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14. Shaking Off the Past

Third Ways, Fourth Ways, and the Urgency of Politics

E. J. Dionne Jr.

Long before the 2000 presidential election, Steve Goldsmith, one of George W. Bush's top campaign policy advisers and the former Republican mayor of Indianapolis, was explaining the inner balances and tensions within compassionate conservatism. After he had described the importance of both the government and the market to this putatively new philosophy, Goldsmith was asked the obvious question: Didn't it all sound a lot like the "Third Way" of which Bill Clinton and Tony Blair were so fond?

"No, " Goldsmith replied firmly but with a chuckle. "It's the Fourth Way."

The notion of cross-ideological larceny was not entirely new. "The good news is that we may elect a Republican president this year, " Republican consultant Alex Castellanos had declared before the 1996 election. "The bad news is that it may be Bill Clinton."

Clinton held no secret GOP party card, but Castellanos had vented what was a constant charge in the 1990s. Frustration with Clinton's success in co-opting stances associated with Republicans, blurring issues, and adopting aspects of Reagan's rhetorical style penetrated deep on both the right and the left. It's been convenient for both ends of the spectrum to brand Clinton an apostate. One of the first people to broach the notion of Clinton as Republican was Bill Clinton himself. "Where are all the Democrats?" Clinton cried out at a White House meeting early in his administration, according to Bob Woodward's account of those days.

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"I hope you're all aware we're all Eisenhower Republicans. We're Eisenhower Republicans here and we are fighting the Reagan Republicans."

Then came the grandson of a genuine Eisenhower Republican, George W. Bush. Bush was not an Eisenhower Republican. He was a thoroughgoing conservative. Yet he understood that times had changed, that Clinton, for all the attacks Bush and other Republicans had leveled at him, had genuinely altered the dynamics of the American political debate. Thus, Bush did not repeat Ronald Reagan's famous declaration that government is not the solution, that government is the problem. Bush said instead: "Government if necessary, but not necessarily government."Bush might pursue an agenda more conservative than Reagan's, but his rhetoric was resolutely more moderate. Agendas, he understood, had to go forward under partial disguise.

These convolutions reflect a sea change in American politics. Over the last decade it has become increasingly difficult to label political events and actors. Sometime in the mid-1990s, new-breed types emerged across the spectrum, as "civic liberals" began to square off against "compassionate conservatives." This linguistic squirming has been going on for some time now.

There is a temptation—one that should not be reflexively denied—to think of this play of nomenclature as unfolding only on the cosmetic surface of politics. In this rendering media-savvy politicians seek to repackage potentially unpalatable ideas in more attractive wrappings. And surely the early course of the Bush administration gave ample evidence of that decorative instinct. Bush himself displayed a great talent for using Democratic rhetoric in support of conservative Republican programs. Recall that in late 2001 Democrats wanted an economic-stimulus package tilted heavily toward benefits for the unemployed. Bush wanted a package tilted heavily toward tax cuts, especially for the well-off and business. How did Bush sell his program?

"I proposed help for those who need it most, immediate help in the form of extended unemployment benefits and cash grants for workers who have been laid off, " the president said in an early December radio address. As for the tax cuts for the wealthy and large companies, he described them as "a long-term strategy to accelerate economic growth to create more opportunities and more jobs." His tax cuts wore a disguise: they were simply "a long-term strategy."

But the truth is that something deeper is at work than a search for tactical rhetorical advantage. The confusion of tongues reflects a changing reality, really a set of realities—in the global economy, in the perception

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of government, in the structure of families, in foreign affairs. These circumstances have not yet called forth a new set of theories and ideologies to explain them and the politics they encourage. And whether it will be a Third Way, after the fashion of Clinton, some not yet clarified Fourth Way, as Goldsmith suggests, or still something entirely different is not yet clear. But we are decidedly in a transition period, a time in which neither left nor right dominates in politics. Republicans and conservatives kept control of both houses of Congress in 2000, barely, yet to do so, many of them ran on liberal and Democratic issues—a patients' bill of rights, a prescription drug benefit, more spending on education. Once Bush was in office, most Democrats stoutly resisted the size of his tax cut and its tilt toward the very wealthy. Yet they proposed sizable tax cuts of their own, not wanting to seem unsympathetic to the desire of taxpayers for a break. Republicans wanted to seem more progovernment than they were, Democrats more sympathetic to the average taxpayer.

And Senator Jim Jeffords of Vermont may have been the perfect symbol of how closely divided American politics has become and of how an uncertain political center can drive politics in unexpected directions. By moving from the Republican Party to independent status, and by throwing his vote to the Democrats on the matter of who would lead the Senate, he shifted party control of one house of Congress and radically altered the distribution of power in Washington.

It's an odd time. In some ways voting has become more partisan—there are fewer split tickets these days—yet the role of Independents in politics looms large. We are divided sharply along ideological lines—such is the lesson of polarization around the Clinton impeachment and the Florida election fiasco of 2000—yet there is that rush to the political center. What is the historical context of these changes?

CULTURE WAR CONUNDRUMS

It is fair to say that a significant portion of the electorate in the past decade has grown angry, frustrated, and disappointed over what they see as the irrelevance of the political debate to their immediate concerns. Part of the problem lies with the fragmentation of our political life and the vitriol and recrimination that have characterized it in recent decades.

The divisiveness is more than personal distemper and sour mood; its roots lie deep in the cultural civil war that split America in the 1960s. Ever since, the American political system has been reeling from novel threats to the old partisan structure that channeled conflict in a predictable

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manner for some time. Just as the Civil War dominated American political life for decades after it ended, so has the civil war of the 1960s—with all its tensions and contradictions—shaped our politics today, although in complex and diminishing ways.

