Why Americans Hate Politics

Praise for Why Americans Hate Politics

"Dispensing with the standard partisan punditry, E. J. Dionne cuts to the core of modern liberalism and conservatism and finds that both have squandered their best impulses. Yet the author resists despair—for he also suggests how Americans, by learning from the recent past, might recover a wider sense of republican adhesion and democratic commitment. Why Americans Hate Politics combines the realism of the precinct captain with a profound understanding of the role of ideas and ideologies in our public debates."

—National Book Awards Finalist Citation

Splendid and thoughtful . . . Dionne makes a closely reasoned argument that the majority of Americans are fed-up-to-here with politics because their politicians quit on them.

—George V. Higgins, The Washington Post

[A] broad and detailed intellectual history of liberalism and conservatism since the 1960s . . . An incisive book . . . A very fine guide to how liberals and conservatives ended up so rudderless in a world without Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, and the New Deal.

—The Wall Street Journal

A book destined to become a classic in American political history.

—Elaine Ciulla Kamarck, Newsday

Dionne is seductive, and his intelligent and well-written book should be consulted. . . . Dionne has sharp insights, and every civic-minded person would be better off for heeding them.

—William F. Buckley, Jr., The Houston Chronicle

Dionne has done a fine job describing the frustrations of the public and the paralysis of government in what he calls the politics of false choices.

—Ellen Goodman, The Boston Globe

An astute, entertaining analysis of the reasons that contemporary political debates and divisions misrepresent American issues.

—The New Yorker

"[A] rare and wonderful book which every citizen who ever voted will be happy she read and every stiff who has ever covered a political primary will wish he had written. Why Americans Hate Politics—like American politics at its best—informs, challenges, provokes and inspires."

—Mark Shields, syndicated columnist

Why do Americans hate politics? Because they hate the false moralizing, the pandering, the divisiveness, the personal slanders, and the trivialization that now dominate the American election campaigns. E. J. Dionne’s wonderful history of modern political ideas shows how this happened, places blame equally on all sides, and offers a simple lesson for a new politics of the nineties: Get serious.

—James K. Galbraith, LBJ School of Public Affairs

A book that historians ought to envy. It offers a well integrated, carefully argued interpretation of a large chunk of our political history.

—Christopher Lasch, Dissent

A gripping page-by-page analysis of what ails us. Neglect it not.

—National Review

Dionne . . . is what a political reporter ought to be, a relentless seeker of that kernel of meaning that is the heart of fact. He has an old-time journalist’s ear for humbug, and he knows the importance of interests and power in political life.

—Wilson Carey McWilliams, Commonweal

CONTENTS

Epigraph

INTRODUCTION TO THE SECOND EDITION:

Do Americans Still Hate Politics?

PART ONE: THE FAILURES OF LIBERALISM

ONE   FREEDOM NOW:

The New Left and the Assault on Liberalism

TWO   THE VIRTUES OF VIRTUE:

The Neoconservative Revolt

THREE   NOT BLACK AND WHITE

Race, Values, and Willie Horton

FOUR   FAMILY POLITICS

Feminism and Its Enemies

FIVE   THE LOST OPPORTUNITY:

Jimmy Carter and the Not-So-Vital Center

PART TWO: THE CONSERVATIVE IMPASSE

SIX   IDEAS HAVE CONSEQUENCES:

Conservatism’s Contradictory Origins

SEVEN   MODERATION IS NO VIRTUE:

The Troubled Life of Modern Republicanism

EIGHT   HELL HATH NO FURY:

The Religious Right and the New Republican Party

NINE   THE DEMAND FOR SUPPLY SIDE:

Conservative Politics, New Deal Optimism

TEN   POLITICS WITHOUT GOVERNMENT:

The Rebirth of Libertarianism

ELEVEN   BALANCING ACTS:

Reagan, Bush, and the Conservative Impasse

TWELVE   ONE NATION, DIVISIBLE:

The 1988 Campaign and the Logic of False Choices

PART THREE: CURING THE MISCHIEFS OF IDEOLOGY

THIRTEEN   THE POLITICS OF THE RESTIVE MAJORITY:

How to Heal Public Life

About E. J. Dionne, Jr.

Notes

Acknowledgments

Index

TO MY MOTHER AND FATHER, WITH LOVE

As long as people are people, democracy, in the full sense of the word, will always be no more than an ideal. One may approach it as one would the horizon in ways that may be better or worse, but it can never be fully attained. In this sense, you, too, are merely approaching democracy.

—VACLAV HAVEL

To the United States Congress

INTRODUCTION TO THE SECOND EDITION:

Do Americans Still Hate Politics?

