They Only Look Dead: Why Progressives Will Dominate the Next Political Era.

RECENTLY when Senator Bill Cohen announced his plans to retire, the moderate Maine Republican appeared on MacNeil - Lehrer. A tight-lipped Jim Lehrer interviewed Cohen -- who, having published two books of poetry and co-written a spy novel with Gary Hart, is what passes for thoughtful in the U.S. Senate -- about how the Senate just isn't the same. Contentious debate, name-calling, sharp ideological divides -- just what has American government come to? Clearly it was time for a 25-year politician with the decency, sensible commitment to good government, and sheer senatorial bearing of Bill Cohen (the key is the prominent forehead) to get out before something untoward happened.

Reading They Only Look Dead, the latest book by E. J. Dionne, is like watching that segment, except without the benefit of the mute button. The Washington Post's Mr. Dionne is the columnist of the third way. Always, there is a sensible center, a mainstream solution to whatever knotty public-policy problem, if only both Republicans and Democrats would stop pandering to voters and start governing with the high-mindedness of the Senator Cohens of the world. It's an attitude that does not wear well in a seven-hundred-word column, let alone a three-hundred-page book. But E. J. Dionne exemplifies the elite brand of disdain for politics that exists in a strange symmetry with the rougher, more populist version.

As politicians find better ways to tap into the populist anger, purveyors of establishment opinion find more reasons to shake their heads. After the November 1994 election the words that Speaker Newt Gingrich had suggested that Republican candidates use to characterize their opponents -- "liberal," "corrupt," etc. --got scandalized coverage from the media as if they had been illicit contributions. The words, after all, were used to divide people. At a recent American Enterprise Institute forum, former House Minority Leader Bob Michel -- decent, bipartisan, ineffectual -- explained how Gingrich failed to understand the policy implications of the first 1990 budget deal, which he helped to scuttle. There were knowing twitters in the audience: poor Newt, he just didn't get it.

Needless to say, confrontation and division are the stuff that makes government go. The underlying reason for elite disdain for them is that they take politics out of the zone where all "reasonable" people agree, and open the way to non-sanctioned solutions. In a sense, the politics of Gingrich's showboaty, divisive, ultimately unsuccessful effort to bring down the 1990 budget deal led to the Republican majority in 1994 and its budget, which broke all the rules by balancing the books and cutting taxes. At a deeper level, as the political scientist James Sundquist argued, the process of re-alignment is completed as moderates of both parties flake off, leaving ideologically opposed majority and minority parties. So, Senator Cohen -- good riddance.

The chief argument of They Only Look Dead, of course, is that such a realignment is not occurring. Mr. Dionne takes on a particularly onerous task in trying to forge a case for a progressive revival, and so he is to be forgiven for leaving the kernel of his argument for a thinnish final chapter. He concedes that two of the more prominent legacies of progressive politics in America -- an overweening Federal Government and contempt for the values of average Americans -- were mistakes. What's left? A sort of third way, it turns out, between the excesses of Gingrich conservatism and the old liberalism. Dionne tries to erect a new progressive program mostly on the issues of "economic security" (wage stagnation and inequality, eroding health benefits, etc.) and civic renewal, enlisting a chastened Federal Government to promote both.

There are just two problems. 1) When it comes to wages, clearly the most effective way to boost them is economic growth, which implies policies freeing the market rather than constraining it. (The government training programs always invoked by Dionne and others are almost universal disasters.) 2) Civic renewal, insofar as it means government surrendering the lead role in society to more effective, private actors, is a Republican issue, which makes it an unlikely rallying cry for liberals. It's a sign of the fecklessness of Mr. Dionne's vision that there were echoes of it in President Clinton's exquisitely hedged State of the Union address this January. Who knows? Clinton may manage to ride his ambivalence back into the White House. But if the third way is enough to win the odd election, no one outside Jim Lehrer and his guests is likely to mistake it for a platform for a new era in American government.