Although political scientists have shed a lot of ink trying to figure out whether the unraveling of this system was a realignment or merely a dealignment, the more urgent question is not technical but substantive. Through the 1980s and 1990s the country was still struggling with major questions left over from the old cultural battles: civil rights and the integration of blacks into the country's political and economic life; the revolution in values involving feminism and changed attitudes toward child rearing and sexuality; and the ongoing debate over America's role in the world that began with the Vietnam War and that the ending of the cold war has only intensified.

These so-called wedge issues hit the Democratic Party especially hard, splitting it into myriad factions. Over time they gave new divisive bite to partisan differences, as both parties realigned on these disagreements of race, family, and foreign policy. Whatever else was going on in the electorate at large, these issues provided a divisive clarity to partisan party struggle, which only intensified as Ronald Reagan courted moral conservatives, especially evangelical and fundamentalist Christians and the prolife movement, and gave them a powerful presence within the Republican Party.

Already by the early 1990s these wedge issues had a powerfully unhappy consequence. They and the politicians who championed them posed complex matters of moral and social conflict in race, in family life, and in sexuality as false polarities, in either-or terms that did not speak to the amorphous center where the majority of American voters dwell.

In truth, America's cultural values are a rich but not necessarily contradictory mix of liberal instincts and conservative values. Americans believe in helping those who fall on hard times, in fostering equal opportunity and equal rights, and in providing access to education, housing, health care, and child care. At the same time, Americans believe that intact families do the best job of bringing up children, that hard work should be rewarded, that people who behave destructively toward others should be punished, that small institutions close to home tend to do better than big institutions run from far away, and that private moral choices usually have social consequences. Put another way, Americans

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believe in social concern and self-reliance; they want to match rights and responsibilities; they think public moral standards should exist but are skeptical of too much meddling in the private affairs of others.

A similar search for balance can be found in the politics of family and sexuality. Overwhelmingly, the country accepts the entry of women into the workforce. The vast majority of Americans see their presence as, at least, an economic necessity and, at best, a positive good. Americans know that for all the conservatives' talk about the "traditional" family, the world of the 1950s is gone forever.

Yet, once again, if Americans on balance agree with liberals that women are in the workforce to stay, they agree with conservatives that not all the effects of this revolution are positive. They worry especially about what will happen to children in the new world we have created. They are concerned that in women's rush to the workforce, the children are being left behind, given that men do not seem eager to take up the slack. The debate the country has always wanted to hear—and, in truth, finally began hearing in the 1990s from thoughtful feminists and thoughtful traditionalists—is not one involving false choices between an ideal "feminism" and an idealized "traditional family" but one about solving the practical problems faced by families, and especially by overburdened working women.

Americans have declared their preference for moderate (or, perhaps more accurately, ambivalent) positions on countless other issues, including abortion. Nonetheless, it was easy to understand, at least until the 1990s, why Republicans had a large stake in culture war. The Kulturkampf of the 1960s made Republicans powerful. Conservatives were able to destroy the dominant New Deal coalition by using cultural and social issues—race, the family, permissiveness, crime—to split New Deal constituencies and to woo what had been the most loyally Democratic group in the nation, white southerners, and to peel off millions of votes among industrial workers and other whites of modest income. Simply put, the cultural civil war replaced the old axis of class division with the passions of moral vendetta.

Conversely, the broad political interests of liberals lay in settling the cultural civil war, but many liberals were loath to give up the old polarities. They too had an interest in its endurance. The politics of the 1960s shifted the balance of power within the liberal coalition away from working-class and lower-middle-class voters, whose main concerns were economic, and toward upper-middle-class reformers mainly interested in cultural

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issues and foreign policy. All of this made the upper-middle-class reformers the dominant voices within American liberalism.

If the wedge issues have worked to the Republicans' advantage, they have not done so in any mechanical or inevitable fashion. In all their overreaching, the congressional Republicans who spearheaded the program of radical reconstruction missed the essential moderation of the American electorate. The embrace of George W. Bush, with his "compassionate" disavowal of meanness, reflects in part a fear of the potential danger of such issues to the forging of a Republican majority.

At the heart of this skittishness lies not just the ambivalence of the anxious middle of the electorate but also powerful schisms within the Republican Party. As Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio showed in a remarkable study a few years ago, the hot cultural issues had the power to split the Republicans, as well, and not simply along the lines of social and economic conservatives, as people ordinarily describe it. Actually, five Republican factions have been vying with each other. Economic conservatives divide into deficit hawks and tax cutters, each claiming roughly one-fifth of the party's supporters. A small group of "progressives" enjoy no more than a tenth of the party. The remaining two are different camps of social conservatives, each claiming roughly one-fifth of the Republican voters. One of them Fabrizio calls moralists—think of them as Ralph Reed/Pat Robertson Republicans—and they are primarily concerned about issues such as abortion and homosexuality. The cultural populists—think of them as Archie Bunker/Pat Buchanan Republicans—are more worried about what Fabrizio calls the hard-edged issues: crime, immigration, drugs, affirmative action, and welfare. The cultural populists are divided on abortion and are more secular than the religiously inclined moralists. Interestingly, both groups of social conservatives are disproportionately female.