THIS BOOK IS IN PART a polemic and a call to political renewal. But it is also—and, I have come to think, perhaps primarily—a history of ideological politics in the United States from the 1960s forward. It’s an attempt to explore the roots of today’s politics by looking at the achievements and wrong turns of contemporary liberalism and conservatism. At the heart of Why Americans Hate Politics is the view that ideas shape politics far more than most accounts of public life usually allow. I believe ideas matter not only to elites and intellectuals, but also to rank-and-file voters. Indeed, I sometimes think that the rank and file see the importance of ideas more clearly than the elites, who often found themselves surprised by the rise of the movements that have shaped our politics since the 1960s. These movements usually arose from the bottom up. They were not imposed top down. That’s certainly true of the civil rights, feminist, and environmental movements and of the various antiwar rebellions. It’s also true of the 1960s conservative insurgency led by Barry Goldwater, William F. Buckley Jr., and Ronald Reagan, the Christian Conservative and libertarian movements, and the various tax revolts that have rocked politics over the last three decades.

Of course, ideas are not all that matter in politics. Money and the power of interest groups matter, too. It would be naive to assert otherwise—just as naive as pretending that ideas don’t matter. But even here, one can see in the reaction against the explosion of big-money politics the rise of another set of ideas in the political reform movement. This movement fueled John McCain’s candidacy in the 2000 Republican primaries, and its ideas played a central role in the appeal of all the Democratic presidential candidates in 2004. The fact that so many Americans see politics as dominated by wealthy interests that make large campaign contributions remains one of the central reasons why Americans continue to mistrust politics—and sometimes come to hate it.

But the central argument of this book is that liberalism and conservatism have long framed political issues as a series of false choices and that many of the problems in American politics could be traced to the failure of our dominant ideologies. Racked by contradiction and responsive mainly to the needs of their various constituencies, liberalism and conservatism prevented the nation from settling the questions that most troubled it. On issue after issue, this book insisted back in 1991, there was consensus on where the country should move or at least on what we should be arguing about; liberalism and conservatism make it impossible for that consensus to express itself. Voters were tired of the false choices presented by an ideologically driven either/or politics.

At its best, democratic politics is about what Arthur Schlesinger Jr. calls the search for remedy. The purpose of democratic politics is to solve problems and resolve disputes. But since the 1960s, the key to winning elections has been to reopen the same divisive issues over and over again. The issues themselves are not reargued. No new light is shed. Rather, old resentments and angers are stirred up in an effort to get voters to cast yet one more ballot of angry protest. Political consultants were especially ingenious in finding creative ways of tapping into popular anger about crime. Yet their spots did not solve the problem. Endless arguments about whether the death penalty was a good idea did not put more cops on the street, streamline the criminal justice system, or deal with the underlying causes of violence.

The decline of a politics of remedy created a vicious cycle. Campaigns became negative in large part because of a sharp decline in popular faith in government. To appeal to an increasingly alienated electorate, candidates and their political consultants adopted a cynical stance that, they believed with good reason, played into popular cynicism about politics and thus won them votes. But cynical campaigns do not lead to remedies. Therefore, problems got worse, the electorate became more cynical—and so did the advertising.

II

This book describes conservatives as suffering from a deep tension. The split is between their free market, antigovernment, libertarian wing and a traditionalist wing more interested in defending values that had come under attack in the 1960s than in market economics. Liberals were also in trouble. Their core programs—Medicare, Social Security, help for the needy, equal rights—were broadly popular. But liberals were reluctant to justify their efforts in the name of values to which most Americans subscribed—work, family stability, serious consequences for criminal behavior, and a respect for the old-fashioned bonds of locality and neighborhood.

With both parties to the debate in difficulty, politics worked itself out as a series of wars. Conservatives might not unite around a program, but they could agree to roll back liberalism. To do so, they used tensions in American life over race, gender equality, and cultural change (or race, rights and taxes, as Thomas and Mary Edsall put it plainly) to divide the liberal camp and hive off working-class voters suspicious of liberalism’s core values. Liberals often played into conservative hands by seeming to deny that a virtuous community depended on virtuous individuals and by opposing changes in the welfare state aimed at reinforcing certain values, work and family stability among them.

To blame our problems on the failure of ideologies seemed a convenient way to avoid attaching responsibility to individuals. But to hold ideologies responsible for our troubles was placing a responsibility on those who lived by and formulated them. It was also a way of saying that ideas badly formulated, interpreted, and used can lead us astray. In the early 1990s, it seemed clear to me that we were suffering from a false polarization in our politics, in which liberals and conservatives kept arguing about the same things when the country wanted to move on.

The cause of this false polarization was the cultural civil war that broke out in the 1960s. Just as the Civil War dominated American political life for decades after it ended, so the cultural civil war of the 1960s, with all its tensions and contradictions, continued to shape our politics in 1991—and, to a surprising degree, does so to this day. We are still trapped in the 1960s.

In 1991, the country faced three major sets of questions left over from the old cultural battles: civil rights and the full 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 the meaning of the Vietnam War. The last was not simply a fight over whether it was right to do battle in that Southeast Asian country; it was also an argument over how Americans see their nation, its leaders, and its role in the world. It was, as well, a debate over who bore the burdens of fighting that war and whether they were borne fairly. In 2004 that issue was still very much alive; witness the debate over John Kerry’s service in the war and George W. Bush’s in the National Guard.

