neighbors, families and various charitable organizations took care of the poor and indigent, for instance. Private charity prodded recipients to get back on their feet again as quickly as possible; it was conditional on the recipients working for their assistance; it often demanded that recipients accept certain moral responsibilities; and finally, it made a distinction between the "deserving" and "undeserving" poor, between those who could not help themselves and those who could.

The America of today, however, is an entirely different place. In our brave new world the average American is ruled. The kind of democratic citizen that Benjamin Franklin projected in his Autobiography and that Tocqueville described in his Democracy in America has been replaced by a new kind of citizen. No longer are Americans thought to be independent and self-governing. Indeed, at times, they seem utterly incapable of self-government. When and how did this great transformation take place?

Culturally and politically, it was the construction and institutionalization of FDR's New Deal that represented the turning point in America's long march away from the moral ideals and political principles of the Founding Fathers. For the first time, the average man was tempted and ultimately seduced by the ideology of collectivism and the promises and favors of the new leviathan state. The nation, declared FDR in his First Inaugural Address, must act "as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of the common discipline."

At the heart of the New Deal was the philosophy of egalitarianism and a radical redefinition of the traditional American notion of "rights." "Rights," as understood by the Founders, meant that all individuals were equally free to pursue and to keep the fruits of their labors. FDR and his New Dealers rejected the Founders' notion of rights. "Everyman has a right to life," said President Roosevelt in his famous Commonwealth Club Address, "and this means that he has also a right to make a comfortable living." It was the responsibility of the state, therefore, to provide security, food, shelter and jobs for all citizens who needed them.

Thus began the massive expansion of the national government in America. The 1930s were a cultural watershed in America's transition from a nation of independednt and self-governing citizens to a nation of servile dependents. All Americans, to one degree or another, would now be wards of the state. Today, as a consequence of the New Deal, almost all Americans, including the middle class, live off of some kind of unearned income.

The science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov, writing about life in America in the early part of this century as a newly-arrived immigrant, captured beautifully the old meaning of freedom and its relationship to virtue:

Everyone faces adversity from time to time. It's a natural part of life. By itself, it's neither good, nor bad. The important thing is how we deal with it and what we learn from it…

Very early in life, poverty forced me to become quick, resourceful, and imaginative. It also forced me to accept jobs I really didn't want but which helped me grow.

So different is the world of modern America. In the days of pre-New Deal America poverty meant opportunity and opportunity meant freedom and freedom meant living according to certain virtues. Today poverty means entitlements and entitlements mean dependence and dependence means slavery.

The most obvious and distressing example of the way that America has changed is the creation of a black underclass utterly dependent on the state for its survival. There is of course a foul irony in the way in which the bureaucratic-welfare state has to invidiously corrupted the soul of black folk and destroyed the black community in so many of our major cities. Under the old form of slavery, the body was enslaved but the moral spirit was free. Under the new slavery, the body is free but the soul is enslaved to government handouts.

But this turn of soul is not restricted to the black underclass—not by a long shot. It affects all classes, all races, all Americans. The social theorist, Charles Murray, has written brilliantly recently about an alarming new trend in the country: the rapid growth of an alienated and dispossessed white underclass. William Bennett, in his Index of Leading Cultural Indicators, has chartered America's moral and social decline over the last thirty years, and the results are alarming. Violent crime in this country has increased 560 percent, illegitimate births increased by more than 400 percent, the divorce rate quadrupled, there was a tripling of children living in single-parent homes, and SAT scores dropped by 80 points. The correlation between the rise of the state in the twentieth century and the decline in moral standards is direct and beyond dispute.

Despite the tragic consequences that have attended the growth of the state in modern America, this is not the end of our great twentieth-century experiment in social engineering. For the Clintons, this is the beginning of a new era. The New Deal was not enough, not nearly enough. The American people want "change," say the Clintons, which they interpret as a mandate to revolutionize American's moral, cultural, economic and political life.

America is sick according to Mrs. Clinton. We suffer from an overwhelming sense of meaninglessness. The officially sanctioned "greed" of the Reagan '80s left our souls hollow and unsatisfied. The decade of Reaganism was our decade of meaninglessness.

What the American people desperately need to cure their existential malady, according to Mrs. Clinton, is a new kind of politics—a "politics of meaning." The first lady is calling for nothing less than a Cultural Revolution.

But what could she mean by the politics of meaning? In an extraordinary essay entitled "Saint Hillary" (the article was accompanied by a cover-page illustration of the First Lady shown with robe and crucifix as if to suggest that she is a post-modern Joan of Arc), Michael Kelley of the New York Times reports that Mrs. Clinton "is searching for not merely programmatic answers but for The Answer."