This split caused the Republicans no end of problems during the Clinton years. For the truth, as Ruy Teixeira and John Judis have shown, ^[1] is that the rise of a large, suburban middle class means that cultural moderation and liberalism may now be a force working for the Democrats, not the Republicans. One of the most striking aspects of elections from 1992 to 2000 was the growing Democratic vote in the suburbs. Teixeira and Judis offer the intriguing theory that the middle-class, socially liberal, constituencies that George McGovern activated in 1972 have now become important and influential parts of the electorate. If Democrats once had an interest in ending the culture wars, Republicans may now have an even more urgent need to do so.

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THE CLINTON INTERREGNUM: TOWARD CIVIC LIBERALISM

Clinton's victory in 1992, combined with Ross Perot's showing, was a sharp repudiation of Reaganism. The 1994 Republican congressional rout does not refute that point. Indeed, the Gingrich revolution ultimately failed because the Republicans misunderstood the victory as an ideological mandate. It was as much a commentary on the failure of Clinton in his first two years to enact the core, popular parts of his program: health care reform, campaign finance reform, welfare reform, and changes in education and training policies aimed at lifting up Americans battered by economic changes.

The increasing numbers of Republicans contemplating the now ambiguous effect of the social issues included Ralph Reed, who served as executive director of Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition and later became Republican state chairman in Georgia. Reed suggested that the cultural right needed to move beyond the core moral issues dear to religious conservatives to embrace the full range of fiscal and economic concerns of middle-class families. In the midst of the argument over the California Civil Rights Initiative, which ended affirmative action in that state, California Republican assemblyman James Brulte worried that simply as a practical matter the initiative might bring more African-American voters to the polls—to oppose it—than it would mobilize whites in enthusiastic support.

His comments reflected a general Republican mood that the party needed, well, a kinder, gentler, compassionate face. The Republicans' loss of Florida in 1996, attributed in part to anti-immigrant rhetoric that offended even conservative Cubans, would add a chastening note. Even on the issue of government itself, Republicans were softening. The 1996 convention issue of the Weekly Standard, the influential conservative magazine, included an article by David Brooks warning that Republicans had attacked government more than they needed to, or should.

Brooks was very direct: "The political reality at the moment is that American voters, while critical of some of the government programs we have, have not given up on government itself. Politicians who preach the harsh line of cut, cut, cut end up where Phil Gramm did when he ran for president."^[2] Such thoughts in a conservative magazine! No wonder Republicans didn't boo Colin Powell when he defended government, and affirmative action in particular, in his speech to the convention.

Brooks was echoing Fabrizio's warning to the party: many of the stands it has taken for granted as winners are in fact losing wedge issues

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that split the party. Opposition to gun restrictions? Large segments of all five groups support them, and never more than in the wake of a string of school shootings in white middle-class neighborhoods deep in the heart of gun-show territory. The flat tax? Only the deficit hawks and supplysiders support it strongly. The populists and the progressives oppose it, and the moralists are split.

Cutting entitlements won't unify the party either. A third or more of each group in the party says it would favor fully funding Medicare and Social Security, even if it means higher taxes. Even free trade, which has become Republican doctrine, splits the party's constituencies. Fabrizio's moralists and populists especially are worried about jobs going overseas, but so are many in both groups of economic conservatives who are usually assumed to be against protectionism. And general themes that unite the party in the abstract—cutting government, devolving power to the states, deregulation—become problematic as soon as you get to specifics. Thus, talk about regulations to protect the air and water, and sentiment against regulation dissipates. Cutting government spending is popular—except for the largest parts of it, such as Medicare, Social Security, and preserving a strong military.

Clinton's genius, albeit imperfectly realized, lay in his instinct for recovering the American center. Suddenly the anxious middle—the same center Reagan did such a good job of wooing with his reassuring mien, the same center that Republican cultural warriors seemed intent on abandoning—was up for grabs.

Clinton's personal foibles—one need only mention the Monica Lewinsky scandal—clearly derailed his project of building a broad coalition of the center-left. As William Galston, one of the architects of the Democratic Leadership Council's agenda, argued, only by gaining "credibility on defense, foreign policy and social values" could the party get a hearing for "a progressive economic program."^[3] Clinton did that. That this project was serious and had great potential can be seen in the success of European politicians, Tony Blair in Britain and Gerhard Schroeder in Germany notably, who pursued a similar path. That Clinton forced Republicans to change their rhetoric, if not their policies, is also obvious.

Clinton did not jettison everything liberals ever thought, as some on the left charged. Rather, he sought a synthesis of liberal goals, pragmatic means, and values to which most Americans related. The synthesis was visible in all of Clinton's most popular proposals. And popularity was part of the point. Clinton was trying to convince the country that active government need not be its enemy.

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His original proposals for welfare reform were designed to lift the poor from dependency and send a clear message that the government's goal is not to make it easier for people to escape the workforce. Clinton's plan for universal college loans that could be paid back with national service was an unapologetic mirror image of the GI Bill: the community, through government, could give individuals a hand, but the community could also expect something back. The commitment to better job training and continuing education was a way of saying government can help individuals through difficult transitions but cannot replace individual effort. On occasion, government really can, to use the overworked phrase, "empower people."

Clinton's talk about "reinventing government" not only responded to popular anger about the state's lumbering inefficiencies but also asserted that Democrats could be open minded and innovative about how they would seek their goals. Sometimes vouchers are better than new bureaucracies—and also more effective in redistributing money and opportunity to the needy. Sometimes market incentives can move us where we want to go faster than government commands.