It was easy to understand why conservatives wanted the cultural civil war to continue—and why so many continued to pursue it into the twenty-first century. It was the Kulturkampf of the 1960s that made conservatives so powerful in our political life. 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. The cultural issues, especially race, allowed the conservatives who took control of the Republican Party to win over 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 incomes.

The new conservative majority that won all but one presidential election between 1968 and 1988 was inherently unstable. It united upper-income groups, whose main interest was in smaller government and lower taxes, with middle- to lower-income groups, who were culturally conservative but still supported most of the New Deal and a lot of the Great Society. The lower-income wing of the conservative coalition tended to vote Republican for president, to express its cultural values, but (at least until 1994) Democratic for Congress, to protect its economic interests.

Conservative politicians have always been uneasy about settling the cultural civil war because they fear that doing so would push their newfound supporters among the less well-to-do back toward the Democrats in presidential contests. The rise of the gay marriage issue in 2004 and President Bush’s embrace of a constitutional amendment to ban it opened another chapter in this struggle. It is no wonder that Bill Clinton in 1992 and Senator John Edwards in 2004 explicitly urged their party to begin a new debate over values. Their purpose was to emphasize the ways in which culturally traditional Americans of modest incomes were being ill served by policies that favored the interests of the wealthy over those of the middle class and the poor. But both Clinton and Edwards also sought to show how traditional values, properly understood, entailed not only a respect for family life, but also a concern for the economic needs of families; not only an emphasis on personal responsibility, but also a respect for community.

The broad political interests of liberals have always rested on settling the cultural civil war. But many liberals have had an interest in seeing it continue. 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, toward upper-middle-class reformers interested mainly in cultural issues and foreign policy. Increasingly, liberalism was defined not by its support for energetic government intervention in the economy, but by its openness to cultural change and its opposition to American intervention abroad. The rise of the cultural issues made the upper-middle-class reformers the dominant voices within American liberalism. The reformers, no less than the conservatives, had a continuing interest in seeing the cultural civil war continue.

Indeed, what is striking about political events of the 1960s is that they allowed both of the nation’s dominant ideologies, and both parties, to become vehicles for upper-middle-class interests. Both the Goldwater campaign and the antiwar forces associated with George McGovern’s candidacy were movements of the upper middle class imbued with a moral (or, in the eyes of their critics, moralistic) vision. These constituencies were not concerned primarily with the political issues that mattered to less well-to-do voters—notably the performance of the nation’s economy, the distribution of economic benefits, and the efficacy of the most basic institutions of government, including schools, roads, and the criminal justice system. While upper-middle-class reformers, left and right, argued about morality, anti-communism, imperialism, and abstract rights, millions of voters were confined to the sidelines, wondering why the nation’s political discussion had become so distant from their concerns.

By continuing to live in the 1960s, conservatives and liberals distorted their own doctrines and refused to face up to the contradictions within their creeds. Both sides constantly invoked individual rights and then criticized each other for evading issues involving individual and collective responsibility. Each side claimed to have a communitarian vision but backed away from community whenever its demands came into conflict with one of its cherished doctrines.

Conservatives claimed to be the true communitarians because of their support for the values of family, work, and neighborhood. Unlike liberals, conservatives were willing to assert that community norms should prevail on such matters as sex, pornography, and the education of children. Yet the typical conservative was unwilling to defend the interests of traditional community whenever its needs came into conflict with those of the free market. If shutting down a plant threw thousands in a particular community out of work, conservatives usually defended this assault on family, work, and neighborhood in the name of efficiency. Many of the things conservatives bemoaned about modern society—a preference for short-term gratification over long-term commitment, the love of things instead of values, a flight from responsibility toward selfishness—resulted at least in part from the workings of the very economic system that conservatives have felt so bound to defend. For conservatives, it was much easier to ignore this dilemma and blame permissiveness on big government or the liberals.

The liberals often made that easy. Liberals touted themselves as the real defenders of community and spoke constantly about having us share one another’s burdens. Yet when the talk moved from economic issues to culture or personal morality, liberals fell strangely mute. Their admirable devotion to social tolerance made many liberals uneasy with talk about virtue. Liberals defended the welfare state but were uneasy when asked what moral values the welfare state should promote—as if billions of federal dollars could be spent in a value free way. Liberals rightly defended the interests of children born into poverty through no choice of their own. Yet when conservatives argued that society had a vital interest in how the parents of these poor children behaved, many liberals accused the conservatives of blaming the victim. When conservatives argued that changing teenage attitudes toward premarital sex might reduce teen pregnancy, many liberals ended the conversation by accusing the conservatives of being prudes or out of touch.