We are told that the first lady is "trying to come up with a sort of unified-field theory of life," and that the search of the world's first philosopher-queen is on the order of a total moral "Reformation." According to the New York Times, Mrs. Clinton has apparently ascended to some kind of higher consciousness, to an exalted plane of moral perfection. The Washington Post has endorsed this view of the first lady as well: "She has goals, but they appear to be so huge and far-off—grand and noble things twinkling in the distance—that it's hard to see what she sees." For some, Mrs. Clinton has become a kind of high priestess, a visionary, a moral Einstein who has seen the Light while the rest of us live in the dark cave that we call America.

Let's take a closer look at what she and her intellectual gurus have actually said about the "politics of meaning."

In her now infamous speech at the University of Texas, the first lady called for a national spiritual renewal. The New Deal must be followed by a New Age. "Let us be willing," Mrs. Clinton implored, "to remold society by redefining what it means to be a human being in the 20th century, moving into a new millennium." She implored her audience to merge their separate lives with other as "part of some greater effort." She reminded us that "we are connected to one another," that "we are part of something bigger than ourselves." Such a moral reformation will not be easy, she said. "It's not going to be easy redefining who we are as human beings in this postmodern age." It certainly won't! But surely this kind of sophomoric, late-night, dorm-room existentialism stretches the limits of incredulity when uttered by a grown woman who wants to be in charge of our $850 billion health-care industry.

In a speech to the Association of Medical Colleges, the first lady announced the moral imperative of Clintonism: "It's about time we start thinking about the common good and the national interest, instead of just individuals," she said. Mrs. Clinton's assessment of contemporary America and her call for a revolutionary paradigm shift can be summarized by repeating over and over again the following mantra: Individualism, selfishness and greed were the virtues of the Reagan '80s. Self-sacrifice, community and altruism will be the virtues of the Clinton '90s.

In the wake of relentless public ridicule over these kinds of statements, Michael Lerner, Mrs. Clinton's principal intellectual guru, leapt to the first lady's defense with a more polished definition of the politics of meaning. "The basic supposition is this," Lerner wrote in the Wall Street Journal: "Human beings have phychological, ethical and spiritual needs that transcend the normal liberal agenda. Liberals have tended to focus exclusively on economic entitlements and political rights. But most people need something more: We need to be part of loving families and ethically and spiritually grounded communities that provide a meaning for our lives that transcends the individualism and me-firstism of the competitive market." Lerner is clear in his desire that the politics of meaning transcend "the 'right'-oriented focus of so much traditional liberal politics."

So what does all this gobbledygook mean in practical terms? How would the politics of meaning be implemented by the Clinton Administration? Lerner recently advised Mrs. Clinton while having dinner at the White House to institute the following policy: "I proposed that the Clinton Administration establish a policy where, for any proposed legislation or new program, there would have to be written first an Ethical and Community Environmental Impact Report, which would require each agency to report how the proposed legislation or new program would impact on shaping ethics and the caring and sharing of the community covered by that agency." Lerner later spelled out in greater detail how the politics of meaning could be translated from theory into practice.

His proposals included: that the Department of Labor order "every workplace" in America "to create a mission statement explaining its function and what conception of the common good it is serving and how it is doing so"; "Honor Labor" campaigns would be sponsored "to highlight the honor due to people for their contributions to the common good," and "a corps of union personnel, worker representatives and psychotherapists" would be trained "in the relevant skills to assist developing a new spirit of cooperation, mutual caring and dedication to work." Lerner, the one-time leader of a revolutionary Marxist organization, is reported to have officiated at his own New Left wedding, which included the bride and groom exchanging rings made out of the fuselage of a U.S. aircraft shot down by the communists over Viet Nam. Born of the 1960s, the politics of meaning represents the political and cultural institutionalization of New Left radicalism.

Although more circumspect in his avowal of the politics of meaning, the president has offered the country his own watered-down version. In his acceptance speech after the November election, president-elect Clinton called for a "New Covenant," one that would redefine the duties of citizens and the responsibilities of the federal government. He said that what is most needed in America is "a new spirit of community, a sense that we're all in this together." The moral basis for this new covenant, said candidate Clinton, is the notion of "reciprocal obligation." His two favorite works in recent speeches have been "sacrifice" and "security." The president's faustian bargain asks the American people to trade a great deal of their freedom in exchange for an economic and moral security that only the President, the first lady, and their corps of social planners can provide. We must give up our selfish interests for the common good and in return the state will take care of all our needs.

But this kind of self-abnegation cuts against the grain of human nature. This is where the first lady and Michael Lerner re-enter. Reinventing government will not be possible until the first lady redefines "who we are as human beings."

One is tempted to ask what will happen to those who are unable or unwilling to see what Mrs. Clinton sees? What of those who will openly resist or fight her reforms? Tipper Gore has a partial answer: She believes that under the Clinton Heal Plan all Americans should and will have check-ups for mental illness. Does this mean that the angst and sense of meaninglessness that we all feel as a result of having lived through the Reagan years can be ameliorated through nationwide sessions of collective therapy?