Clinton effected a similar consensus in the cultural realm. Here, too, his ability to plow under old issues that had divided Democrats was central to his endeavor. Especially on crime and—ironically, in the light of the Monica scandal—family values, Clinton helped Democrats overcome a quarter century of squabbling and setbacks. His initiatives on guns and more cops were accompanied by falling crime rates. Notwithstanding the controversy over gays in the military, Clinton signaled this cultural moderation in many moments, perhaps most memorably in his address to a group of black ministers in Memphis, in which he sounded the traditionalist themes of family breakup, violence, and personal responsibility. Invoking Martin Luther King Jr. to assure his audience that an appeal to white backlash did not lurk beneath his words, he told the ministers that King had not died "to see the American family destroyed" or "to see thirteen-year-old boys get automatic weapons and gun down nine-year-olds just for the kick of it."

Clinton's co-opting of socially conservative themes, especially his direct appeal to suburban working couples worried about how to raise decent children, drove conservative Republicans mad no less than did Clinton's co-opting of their antigovernment rhetoric. The Republicans were eager to associate the noninhaling Clinton with the permissive values of the 1960s. Instead, he talked about 1990s-style families.

Republican Castellanos shrewdly captured what Clinton was up to in

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pushing such initiatives as school uniforms, teen curfews, crackdowns on truancy, gun restriction, and the V-Chip to block obscene programming on television. The president, following the advice of consultant Dick Morris among others, was reaching out to "soccer mom": the overburdened middle-income working mother who ferries her kids from soccer practice to scouts to school. Clinton's message to her was that the government will do what it can to help her raise her kids and establish some order in her family life.

Castellanos added that Clinton's specific and putatively liberal spending commitments to Medicare and Medicaid for the parents of a soccer mom and student loans for her children reinforced the message that Clinton, and, by extension, the federal government, is the "protector of the family." Conservatives, said Castellanos, had always argued in favor of "protecting the family from government." Clinton, for all his rhetoric against big government, proposed to "protect the family with government."

If this all sounded new, it was less new than it seemed. Many of these ideas grew out of Franklin Roosevelt's liberalism. For the New Deal, coming as it did before the time of the counterculture and the revolt against "traditional values, " was always singularly concerned with using government to protect families: through family wages, through the Works Progress Administration (WPA) jobs for breadwinners, through Social Security, and, yes, through the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program, which, after all, was originally designed for widows with children.

Senator Daniel P. Moynihan made the point powerfully that family had long been central to federal social programs in his book Family and Nation. The loss of this emphasis, he argued, was a grievous blow to sensible policy (not to mention politics). That analysis, ironically, would help lead Moynihan to his vehement and courageous opposition to the repeal of the AFDC program and put him on a collision course with Clinton. It was an unfortunate estrangement because it could be argued that so many other Clinton policies might be seen as coming from a careful reading of Moynihan and a reengagement with the older social policy tradition Moynihan admired.

Thus the Clinton gambit: fiscal caution, free trade, social moderation, and a probusiness orientation to pull in moderate Republicans and suburban independents; and a family orientation in social policy that jumped back over the 1960s and looked to the New Deal for inspiration. Ironically, it was in this second area that Clinton used his most conservative

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rhetoric to revive support for the activist government whose era is supposed to be over.

For those who welcomed this realignment of policy, politics, and ideas, the Clinton scandal and impeachment controversy was a huge blow. It undercut what had been one of his greatest achievements, the revival of Democratic strength among Reagan Democrats who never fully abandoned their commitment to activist government. Many of these voters were also socially conservative, rural, and southern. Al Gore, partly because of his own failures but also because of Clinton's, suffered serious defections from their ranks.

THE 2000 ELECTION AND BEYOND

Throughout the 1990s it was possible to argue that Clinton had fashioned a new kind of center-left coalition that might establish a majority regime in American politics. This was true even though Clinton's efforts to recast the terms of public policy were uneven, marked by the rhythm of bold adventure and hasty retreat, by failure of nerve and more chastened steps forward. Indeed, the precise emphasis varied with various phases of his administration. Early on, conflicts between the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) on the one hand and more liberal Democrats on the other exploded. They came to the fore in the health care initiative. Its failure forced Clinton to declare, whether he fully believed it or not, that the era of big government was over.

Given the preoccupation with sex and lies, the drawn-out impeachment melodrama, and the sordid finale of the pardons, it's easy to forget that Clinton-style civic liberalism reflected a broader, in part global, dynamic. Clinton was at the forefront of an important transformation that took place in the wealthy democracies of Europe and North America. On both sides of the Atlantic politicians and intellectuals were debating what sort of politics should replace the traditional liberal and social democratic doctrines of the left and the free market ideas of the right. For most of the 1990s the parties engaged in that quest were winning elections in the United States, Britain, France, Italy, Portugal, Holland, and Germany. The new ideas—at least the quest for them—were coming to be known as the politics of The Third Way.

Those three words arouse instant suspicion, and skeptics have raised fair questions. They asked whether the Third Way was a set of real ideas or an advertising slogan. They wanted to know if it represented a serious effort to create new forms of progressive politics or was, instead, a

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capitulation to the right, the final triumph of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Ultimately, they asked whether the Third Way was simply a ploy that shrewd politicians such as Clinton and Blair could use to distinguish themselves from some terrible "them" (the "far right, " the "old left") without ever having to define who "we" are.

Today the momentum toward a progressive Third Way seems somewhat stalled. Still, notwithstanding the Bush "victory, " it is plausible to argue that a new progressive majority was in the making. Even putting aside the controversy around the Florida recounts, Gore did defeat Bush in the popular vote by over a half million. Between them, Gore and Green Party candidate Ralph Nader secured a clear majority of the vote. Whatever the voters did in November 2000, they did not provide the centerright with a presidential majority. The Democrats also gained seats in the House and Senate, producing a virtual tie in the House and a literal tie in the Senate, later to be overturned by Jeffords. And of course, there is growing evidence that absent machine errors—and, perhaps, with a full recount—Gore would have won Florida, the electoral college, and the presidency.