Why Americans Hate Politics insisted that a new political center was waiting to be born. The center it had in mind would reflect the public’s liberal instincts and conservative values. It would be moderate in its cultural attitudes, broadly tolerant but also respectful of traditional popular leanings on matters of work, faith, and family. William Galston, the political philosopher and former Clinton White House aide, put his finger on the American consensus when he said that most of us were tolerant traditionalists. Sociologist Alan Wolfe’s brilliant 1998 exploration of middle-class social and political attitudes, One Nation, After All, broadly confirmed this view. David Brooks’s discussion of bourgeois bohemians, or Bobos, as he called them, pointed to the ways in which Americans tried to blend the values of the 1960s and 1980s in their personal lives.

But the new center described here would also be progressive in its view of government’s capacity to ease the suffering of the poor, reduce economic injustice and inequalities of opportunity, and expand access to education, housing, health care, and child care.

I’ve been gratified over the years that the book won a following among young Americans who responded to its call for a politics that would no longer be held hostage to the ideological feuds and enthusiasms of the 1960s and the 1980s. All of us are, more than we would like to admit, creatures of the times in which we come to maturity. There are definable political generations. Americans shaped by the New Deal hold attitudes toward government and public life that are, on the whole, quite different from the responses of their fellow citizens whose views were forged in the Reagan era.

But a nation and its public life lose their dynamism when politics is nothing but a reprise of the past. The young are always rightly irked when the old say that all the important things, all the good ideas, all the great leaders, all the best music, were produced twenty or forty or sixty years ago. So it is in politics. To argue that all the answers to contemporary problems lie in sixties liberalism or in Reagan-era conservatism is to walk away from the fierce urgency of now. It is to pretend that new circumstances don’t matter, new problems don’t exist, new solutions aren’t available.

III

It is an inevitable temptation for anyone who has written a book about politics—and, perhaps, about economics, literature, or anything else—to see subsequent events as vindicating his or her view. Having admitted that, I’d argue it’s fair to see that much of what happened in the Clinton years was a largely successful war against false choices. Clinton himself was quite deliberate in denouncing false choices in his speeches and arguing that they were debilitating to sensible approaches to policy. He frequently appealed to the vital center described by Arthur Schlesinger and discussed in some detail here. He consciously set out to solve some of liberalism’s problems—and to take advantage of some of conservatism’s failures.

The big government vs. small government argument faded. (And George W. Bush, having created massive budget deficits, was not in the strongest position to present himself as a small government conservative.) The discussion of work and family issues was no longer cast as a war between the family and feminism. Most Americans accepted the legitimacy of women’s quest for equality and the importance of protecting family life. The new argument focused on how to balance work and family and how to protect the family within a highly competitive labor market. In The Missing Middle: Working Families and the Future of American Social Policy, Harvard sociologist Theda Skocpol argued that a central purpose of progressive social policy should be how we as Americans can continue to care for our grandparents, while doing a much better job than we now do of supporting all working parents as they do the hard and vital work of raising our nation’s children. So much for any side in the political debate claiming a monopoly on family values.

The success of Clinton’s economic policies discredited (or should have) many of the claims made by supply-side tax cutters whose ideas are described in some detail in these pages. When Clinton proposed a substantial tax increase on the wealthy to balance the federal budget, conservatives such as Newt Gingrich, Dick Armey, and the editors of The Wall Street Journal editorial page predicted economic catastrophe. The opposite happened. The economy grew at rates unseen since the 1960s. The rich, even after they paid Clinton’s taxes, got richer. But the middle class and the poor got richer, too. Exceptionally low rates of unemployment helped raise wages and create new opportunities for those previously left out of the workforce. Some conservatives were willing to admit that their side had suffered a significant—and self-inflicted—defeat. The Republicans’ mistake, wrote Ramesh Ponnuru in the National Review, "was to overstate the case against Clinton’s tax increases. . . .

Instead of predicting that his bill would reduce growth . . . they said it would plunge the economy into recession, Ponnuru went on. When this didn’t happen, and the economy after a few years of subpar growth started chugging along, Republicans were embarrassed (as much as politicians get, anyway), and, more important, left with nothing to say.

And as the economy grew and the government’s tax take increased, the federal budget not only came into balance, but began to throw off large surpluses. Democrats, once seen as the fiscally profligate party, became the party of the balanced budget.

Shrewd conservatives understood how dangerous this achievement was to their cause. In a column in The Wall Street Journal, Paul Gigot warned early on that the era of balanced budget liberalism would deprive conservatives of their ability to swat new programs away with arguments that big deficits made them unaffordable. Had not government grown in the early 1960s and 1970s, Gigot asked, when deficits did not figure so prominently in the political debate? The ambitious plans offered by Democrats Al Gore and Bill Bradley during the 2000 campaign for health coverage, preschool and after-school programs, and action against child poverty ratified Gigot’s prediction.

Although the welfare bill Clinton signed into law was deeply flawed, there is little argument anymore that the purpose of social policy should be to promote work while expanding the rewards to the poor who join the workforce. George W. Bush’s response on this issue during the 2000 campaign was revealing. He chose to take loud public issue with the Republican Congress when it proposed to slow payments of the earned income tax credit, which Clinton vastly expanded to lift the incomes of the working poor. It was wrong, Bush said, to balance the budget on the backs of the poor. The Republican leadership quickly dropped the plan.