In college, high school and even in elementary school classrooms all across America, there is already a concerted effort underway to indoctrinate our young people in ideology of '60s radicalism. Traditional education is out and consciousness raising is in. It should not surprise us, then, to learn that the Clinton administration represents a who's who of campus thought police. Donna Shalala (secretary for Health and Human Services) and Sheldon Hackney (chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities) to name just two, presided over the installation and enforcement of speech codes of their respective campuses during their tenure as university presidents. Verbal morality statutes, "sensitivity" classes and explicitly politicizes classes dealing with questions of race, class, gender and sexual orientation now have the unofficial sanction of the Clinton government. Attitude readjustment rather than the reading of great books has become the purpose of these politically correct reeducation camps.

Like any messianic ideology, the politics of meaning thrives on the existence of an easily identifiable enemy. Mrs. Clinton's redefinition of American citizenship begins therefore by exposing those who represent the focus of evil in this post-modern world. A criminal, according to the first lady, is not a man who violates the rights of individuals; he is a man who injures "the common interest." It goes without saying that businessmen are the worst offenders, the new criminals. In a number of public jeremiads, the first lady has named some of America's leading villains: Top on her hit list are the "price gougers," the "cost-shifters" and the "unconscionable profiteers" of the medical-industrial complex, that is, the insurance and drug companies and doctors.

Given Mrs. Clinton's distaste for the free-enterprise system, it is not surprising that two of the president's closest economic advisors have called for an end to America's free-market system. Lester Thurow, an economics professor at MIT has written that "the individualistic Anglo-Saxon British-American form of capitalism" must be replaced in favor of something he calls "communitarian capitalism." Likewise, Robert A. Reich, the president's Secretary of Labor, has argued in his Tales of a New America (1987) that America can only be saved by a kind of "collective entrepreneurship."

One is tempted to say that the meaning of the politics of meaning is that it has no meaning. But ideas have consequences, even incoherent ideas, and those notions can be seductive and dangerous, particularly to a culture that has lost its moral compass.

It is now possible to see why the completion of the New Deal is not the end, but rather is the beginning, the launching-off point, the "great leap forward" for St. Hillary's New Salvation. Mrs. Clinton's politics of meaning is but a moral preparation for what is to follow. By clearing the moral atmosphere of traditional American virtues—rationality, independence, self-reliance, frugality, individualism—the politics of meaning hopes to reinvent the American character by establishing the sanctity of self-sacrifice as the highest moral virtue. By delegitimizing the moral foundations for individualism, the way will have been cleared for newer and higher forms of communal action. Once achieved, the American soul will have been opened or prepared for new and ominous forms of social experimentation.

But this kind of moral reformation cannot be achieved without dramatically increasing the coercive powers of the State. And the Clintons have all kinds of bright ideas to reinvent the ways that government can intrude into our private and public lives. Of course the core of the Clinton plan to reconstitute the human soul begins with their Health Care Plan. Make no mistake about it: this is socialist-corporatism pure and simple. If you doubt this, examine the sweeping powers given to the proposed National Health Board. This central committee of seven will function like a Communist Central Committee or one of the Fascist National Councils of Italy. The Clinton's Health Board will oversee and regulate all the activities and operations of the government-created "regional health care alliances," and it will undoubtedly have the authority to enforce wage and price controls. The nation now stands poised on the brink of the largest increase in government controls and government subsidies since the New Deal.

But where exactly does the Founders' Constitution grant the power to the national government to force citizens to participate in a federally-mandated health care plan? To the Clintons and the New Left radicals who support them, such questions are simply irrelevant. The Constitution is at best what the cultural Left says it is and at its worst a retrograde check on the revolutionary goals of the far-Left. If the Clinton's health care plan passes, there will be no limits, no restraints on the leviathan powers of the national government. "Thereafter," writes David B. Rivkin of the Wall Street Journal, "Congress will be able to regulate you not because of who you are, what you do for a living, or whether you use the interstate highways, but merely because you exist." But we shouldn't put all the blame on the Clintons: In the end it will have been the American people who drove the final stake into the heart of the Constitution of 1787.

If you want to oppose the politics of meaning and the Clintons' moral-political agenda, you must challenge its basic principles: New Age mysticism, altruism, self-sacrifice, collectivism, elitism, and statism. The politics of freedom must replace the politics of meaning.

A new generation of young people, the new revolutionaries, must rediscover and consistently defend the principles of our Founding Fathers: the idea of individual rights, the sanctity of private property and the inviolability of contract, limited government and the virtues of entrepreneurship. Then and only then will America hold out the promise for a new birth of freedom.