It is also easy to overplay the role of issues and philosophy in the election of 2000. Three factors played a large role in keeping Gore from winning a clear triumph: Al Gore himself, Bill Clinton, and the relationship between the two of them. In an election this close factors of personality and performance can, all by themselves, explain the outcome. If Gore had not sighed so much in that first debate with Bush, he might be president. More generally, Gore allowed the election to be as much a personality struggle (Bush won this) as a contest over who was better prepared to be president (a competition that favored Gore). The Clinton scandals were also critical. The Bush campaign shrewdly played on Clinton's problems with veracity to highlight Gore's "little lies" and exaggerations. In normal circumstances these would not have been an issue, or not much of one.

Yet Gore and his strategists were so spooked by the Clinton drag on the ticket that they failed to take full advantage of the broad satisfaction in the electorate with the state of the country after the eight Clinton-Gore years. During the Democratic National Convention a Gore strategist outlined what looked then—and looks now—like a shrewd strategy. Gore would emphasize populist themes and distance himself from Clinton during the early stages of the fall campaign. He'd then turn in October to an embrace of the Clinton prosperity and to warnings about the risk of Republican policies to these achievements. The first half of the strategy

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would secure the Democratic base and bring left-of-center voters home to Gore after their flirtation with Nader. The second half would secure the ballots needed from middleand upper-middle-class voters who did very well under Clinton.

The problem with the strategy is that Gore didn't get to stage two until the last week of his campaign. There is a consensus across the Democratic Party, from left to center, that Gore—because of his understandable frustrations with Clinton—never took full advantage of what the Clinton record might have achieved for him.

Still, even if civic liberalism remains a plausible option, the progressive majority that looked so promising only half a decade ago no longer seems as inevitable as it once did. One can also see the possibilities for a center-right majority. Since the election, New Democrats associated with the Democratic Leadership Council have argued that Gore's embrace of "populist" themes actually hurt him. The populism, they say, turned off potential middle- and upper-middle-class allies and distracted attention from the themes of peace and prosperity. As several commentators have noted, Gore's slogan seemed to come down to "You've never had it so good—and I'm mad as hell about it."

There may be an instructive lesson, both for parties of the center-left and the center-right, in Gore's dilemma that transcends this particular election or the happenstance of the candidates and circumstances bequeathed them. The essence of Third Way politics has been defined in largely negative terms. It was not "the old left" or "the new right." It was not about unlimited confidence in the state, and it was not about unlimited confidence in the market. As common sense goes, it's not a bad formula. The electorates in most of the wealthy democracies have doubts about the old left and the new right, and they do not fully trust either the government or the unfettered market. But this third-way formula has proven better as a critique of the past than as a road map to the future. The surprising failure of moderate socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin to reach the runoff in France's 2002 presidential election underscored the difficulty of center-left politicians who try to balance state and market. The rise of the far right in Europe—its successes should be neither exaggerated nor ignored—suggest problems for the moderate right.

In the American case Democrats are still badly divided over the proper response to the global economy. In principle both sides of the internal debate agree that the global market is here to stay but that some forms of regulation (on the domestic side, certainly, but also at the international level) are needed—especially where the environment and labor and human

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rights are concerned. In practice, it's not at all clear what this formula means.

Similarly, both ends of the coalition agree on a role for government in assisting those left out of the current prosperity. Both sides mouth the same slogans about the need for "new, " "more efficient, " and more "market-friendly" approaches to social insurance, job training, and education. In practice there are clear differences over what that means. Democrats have been split over whether and how private investments should be part of the Social Security system, or how private insurance should play a role in the Medicare program. It is significant that as time went on both Gore and Clinton became more skeptical of proposals to "privatize" parts of Social Security. Their substantive conclusion—correct, I think—was that most privatization plans would endanger benefits, especially for lower-income workers. Their political conclusion was that the core Democratic vote came from those also skeptical of dismantling Social Security. Given that Gore made large gains in the closing days of the campaign with warnings about the dangers of Bush's privatization plans, this conclusion seems right too.

The trouble, then, is that center-left parties, no matter how often they use the word new, find themselves inevitably cast as defenders of older forms of social provision. They become the parties of status quo because they are willing neither to do much to expand current forms of social provision nor to cut them back in serious ways. (This, by the way, is why they face a constant struggle to mobilize their core constituencies. The base is often looking for more change than the moderate center-left wants to offer.) They support market capitalism more or less as it is—and are wary that even their own reforms might upset it. As a result, although parties of the moderate left have done well in shedding politically damaging baggage, they have not created a sense of excitement or commitment. As the former president George Bush Sr. might put it, the moderate left has a problem with "the vision thing." The trouble faced by Blair, Clinton, and their colleagues on the moderate left is that in abandoning old progressive dreams, they seem to have created what Philip Collins, director of the London-based Social Market Foundation, calls "politics without a lodestar."^[4]

These vulnerabilities at the core of the Third Way provide hope and inspiration to partisans of a center-right Fourth Way. As we will see, such a Fourth Way is not without its own ambiguities, as Bush continues to discover. Nonetheless, the Bush project should be taken seriously because it does contain elements that are genuinely new—even as it uses innovation

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to support an older market conservatism, buttressed by an even more ancient traditionalism.