The crime issue, so potent in every campaign between 1968 and 1988, ebbed with falling crime rates. It’s hard to accuse anyone on any side of being soft on crime. There continued to be demagoguery about the death penalty—but much less. Indeed, space was reopened in the death penalty debate for those who questioned its fairness and saw flaws in the system that administered it. Some religious conservatives—including foes of abortion seeking moral consistency on issues related to life—spoke of their own moral doubts about capital punishment. All this was made possible because of falling rates of crime. Crime fell—sharply in many places, especially in New York City—because politicians returned to the basics in fighting it. New strategies involving community policing (and more police on the streets, financed with help from the federal government) were part of the success. And with the economic boom beginning to reach inner cities in the late 1990s, social indicators of all kinds began moving in the right direction. The crime rate was one of the most notable.

The discussion of the role of religion in public life was also transformed. The political influence of the religious Right declined in part because it was no longer easy to cast political progressives as hostile to the views and interests of religious people. Al Gore’s endorsement of government assistance, within limits, to the work of religious charities reflected a sea change in Democratic attitudes—even if Democrats were skeptical of aspects of the faith-based program Bush proposed when he became president.

And although homosexuality is still a difficult issue for many Americans—particularly when it comes to gay marriage—gays and lesbians enjoy an acceptance undreamed of three decades ago. They find defenders of their rights in both political parties.

All these changes might be summarized as the decline of the old wedge issues that divided the electorate by race, culture, and religion and the rise of what might be called bridge issues that assemble new coalitions by reaching across old divides. Bush’s use of the adjective compassionate in front of conservative was an example of such bridging at the rhetorical level.

True, attitudes toward government were still less positive at the end of the Clinton presidency than they were in the early 1960s, before the cultural revolution, Vietnam, and Watergate. Clinton himself chose to declare that the era of big government is over. But philosophical hostility toward government ebbed, replaced by a pragmatic inclination sympathetic to public action in spheres such as education, child care, health care, and the effort to right the balance between work and family life. The conservative Ponnuru was more persuasive on this point than any moderate or liberal could be. Whatever they may say, conservatives know in their bones that their position is weak, he wrote in the late fall of 1999. What these conservatives sense is that, at a level of politics deeper than the fortunes of the political parties, the ground is shifting away from them. What they have not noticed is that the 2000 election is shaping up to be a ratification not of conservatism but of Clintonism—and will be so even if the Republicans win.

No one was more attentive to the shifting ground than George W. Bush. Consider the difference between Bush’s rhetoric before the 2000 election and Ronald Reagan’s. Reagan’s battle cry was: The government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem. George W. Bush put his case much more modestly. Government if necessary, he said but not necessarily government.

The difference between the two statements was profound, and Bush went out of his way to underscore just how big the difference was. In the fall of 1999, he criticized the destructive mind-set holding that if government would only get out of the way, all our problems would be solved. Today’s destructive mind-set was, just yesterday, a principled conservative argument. Too often, Bush said for good measure, my party has confused the need for limited government with a disdain for government itself.

What led to this rethinking (or, more appropriately, repositioning) was the defeat of the genuinely ambitious antigovernment program the Republicans offered after their triumph in the 1994 elections. Even those who disagreed with what the Republicans tried to do owed them a debt for clarifying the issues. In the wake of the budget fights of 1995 and 1996, it was no longer possible to assume that the country was antigovernment, especially if that meant cuts—you can still hear Clinton’s 1996 speeches—in Medicare, Medicaid, education, and the environment. That congressional Republicans proposed nearly as much federal education spending as Clinton did in 1999 (albeit in a different form) suggested how well they understood where public attitudes were drifting. That Bush made education a central issue in his campaign and made passage of the No Child Left Behind Act a central priority of his administration showed that he understood, too.

Which means that Americans have gone from hating to loving politics, right? Alas, nothing could be further from the truth. This is one of many paradoxes of the Clinton presidency—and the problem with talking unambiguously about the triumph of Clintonism. For many reasons of his own making (and also because of the ferocious mistrust of his opponents), the Clinton who wanted to be a unifier and a consensus builder became instead a profoundly divisive figure. Precisely because his political successes so enraged his opponents, Clinton could not afford to hand them heavy weapons, as he did in the sex scandal. His opponents, in turn, could not let go of their hostility. The result was the impeachment saga.

The loss for Clinton from the impeachment imbroglio was obvious enough. But the battle had the larger effect of reopening cultural wounds that the 1990s had begun to heal. While a majority of Americans stood resolutely against impeachment even as they condemned Clinton’s recklessness, many conservatives saw Clinton’s behavior as of a piece with the irresponsibility they associated with 1960s culture. And the more the country turned its face against impeachment, the more frustrated traditionalist conservatives became with a nation whose moral compass they saw as defective. William Bennett, the conservative moralist, offered a book called The Death of Outrage in protest against the country’s apparent indifference to the sins that seemed so important to the Right.

