Are the parties over?

The Radical Center
The Future of American Politics
Ted Halstead and Michael Lind
Doubleday, $24.95, 264 pp.

Dealignment and disengagement are the order of the day, and Ted Halstead and Michael Lind are intent on doing something about it. Americans are increasingly becoming independents in their political affiliations and free agents in their work, the authors argue in their oddly named book, The Radical Center. The American two-party duopoly, they say, has failed the nation and should be shoved aside. Both the Democrats and the Republicans have succumbed to extreme elements in their own ranks. Republicans have been captured by "social conservatives and economic libertarians," and Democrats by "a constellation of aggrieved minority groups and public employee unions." The American social contract, parties, government programs, educational and even charitable institutions are "designed on the premise that highly educated experts should be in charge of relatively passive, ignorant, and incompetent people." Both parties have imprisoned themselves in the past.

But the past is the last place Americans want to be as they look to their future. The nation that has transformed itself in at least three revolutions since 1776 is well on its way to its next major transformation--even as the parties are looking backwards. Halstead and Lind cite the familiar sources: the twin revolutions in information technology and biotechnology, the graying and browning of the American people, and the increasing globalization of knowledge and commerce. Americans want and need far more flexibility and choice in all aspects of their lives--family, work, school, health, savings. But they also want flexibility to be matched with fairness so that the most vulnerable members of society are taken care of even as those who can afford to pay their way do so. "The most successful societies in the Information Age will be those that combine a Darwinian marketplace with a non-Darwinian social safety net."

Halstead and Lind emphasize that they are interested not in tinkering at the margins of inherited public, private, and communal institutions, but rather in promoting the wholesale revamping of their component parts. Thus they call for a radical center in keeping with the Latin derivation of radical from radix or "root."

And their proposals are indeed radical, though hardly in the center of anyone's political universe: an endowed savings account for every baby, national equalization of school funding for every schoolchild, a national consumption tax to replace state sales taxes, an elimination of all exemptions and loopholes (including the home mortgage deduction), abolition of corporate taxes, progressive privatization of Social Security, and more.

The details on how any of this would work are sparse. Take the national equalization of school funding, an idea with some merit, especially since the authors propose that the money be allocated directly to students and not to the schools. (This would by itself promote substantial choice.) They quote sociologist Daniel Bell's decades-old comment: "If capital and labor are the major structural features of industrial society, information and knowledge are those of the postindustrial society." It was true in the 1960s and it is true now. The problem is that the quality of many of the nation's public schools has plunged just as education's import to the economy has accelerated. But not all public schools have declined. Wealthy suburban schools are as good as ever--after all, the nation does spend a higher percentage of GNP on education than any other advanced industrial democracy. But most urban minority public schools are abysmal.

Black parents noticed this a long time ago. Their rage against indifferent public school bureaucrats began taking political shape in the late 1980s. By the mid-1990s black parents had instituted a legislatively successful school-choice movement that covered religious schools in Milwaukee and Cleveland. In doing so they left behind some traditional black groups like the naacp and the Urban League, not to mention the teacher unions--the kinds of group that still hold the Democratic Party in thrall. When you think about it, their achievement was remarkable--forcing through immensely controversial legislation over the opposition of virtually all their traditional allies. These political victories yield some hope that the sort of federal voucher Halstead and Lind are proposing might work.

But there's another level of the problem--the operational one that gets short shrift in all the Halstead and Lind proposals. Howard Fuller, an African American and a superintendent of the Milwaukee public schools who had been dismissed because of his support for vouchers, gave a talk about vouchers before the Manhattan Institute in New York in 1996. An outraged public school union official stood up and said Fuller had no right to talk about the superiority of Catholic schools so long as they weren't forced to operate under the onerous, destructive regulations that burden public schools. "Impose these costly regulations on them," said the union official, "and then we'll talk about who's better." Now there's a reform!

The man had a point. At least one reason American public schools are no longer the pride of the country is that they have been smothered by ruinous regulations that mandate how they handle everything from schoolyard play to academic recommendations. Catholic schools sidestep many of the most burdensome regulations. Most parents and educators would like to see public education deregulated to the level of private education--but that's very unlikely if the feds enter the arena as the major funder. Halstead and Lind argue that their funding scheme will not lead to federal domination of curricula and standards. They point to highway construction and welfare as two areas with a "long tradition of combining federal funding with local discretion." In fact, both have a long tradition of federal tact evolving into federal aggression and dominion.

But the most urgent issue is that of political will. Halstead and Lind point out that the success of past reformers during the nation's three revolutions--American, Civil War, and New Deal--depended on a communal sense of crisis. Thus corporate predation before World War I, mass unemployment during the 1930s, fascism followed by communism during World War II and the early 1950s all propelled the nation to revolutionize its governmental and economic structures. Racial injustice and Vietnam during the 1960s helped destroy the New Deal consensus, leaving the nation vulnerable to the subsequent eruption of identity-group politics on the multicultural left and on the religious right. Halstead and Lind hope that all of this makes the nation ready for its next revolution. The nation simply doesn't have--nor should it have--a sense of shared crisis about most issues today. September 11 has helped Americans rethink what we're about, which is liberty, equality, and justice for all. If we can get those for all American schoolchildren, we'll go a long way to moving successfully to our next revolution.

Julia Vitullo-Martin is a New York-based writer who contributes regularly to Commonweal.