Throughout the election Bush tacitly honored the logic of the Third Way. Most obviously, the rhetoric of compassion was a pointed break with the conservatism of the 1980s and mid-1990s. The characteristic of Anglo-American center-right politics during the years when Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and, later, Newt Gingrich were in the ascendancy was a hard antigovernment, antistate rhetoric—a rhetoric that was often harder than the programs embraced by the protagonists. The classic formulation was Reagan's statement that government isn't the solution; government is the problem.

Pure antistatism ran out of steam—and Bush and his advisers knew it. The strategic correction Bush introduced was to embrace, Third Way-like, a rhetoric declaring that conservatives, too, understood the limits of both state and market. Bush, like the Third Wayers, went out of his way to criticize his own side. "Too often, " he declared, "my party has confused the need for limited government with a disdain for government itself."

Bush also distanced himself from a pure embrace of the market—but he used conservative, traditionalist, and religious rhetoric to this end. "The invisible hand works many miracles, but it cannot touch the human heart, " he declared in a speech in July of 1999. "We are a nation of rugged individuals. But we are also the country of a second chance—tied together by bonds of friendship and community and solidarity." For good measure, he added: "There must be a kindness in our justice. There must be a mercy in our judgment. There must be a love behind our zeal." Bush returned to these themes in the spring of 2002 in a speech in California. "We are a generous and caring people, " he said. "We don't believe in a sink-or-swim society. The policies of our government must heed the universal call of all faiths to love a neighbor as we would want to be loved ourselves. We need a different approach than either big government or indifferent government." This is the Fourth Way at its purest.

Bush's rhetoric on the limits of markets was not about changing the market system but about strengthening nonmarket institutions, especially religious institutions. In a long conservative tradition Bush was arguing that the cool calculations of the market would be tempered by those havens in a heartless world, the family and the church.

Although Bush's Fourth-Way synthesis should not be dismissed, the ultimate victory of a center-right coalition is no more inevitable than Third-Way progressivism. Bush has linked this rhetoric to a more energetic

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assault on the old New Deal-Great Society state than Reagan himself dared pursue. Bush was the first presidential candidate ever to propose the partial privatization of Social Security, that supposed "third rail" of American politics that no conservative politician would dare to touch. He spoke of a Medicare program more implicated in the private insurance market than the current system. And of course, like Reagan, he proposed a large income tax reduction, tilted inevitably toward wealthier taxpayers. Bush gave wonderful speeches about compassion for the poor but put far more money into tax cuts for the best off—and, after September 11, into the Pentagon. It's clear that the election of 2002 was not a mandate for assaults on government social programs that were never telegraphed in Bush's electoral rhetoric. In his speeches, if not in his policies, Bush recognized this.

In the meantime the rhetoric of the center-left emphasizing government's role in protecting average citizens still had power. Defenders of Gore's populism point out that his most successful period came in the weeks after his populist turn at the August Democratic Convention. If the election had been held at some point in September, Gore would have won a victory in the range of seven percentage points (or so, at least, the polls suggest). Gore's populism was of a highly tempered sort. His targets were large insurance companies, health maintenance organizations, "big polluters, " and "big oil, " the last an inevitable attack given the business ties of the Republican candidates for president and vice president. "Big polluters" fare very badly in the polls, and "big oil" (outside the oil patch) doesn't do too well either. And Gore's assault on insurance companies and health providers was harnessed to popular causes—notably a prescription drug benefit for elderly Americans under the Medicare program and a patients' bill of rights.

In short, Gore's populism worked well as far as it went. His failure was not to integrate the populist appeals into a self-confident, forward-looking program that promised to build on past achievements. Gore had good issues but not enough lift. He had more program than theme. He made a series of reasonable, individual promises that did not quite add up to a broader promise for the country.

Bush and the policies he has championed remain out of line with popular opinion on the environment, energy, health care, and several other issues. Consider Bush's big success, his tax cut. The president liked to say that his stand on taxes was principled, because he was not following the polls. He was right about the polls. A big tax cut, tilted toward the best off, was never what the public wanted most. Throughout the

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2000 campaign and after, majorities cared more about fixing Social Security and Medicare and improving education. In a sense, once elected, Bush was forced to choose between what Democratic consultant David Doak called "expansive, big tent rhetoric, "^[5] which Bush used to gloss over his frankly conservative policy proposals, and the proposals themselves. He chose the policies. David Winston, a Republican pollster, has pointed out that "[t]he focus of compassionate conservatism should not be about being more green or appealing to specific groups.… [It] was about understanding people's problems. That's what his strength was in the campaign."^[6] But in his approach to governing in the period before September 11, as Robert Shrum, an adviser to Gore in 2000, observed, Bush was "off the wavelength and strategy of his own campaign."^[7] Shrum knew what he was talking about. He spoke shortly after he had advised the British Labour Party in its landslide 2001 victory. Labour's Conservative Party foes made the mistake of imitating Bush's behavior in office rather than his strategy during the campaign. In the process they ensured the triumph of Blair's Third Way.

All of this brings us back to the possibilities for a progressive regime. The center-left has solved many of its old problems. In most countries (and certainly in Britain and the United States) it is no longer seen as fiscally irresponsible. It is not seen as hostile to the market. It is not viewed as hopelessly defensive of every failed policy innovation in its history. But it now lacks the energy that inspired the older movements around social democracy, New Dealism and Labourism. Its "negative" innovations—better labeled, perhaps, as "strategic corrections"—have largely been achieved.