Of course, the country’s reaction to the Clinton mess might be seen as growing out of a conservatism very different from the brand practiced by the advocates of impeachment. Most Americans saw Clinton’s White House affair as foolish, wrong, and irresponsible—reprehensible was the most popular word among Clinton’s supporters. But they were even more distressed with the radical departure that impeachment represented. Most voters did not think the matter provided reason enough to overturn the outcome of a democratic election, and most Americans were satisfied with Clinton’s stewardship over public life—if not his own. Clinton was also blessed by the behavior of his enemies. The country decided that if it had to choose between special prosecutor Ken Starr and impeachment advocates such as former representative Bob Barr on the one side and Clinton on the other, they would, reluctantly in some cases, choose Clinton.

But Clinton’s behavior and the impeachment fight itself destroyed his chance to create a new political era of good feeling in which ideological conflict would abate. The Clinton presidency will thus be seen historically as a moment of successes and lost opportunities. It’s impossible not to contemplate what a politician of Clinton’s talent might have accomplished absent the scandal that wasted most of 1998, sapped his authority, and scarred his presidency.

IV

The 2000 election offered a perfect coda to the Clinton presidency. On the Republican side, Bush accepted that running the Reagan campaign one more time would not work. Yes, Bush was exceptionally attentive to the Republicans’ conservative base. He used that base to destroy John McCain’s challenge to his candidacy in the vicious campaign that turned the 2000 South Carolina Republican primary into what one journalist called a slaughterhouse. Bush was determined that conservatives would not do him in as they had his father in 1992—even if, as these pages show, his father was as aware as anyone of the importance of the conservatives and adjusted his own views accordingly in his 1988 campaign.

But the second Bush made adjustments to the new era. He still fought the 1960s culture wars by attacking a worldview he saw as embodied in the phrase If it feels good, do it. But Bush’s was a toned-down rhetoric that emphasized personal responsibility (much as Clinton had done in 1992) and struck tolerant notes. He proposed supply-side tax cuts and, going beyond Reagan, suggested the partial privatization of Social Security. But during the 2000 election, at least, the tax cuts were easier to defend in light of the Clinton-era surpluses. Bush insisted that his tax plan was affordable and would still allow the paying down of debt and the financing of essential government programs. He did not discuss impeachment as such. He didn’t have to. He would simply and solemnly promise to restore honor and dignity to the White House. Republicans knew what he meant. Democrats couldn’t challenge the idea as presented.

The Clinton years presented Democrat Al Gore with a mountain of successes and a pile of problems. The Clinton legacy was valuable to Gore, and it hobbled him. Clinton’s strong economy in the end helped power Gore to a popular vote victory over Bush and (absent ballot snafus in Florida) an electoral vote victory as well. But Gore began the election year running some fifteen points behind Bush. This deficit was not just Gore’s. It was also Clinton’s. The result was a Democratic campaign that could not figure out how to use the positive side of the Clinton legacy while eliminating or at least playing down the negative. Clinton and Gore each had reason to hold the other accountable for the problems of 2000.

Not all of the splits among conservatives that are described in this book were healed. Indeed, the Clinton years saw a steady drift of moderate Republicans in suburban areas—in the Northeast and Midwest and on the West Coast—toward the Democrats. Counties that had been strongly sympathetic to a brand of politics rooted in the Modern Republicanism discussed in chapter 7 moved toward Clinton in 1996 and stayed with Gore in 2000. Middle-class Republicans and independents who cheered the disappearance of the deficit and held moderate or liberal views on social issues and the environment drifted in the Democrats’ direction. In their 2002 book, The Emerging Democratic Majority, John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira called attention to the rise of ideopolis voters. They lived in metropolitan areas heavily affected by the knowledge industries and high technology. Such voters, they predicted, would form a new base for Democrats as industrial workers declined as a total percentage of the total workforce. This new middle class was Clintonism’s gift to the Democrats.

Clinton’s greatest gift to the Republicans was the extent to which the antipathy he sparked among conservatives led his foes to sharpen their attacks, mobilize their forces, and practice an approach to politics far tougher than anything undertaken by either Ronald Reagan or the first President Bush. One did not have to believe in a vast right-wing conspiracy to notice the rise of a powerful set of institutions on the Right intent on defeating the liberal enemy by whatever means necessary. Conservative talk radio became ever more powerful. Cable television drifted to the right. Ideological law centers sued—and sued and sued.

The profound desire of the Republican base to end the Clinton era made George W. Bush’s 2000 campaign much easier. The base did not trouble Bush as he did all he could to seem moderate to middle-of-the-road voters who would vote for modest change (and Bush’s seemingly sunny personality) as long as the risks were not too high.

