What we voted for: ambivalence, anxiety & gridlock.

In 1996, most voters didn't like the Congress or trust the president, but they reelected both. Ambivalence is the name of America's political game: we fear that government has too much power, but we also worry that it isn't strong enough to take on the problems that beset us; at least half-aware of how much we depend on government, we doubt its competence and its moral title to rule.

Mass democratic politics has become more expensive and more contrived, a contest of consultants as much as candidates, an exercise in technique as distant from genuine conviction as it is from everyday life. This year, majority rule was notable by its absence: only 49 percent of eligible Americans voted, the lowest figure since 1924. Here and there, citizens followed their better angels. "B-1 Bob" Dornan apparently lost to Loretta Sanchez in Orange County, California; up the coast, Walter Capps, a distinguished student of religion, turned a Gingrichite out of a seat in Santa Barbara; Carolyn McCarthy's old-Irish tenacity did in the N.R.A.'s empty suit out on Long Island [see page 9]; and as if to remind us that we are not naturally separated into islands of race, culture, and gender, voters in two predominantly white districts sent African-American women to the House, Cynthia McKinney winning reelection in Georgia and Julia Carson capturing the seat in Indianapolis. Still, such points of light only emphasize the general dreariness of the campaign and its result.

The liabilities of the candidates were obvious, and while Bill Clinton had an edge where "vision" was concerned, neither party had a compelling idea of how to address our uneasiness about the future the uncertainty of jobs, what feels like the steady erosion of social and moral resources, and especially our anxiety about increasing inequality. Americans tend to get a lot of their economic facts wrong, overstating unemployment and underrating job creation, but they are dead on in judging that the gap between rich and poor is getting wider and that the middle sectors are being squeezed, so that we are moving toward a two-tier society. And politics, equality's stronghold, has opened the gates to the barbarians.

This year, the impact of money truly troubled voters; the Democratic fund-raising imbroglio hurt Clinton, if only as a last straw. With reason: the presidential campaign alone may have cost $800 million. Organized labor spent a well-publicized $35 million, and was disappointed in its hope of overturning the Republican majority in the House. Still, money from the unions helped set the tone for the campaign: the GOP never recovered from the charge that it proposed to cut Medicare's budget by $270 billion, and the effectiveness of labor's campaign is indicated by the vehemence of Republican attacks on "big labor." In fact, business spent roughly seven times as much as labor, almost a quarter of a billion dollars, with upwards of 60 percent going to Republicans, so that labor's money only let the Democrats compete on something like equal terms. And the weight of money and the constant preoccupation with fundraising is more fundamental than who wins: Democratic in form, American elections are increasingly oligarchic in content.

There's enough discontent that we'll probably get some version of campaign reform over the next couple of years, but little chance that it will change matters much. All current officeholders, after all, have survived if not profited from the present system. More important, serious reform would have to get around the roadblock posed by the Supreme Court's 1976 decision, in Buckley v. Valeo, that contributions of money are speech, entitled to the protection of the First Amendment. It wasn't much of an argument - among other things, money doesn't give reasons - but until that ruling is changed (outgoing Senator Bill Bradley recently suggested amending the Constitution, if necessary), the rights of money will trump the claims of democratic civic life.

It doesn't help that neither political party speaks with a coherent voice. The Republicans' intramural troubles are evident: "mainstream" Republicans are contending that the party needs to become more inclusive, ditching or playing down the conservative social agenda; but the right wing - which mostly lined up behind Bob Dole, only to be humiliatingly ignored at the Republican convention and in the campaign - points out that a narrowly economic appeal is disastrous, especially in a time of relative prosperity. Since the supply-side tax cut failed to catch on, Clinton was able to focus debate on government programs, the Democrats' strong suit. In other words, conservatives can make a passable case that Republicans need a candidate capable of defining the contest in terms of cultural issues and some sort of "politics of virtue."

And on balance, the election may have strengthened the Right. To be sure, Woody Jenkins lost by a hair in Louisiana and social conservatives were beaten in Georgia and Illinois, but Jesse Helms won and so - among others - did Gordon Smith in Oregon. Meanwhile, moderates like William Weld and Richard Zimmer came up losers, so that the Republican caucus in the Senate took several steps to the right. Moreover, as the party's center of gravity has shifted toward the South, the GOP has become more dependent on religious conservatives. This year, the fraction of white, "born-again" Protestants voting Republican went up to about three-quarters, at a time when the party was losing ground among other constituencies.

But despite their militancy, social conservatives have played a kind of coalition politics. At odds with probusiness Republicans on so many issues, they have chosen to ignore the role of the market in tearing up communities and tearing down standards, and as long as they do, their defense of the decencies will sound hollow to the millions of Americans who know better.

Not that the Democrats are much better off. The party did get some good news at the polls: It did well among younger voters and it gained among Catholics and Hispanic-Americans. Still, Clinton won, the economy aside, chiefly by taking advantage of Republican mistakes. Positive support for the president and his party was limited at best: a very late, very modest shift toward compromise and moderation was enough to preserve Republican control on Capitol Hill.

The electorate, taken as a whole, simply didn't trust the Democrats to run the country. Liberalism, the party's closest approach to a public philosophy, is discredited with most voters. Republican ads attacking Democrats as "foolishly liberal" failed, more often than not, but - Minnesota's Senator Paul Wellstone aside - Democrats weren't racing to identify themselves as liberals either. For a quarter century and more, liberalism has combined an expanded idea of government's responsibility for social and economic life with an advocacy of individual and group rights and immunities that radically limits government's authority. Those contradictory pulls leave liberals with virtually no idea of the common good other than material well-being, and no way of asserting public power other than taxing and spending, as the sound bite has it. And while President Clinton has blurred the old distinctions on social issues, he has not provided his party with a new doctrine.

Sometimes, Clinton seems to lean toward reducing government's responsibilities, as he did when he proclaimed the end of the era of big government or when he signed the welfare reform bill, implying that government should follow, more or less humanely, wherever technology and the market take us. But at other times, he tilts toward an increase of government's moral mission, as in his hope - doomed, given this Congress - of "fixing" the welfare bill, or in his appeal to a "new covenant" emphasizing obligation. Democrats would be wise to encourage this second tack. Even when they can't articulate it, middle- and working-class Americans are learning the distinction between economic growth and well-being: the latter includes dignity, the sense of doing work that has value, of making a contribution to the common life. That good - the foundation of civic equality - is worth a considerable economic price: to think otherwise, as a great Democrat taught his party a century ago, is to "crucify mankind upon a cross of gold."

Wilson Carey McWilliams's most recent book is The Politics of Disappointment (Chatham House). He teaches at Rutgers and writes regularly for Commonweal.