The plight of the center-right is somewhat different. It enjoys, and can draw on, the sense of solidarity that can be found in abundant supply among traditionalist movements. It profits from two decades of public argument in which market-oriented ideas were dominant and statism became a very dirty word. Despite the general popularity of tax cuts, however, it has not yet overcome the suspicion that its rhetoric of compassion is a cover for a program of redistribution of wealth upward. And in the United States the growing constituencies—especially Latinos, but also the socially moderate middle class—are those least likely to form the base of a new Republican majority. If demography is destiny, the demographics favor the center-left.

In sum, one could argue that on the eve of September 11 the contemporary center-left had succeeded in jettisoning failed dreams, but it has not yet generated new ones. The contemporary center-right has learned

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a great deal from the rhetoric of the center-left, but its program still looks back to the dreams of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.

AFTER SEPTEMBER 11

We say that September 11 changed everything. But in politics we do not know yet exactly what September 11 changed or how much it changed us. Will the profound seriousness that overtook the country after the assaults of that day cause a more permanent change in politics as practiced in the past decade? It is already clear that the bipartisan mood that characterized the immediate aftermath of the attacks cannot be the way of politics. The divisions between center-left and center-right on the role of government—witness the early battles over airport security and the economic stimulus packages and later fights over budgets and health care—are too deep.

Yet there can be little doubt that something important happened in the wake of September 11. The tough guys of politics—the political consultants whose first, second, and third jobs involve winning elections—were among those who thought politics had turned a corner. At the very least, they began advising their clients to be prudent in picking their fights. "One of the things you've seen is a desire for a very different kind of discourse, "^[8] said Winston, the Republican pollster. Americans, he said, wanted to know that leaders (and preachers and even comedians) understood how much the world had changed. He argued that criticisms of statements by the Reverend Jerry Falwell and Bill Maher of TV's Politically Incorrect in the aftermath of the assaults were not so much an attack on free speech as an assertion of new public norms. For at least a few weeks after September 11, he said, the public saw "a different political debate" carried out—more civility. As a result, he said, "politicians are going to do tit-for-tat at their own risk."

Some of this was, and will remain, purely tactical—a moderate-sounding style overlaid on the moderate-sounding rhetoric that became the rule in the late 1990s. Democratic pollster Guy Molyneux predicted that politicians would define their positions as "the sensible bipartisan solution" and define their opponents as the ones "breaking the bipartisan coalition."

Some things were obvious. Polls showed a reversal in the antigovernment sentiment that had been so powerful for so long. That may prove a favorite adage of former defense secretary Senator William Cohen: "Government is the enemy until you need a friend." And, paradoxically

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at a time of increased anxiety, many more Americans thought the nation was on the "right track" than did so before the attacks.

Winston argued that those polling results showed that Americans, although worried about the future, were gratified by the country's new sense of community. "People saw this as a horrible event, " he said. "They think the economy is going to get worse. They think life is going to be tougher. But they also saw these firefighters stepping up to the plate. These were good people. They saw millions of Americans reaching into their pockets to make contributions. They saw people crashing that plane into the ground in order to save the lives of others. They saw people who acted as Americans who made them feel proud."^[9] If a new fear was one product of September 11, a new solidarity was the other.

The very seriousness of the problems the country confronted shoved old scandals off the front pages, the talk shows, and cable television. Old slogans, left and right, seemed painfully stale. Only the most contorted analysis could lay the blame for the slaughter of innocents on "American imperialism." The rhetoric of free-market omnipotence, so dominant for so long, became a bit less believable when Republicans and Democrats in Congress agreed that the marketplace couldn't keep the airlines flying; only the government, however clumsily, could do that. Later, the Enron scandal would challenge the fashion for deregulation. Capitalism without clear rules, seriously enforced, could lose a lot of people a lot of money for reasons that had little to do with genuine success or failure in the marketplace. The scandal, and the spate of similar corporate scandals that followed, showed clearly that the interests of outsiders—both employees and shareholders—needed to be protected against the greed of insiders.

September 11 had another effect: complaints about America's alleged "moral bankruptcy" or "hedonism" were laid low by the community spirit and selflessness of countless firefighters, rescue workers, and volunteers. Our celebrities, suddenly, were not high-tech wizards, Hollywood beautiful people, or hotshot investors. The heroes were public employees who soared in our esteem by simply doing their jobs—and ordinary citizens who simply behaved as citizens should.

Patriotism was suddenly spoken of without any irony. The American flag, a politically contested symbol in the forty years war that began in the 1960s, was restored as the banner representing the entire American community. This was not a trivial change. Nothing more perfectly symbolized the end of the culture wars. And it suggested we might begin believing again in common endeavor. Politics, public life, and public service

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were suddenly too important to be trivialized or denigrated. If we don't come to believe that after September 11, we never will.

To predict with any certainty how these changes affect the political future would be foolhardy, especially given that the signs remain contradictory. President Bush's soaring popularity in the wake of the attacks—and the widespread view, held even among his critics, that he handled the early months of war with great skill—pointed to a Republican future built around patriotism, military virtues, and a yearning for security.

And in the elections of November 2002, Republicans used every single one of these issues—and Bush's frenetic campaigning—to oust the Democrats from control of the Senate and to expand their majority in the House of Representatives. It was a close yet still stunning result, better than many Republicans expected. At mid-summer, the election seemed likely to point to the limits of the September 11 effect. A sagging economy and the scandals that wracked corporate America crowded terrorism out of the news.