But the toughness inside the Republican Party (and among allied organizations and political commentators) reemerged when the battle over Florida ensued after all the votes had been counted (or miscounted). Democrats were slow to come to Gore’s defense as he demanded recounts that were perfectly typical of very close elections—and seemed all the more justified in Florida, given the disenfranchisement of so many Democratic voters. Republicans, on the other hand, rallied immediately to Bush’s efforts to shut down the recounts and demonized Gore for allegedly trying to steal the election.

As the battle went on, Democrats became steadily angrier at the Republicans’ tactics. In a sense, the Florida battle allowed a Democratic rage that had seethed below the surface during the impeachment fight to emerge purified and with a fury. Democrats had never found it easy to defend Clinton’s behavior during the impeachment battle, even if they believed that Republicans had been willing to abuse the legal and political process to drive Clinton from office. In the case of Florida, there was no sexual misconduct to defend, no presidential lying to condemn. What happened was pure Republican hardball.

And it worked. When a 5–4 ideological majority on the United States Supreme Court halted recounts in Florida and effectively made Bush president, the episode ratified the fears of Democratic partisans that conservatives would use whatever power was at their disposal—including the power of the judiciary—to achieve their ends. That some of the conservative justices who voted for Bush turned their backs on their own principles (in support of states’ rights and in opposition to the excessive use of the equal protection doctrine) confirmed for Democrats that the decision in Bush v. Gore had been unprincipled, even lawless.

Republicans, on the other hand, felt vindication in their long battle against Clinton and Clintonism. Impeachment did not work directly, but it undercut Clinton’s influence, rallied traditionalists, toughened the Republican Party, and debilitated the Democrats. To be sure, Bush had by no means restored the conservative glory days of the Reagan era. The divisions within conservatism described in this book continued. Bush lost the popular vote, receiving just 48 percent of the total. This was weaker than his father’s showing in 1988 and far weaker than Reagan’s triumph four years earlier. But under the strange circumstances of 2000, it was enough.

V

Bush had two opportunities to pursue a moderate course, to emphasize the compassionate side of his program, and to bring moderate voters into his coalition. Like Clinton, he had a chance to cure the mischiefs of ideology. But both times, Bush declined. His would be a frankly conservative administration. Yes, there would be big deficits. But much of the new money would be spent on defense and homeland security and to privatize (or, as Bush would prefer it, modernize) the Democratic entitlement programs for the elderly.

Bush could have used the unusual way he came to office and his lack of a popular vote victory as a reason for governing from the political center. Primarily, this would have required that he moderate his tax cut by reducing its size and spreading its benefits more broadly across income classes. Instead, Bush went with a large tax cut, organized along supply-side lines. (Later, he would offer a dividends tax cut tilted even more toward the wealthy.) Reading from the supply-side gospel, Bush declared that cutting the top rates for the best-off Americans would spur economic growth and help all Americans. Trickle-up economics would be repealed, and trickle-down economics would become the order of the day—again.

Bush’s months in office before September 11, 2001, saw one great victory, the passage of the tax cut, and one large defeat, the defection of Senator James Jeffords, a Vermont Republican who became an independent and, by voting with the Democrats, wrested control of the Senate away from Bush’s party. The Jeffords shift robbed Bush of much of the momentum he might have accrued from the tax cut. Bush in office proved to be more ideological than many voters had expected. By late summer, the polls were showing that a replay of the previous year’s election would produce essentially the same result: a virtual tie between Bush and Gore. Before 9/11, Bush had done little to expand his coalition.

The terrorist attacks changed that. A country in shock turned to Bush for leadership, and Democrats from top to bottom rallied to his side. In the first months after 9/11, Bush did govern from the center, compromising with Democratic leaders on budget issues, airport security, and even the language of a resolution declaring war on terror. Bush’s decision to attack the Taliban in Afghanistan won overwhelming approval, even from longtime foes of American military action abroad. As allies of al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, the Taliban seemed a perfectly appropriate target. Advocates of an essentially medieval brand of Islam with its restrictions on the rights of women, the Taliban seemed an appropriate enemy to liberals no less than to moderates and conservatives. And the very aspects of Bush’s personality that drove his critics to distraction were reinterpreted, in the months after the terrorist attacks, as precisely the virtues required at the moment. What seemed like arrogance in early 2001 (and again in 2004) looked like strength. Bush’s tendency to make decisions based on his gut and his reflexes—and to avoid second-guessing himself—came off as a deficiency of reflectiveness and a lack of intellectual curiosity during much of his term. But in the post-9/11 period, it looked like decisiveness. Bush’s tough-guy talk, his unapologetic use of the word evil, even his swagger—all seemed to fit the moment.

But bipartisanship and moderation proved short-lived. Bush did not believe he had been elected to revive the Eisenhower Republicanism of his grandfather. He did not think the old internationalism of his father was appropriate to a time of terror, when the United States had an obligation to resist seeking permission slips from allies. Bush would be bold in cutting taxes; he would be bold in acting against Iraq. If the results were deficits, a difficult occupation, and a loss of allies, all were prices Bush was willing to pay.