But the Bush political team shrewdly turned the country's attention back to national security issues. At the end of August Vice President Dick Cheney fired the first rhetorical guns in a new debate over whether the United States should invade Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein. The president went to the United Nations on Iraq in early September. Despite the administration's best efforts, it could never provide a clear link between Saddam and Al Qaeda—and thus September 11. But in the end, this didn't matter. One does not have to believe that the Iraq debate was driven by primarily partisan and political imperatives to see that it displaced economics, split the Democratic party, and left the Democrats struggling (unsuccessfully, as it turned out) to move the nation's political dialogue back to what might be seen as "normal" domestic issues such as health care, social security, and economic growth.

For good measure, the administration took what might be seen as a bureaucratic issue—the reorganization of the government to create a Department of Homeland Security—and inflated it into a major cause. Democrats resisted a provision sought by Bush to give the president more freedom to hire and fire through a weakening of union rules and civil service protections. But Bush scored when he argued that Democrats preferred protecting their union allies to passing the bill he said he needed.

This was classic, divisive wedge politics. Democrats had a choice of capitulating to Bush and thereby angering some of their most important allies or going on the offensive with an aggressive defense of the rights

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of unionized civil servants. (They might have reminded the country of the heroism of those unionized firefighters and police officers.) The Democrats chose neither to capitulate nor to fight back effectively, and Bush bludgeoned them with the homeland security club.

Here lies a cautionary tale about the hopes for greater civility in a post9/11 world. In principle, the homeland security bill was bi-partisan. Bush had, in fact, resisted the idea at first and then picked it up from the Democrats. And when it came election time, the administration was willing to use a minor provision in the bill to bash its twin opponents in the unions and in the opposition party. A relatively minor dispute was turned into Republican television advertisements charging that Democrats—even including Senator Max Cleland of Georgia, a disabled Vietnam War hero in a wheelchair—were somehow soft on homeland security. More generally, Bush engaged in what conservative writer Jeffrey Bell called "fierce, relentless, highly effective partisanship."^[10] Yet Bush succeeded brilliantly in hiding partisanship and ideology behind the determined face of national unity. To Republicans and many suburban independents, it was Democrats who seemed to be the partisan aggressors, even though Democrat after Democrat swore fealty to Bush in the war on terror.

Seen in this light, the 2002 elections may have buried Goldsmith's Fourth Way and—if one dares go on like this—marked the beginning of a Fifth Way, yet another attempt at realignment. This try would be rooted not in compassionate conservatism but in the quest for national security. The old tax-cutting conservatism would be harnessed to a new toughness on security and a new patriotism cast in terms set down by a politically savvy White House. With the Republicans enjoying ever growing advantages in fundraising, and a mass media increasingly tilted to the right through the power of conservative voices on radio and cable television, a Republican realignment seemed a possibility. Yet the inexorability of such a realignment was almost immediately called into question. First, there was the re-election of Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu in Louisiana's runoff election in December of 2002, despite prodigious efforts by Bush and his administration to turn the seat Republican. Republican toughness in November called forth a tough Democratic response in December. At around the same time, the widespread reaction against Senate Republican Leader Trent Lott's suggestion that the country would have been better off if Strom Thurmond's segregationist presidential ticket had triumphed in 1948 suggested that wedge issues are two-sided. So embarrassing was this explicit reach back to segregation that the president himself was required to condemn it. Whether the Fourth

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Way or the Fifth, a new Republican realignment would certainly fail if it became ensnared in old-style right wing politics. As John Judis and Ruy Teixeira argue in The Emerging Democratic Majority, not only are minority voters a growing part of the American electorate, but so, too, are members of the professional middle class. Neither group is likely to be attracted by a call to the pre-Civil Rights Era.^[11]

And so even in the wake of a Republican victory and in a political environment unsettled by terrorism, Americans were still rejecting the old wedge politics and the reopening of such settled questions as the equality of the races and the genders. Despite the president's embrace of a libertarian economics around taxes, the new spirit of community and solidarity that was bred by the events of September 11 pointed away from a politics of radical individualism. This was a continuation of 1990s trends, not, as some thought, a reversal. The President's embrace of national service as an ideal suggested that he was as aware of this as anyone. And the new, more positive attitude toward government suggested that at a time when Americans decided they had real enemies, government was unlikely to be one of them. Both trends pointed more toward the left than the right. One of the earliest tests—over whether airport security should become a task for federal employees or private sector companies—the government won, to the chagrin of conservatives in the House of Representatives.

The new patriotism, the new seriousness, and the new solidarity pointed to a style of politics more akin to the ethos of Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower than to the ideological styles of either the 1960s or the 1980s. This does not imply a return to the 1950s. Few things were more striking during the war against the Taliban than the triumph of certain ideas from the 1960s, especially the equality of men and women. A conservative administration used feminist values—including a strong speech by First Lady Laura Bush—as part of its argument for the morality of the struggle against terrorism. The arguments against the Taliban were arguments for not only political but also religious liberty. A hard right religious politics rang hollow, as both Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson learned.

The wars of the past—over culture in the 1960s and over government's role in the 1980s—seem profoundly irrelevant to the new moment. That is why Third Ways and Fourth Ways, and, perhaps Fifth Ways—however imperfectly they are realized—will continue to set the tone of politics. Americans spent the 1990s trying to heal the wounds of the old culture wars and to shake off the politics of the past. In the first decade of this

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century, propelled by crisis and a sense of the urgency of politics, we might actually succeed.

But there are no guarantees. The old habits of partisanship and wedge politics die hard. A new politics will arise only if the assorted new "ways" become more than short-term gimmicks. And in contemporary politics, overcoming the pressures to think only in the short-term requires courage, commitment, and a faith that democracies ultimately reward achievement and vision. Paradoxically, all the new ways have arisen precisely because that faith remains in such short supply.

NOTES