And he was willing to throw Democrats over the side if doing so could secure him a narrow but sufficient Republican congressional majority to push through his bold program. I have described the politics of the post-9/11 era in detail in Stand Up Fight Back: Republican Toughs, Democratic Wimps, and the Politics of Revenge, a book published in 2004. Important for these purposes are three decisions, two made by Bush and one made by the Democrats.

In the 2002 congressional campaign, Bush, having cooperated with the Democrats on homeland security questions, chose to use homeland security against them. The attack was contrived but effective. Bush had opposed the creation of a Department of Homeland Security when Democrats had proposed it after 9/11. But when questions finally arose over what Bush had done (or failed to do) in the pre-9/11 period, he changed the subject by embracing the Democrats’ idea. He also picked a fight over whether employees of the new department should be covered under traditional union and civil service rules. Democrats said they should. Bush accused the Democrats of being insufficiently tough in their approach to terror. It was an issue straight out of the playbook of his father’s 1988 campaign, laden with symbolism and implying that Democrats were, somehow, soft.

Bush also pushed for a resolution before the 2002 election authorizing him to use force to disarm Saddam Hussein. Here, the son departed from the practice of the father, who sought to keep the first Iraq War out of the politics of the 1990 midterm voting. (Perhaps the son noted that the father subsequently lost reelection.) The second Bush claimed that Saddam was a great and immediate threat. By 2004, those claims had proven hollow when the administration failed to find the weapons of mass destruction it had insisted Saddam held in abundance. But in 2002, this was not yet obvious.

And in the face of this intimidation and pressure, the Democrats crumbled. They split on the Iraq War and failed to make their case on homeland security. They thought they could win in 2002 by finessing security and foreign policy and turning to economics. The result was narrow—the country was still largely divided into roughly equal halves. But the Republican share of the vote was just enough to produce a decisive shift in the Senate and modest gains in the House. After 2002, Republicans controlled the entire federal government—including, it could be said, the federal judiciary and the Supreme Court.

Rank-and-file Democrats exploded in anger. They were furious at Bush for using national security for his own purposes. They were incensed at their Washington leaders for letting him pull off the ploy. The first Democrat to notice the potential of the new Democratic militancy was an obscure governor of Vermont named Howard Dean. Respected by insiders but largely unheralded by anyone else, Dean burst on the scene first as a vocal opponent of Bush’s Iraq policies—at a time when most leading Washington Democrats either supported Bush or hedged their view. He adopted as his own the late Senator Paul Wellstone’s claim to represent the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party. He raised record amounts of money on the Internet from an increasingly energized Democratic base.

And—this proved to be both Dean’s achievement and a kind of tragedy for his candidacy—all the leading Democratic presidential candidates adjusted accordingly. Senator John Kerry became just as critical of Bush as Dean had been. Kerry successfully made the case that while Dean could express rank-and-file outrage, he would not be able to drive Bush from office. Democrats were not willing to give Dean their nomination, but they knew they owed him a debt for giving the party a needed backbone transplant.

The era of the angry Democrat, absent from public life for so long, had begun. And the era of good feeling collapsed under the weight of the political polarization that Americans said they hated, but that the political system could not overcome.

VI

So why have our political divisions proven to be so stubborn? That’s the question this book tries to answer. Except for this revised introduction, a change in one chapter heading, and the elimination of an outdated afterword, this book is unchanged from the paperback edition issued in 1992. Naturally, that doesn’t mean I think the book is perfect. But because I have tried to carry its argument forward in other books (and in this introduction), it seemed superfluous to add large amounts of new material. I have come to see this book as the first volume of a series about our recent politics, followed as it was by They Only Look Dead, about progressives in the Clinton-Gingrich years, and the more recent book about the Bush years. In any event—and for better or worse—it strikes me as more honest to let readers judge the merits of the book as originally written than to try to tweak it here or there. I am grateful to Simon & Schuster and to my editor, Alice Mayhew, for putting out a new edition and for giving me the chance to update its argument here.

If I were to write the book all over again, I would retain its insistence upon criticizing liberals and conservatives in roughly equal measure—even though my own approach to politics has, for the moment, become tougher. I believe passionately that the turn to the political Right after the 2000 election was dangerous for our country and prevented us from solving many of the problems described in this book. I am thus more critical of the current conservative political and governing style than I was of conservatism’s earlier incarnations described in these pages. A period, perhaps a long one, of much harsher politics seems to be in the cards. I don’t welcome this or particularly like it. I especially dislike the extent to which political discussions, in living rooms and on the airwaves, have become less and less about facts and reasoned arguments. More and more, they are about demonstrations of brute force. (That makes me especially grateful for a group of conservative friends with whom it is still fun to argue because we share the view that disagreement can be a source of mutual enlightenment and not simply an occasion for confrontation.)

But citizens must play the hand the times deal them. Those of us who favor progressive politics and a culture of moderation