Why Americans Hate Politics.

Faith Healing 

E.J. DIONNE JR. reports on politics for the Washington Post with a keen eye and a fair mind, and his much-praised new book, Why Americans Hate Politics, offers a gripping page-by-page analysis of what ails us. Neglect it not.

This is not to suggest that Dionne is right about everything, or about all the big things. But he brings so much acuteness and grace of style to his argument that you can profit by it and enjoy it without fully agreeing with it.

I confess to wincing at the outset when he laments that "the faith of the American people in their democratic institutions has declined." Is this a bad thing? He assumes so, and this turns out to be a fateful, if not fatal, presupposition for the rest of the book. But there is much to savor along the way.

"The categories that have dominated our thinking for so long are utterly irrelevant to the new world we face." Well, yes. "The central argument of this book is that liberalism and conservatism are framing political issues as a series of false choices. . . . Liberalism and conservatism prevent the nation from settling the questions that most trouble it. . . . We are still trapped in the 1960s."

So far, so good, sort of. And it gets better. Dionne describes in fine detail the way liberal and conservative "ideologies" have developed since the 1960s, and it's gratifying to find a mainstream journalist paying close attention to the nuances of liberalism, conservatism, libertarianism, the New Left, neoconservatism, feminism, centrism, and even "Modern Republicanism." (Does anyone remember Modern Republicanism? It's in the White House, as it happens.)

Dionne is not just fair; he is perceptive. Here, in his discussion of the New Left, is a fine sample of the way he makes unexpected connections:

Critics of American foreign policy have

nearly always been labeled

"anti-American" by their foes; being cast into the

political darkness is one of the risks of

dissent. But rarely have dissenters 

cooperated so willingly to validate the

claims of their enemies. By embracing

anti-Americanism as a noble cause, the

farther fringes of the New Left divided

and set back the antiwar movement.

They opened the way for a contentless

politics of symbolism that made the care

and treatment of the American flag a

more important political question than

what the flag stood for. Those who

despised George Bush's relentless use of

the American flag as a partisan symbol

can blame the flag burners of the 1960s

for making such a tactic possible. Even

the Communist Party had the good sense

to drape its meetings with the American

flag and to declare that Communism was

"twentieth-century Americanism."

Though fair and friendly to conservatives, Dionne sees conservatism, like liberalism, as having run out of "ideas" and reached a point of "exhaustion." He is finally on the liberal side himself, but he takes liberals to task for failing to absorb what he sees as the real insights of conservatism. He devotes a good deal of space to libertarianism, which he recognizes as far more important than its overt political fortunes would indicate, noting the curious habit both liberals and conservatives have of falling back on libertarian rhetoric when they don't like their opponents' brand of communitarianism. Dionne himself could be fairly described as a communitarian liberal who thinks the welfare state and politics itself can't work without national moral consensus.

Conservatism, as he sees it, died of success and the compromises it entailed. It reached an "impasse" under Ronald Reagan, resulting in the huge budget deficit: "Only a high deficit could keep the conservative coalition together, since conservatives could not raise taxes on one part of their constituency and could not cut programs that benefited another part of their constituency."

Dionne also thinks conservatives have used hollow rhetoric for sheer political gain. Their idealization of the "traditional" family, whose mother doesn't work outside the home, is simply passe now; that's not radical feminism, it's just realism, he says. And he has a point.

He's also right to say that conservatives lack a positive vision of politics. The trouble is that he seems to want an idealization of politics that is as nostalgic as some conservatives' image of the family. He yearns for "the creation of a new political center" driven by "faith in the possibilities of common endeavor." But the "problems" he wants this new vital center to solve are problems as defined by an old liberal consensus that is gone for good. He himself seems "trapped," so to speak, in the heyday of the civil-rights movement, a moment when there was indeed "faith" in "possibilities" that experience has since exposed as naive.

It's discouraging that such a shrewd book should finally fall back on "faith" as a prescription. If Americans hate politics, the explanation may be simply that politics is hateful. The media no longer sustain the images of old liberal heroes like King and the Kennedys. For all the liberal prejudices of journalists, the media by their nature expose facts uncongenial to the old liberal ideology. Television has given us all a new intimacy with Washington; the inner workings of politics have become too visible to permit much faith in it. Too many politicians are, not to put too fine a point on it, crooks. How can we believe that the total process transcends the seamy character of the men engaged in it?

Dionne quotes Murray Rothbard: "If you wish to know how libertarians regard the state and any of its acts, simply think of the state as a criminal band, and all of the libertarian attitudes will logically fall into place." Dionne calls the rise of libertarianism "a sign of a deep sickness in the democratic system." But there are various sorts of libertarians, and some of them are saying no more than what Madison said when he warned of the corrupting power of "factions"--the chief danger to self-government.

The dangers of faction have been fully realized, and today special-interest politics is taken for granted as the normal and healthy working of "democracy." This disgusts even many of the people who profit by it. And most conservative politicians see no alternative to playing the game by the established rules. That's the story Why Americans Hate Politics misses.

Mr. Sobran, NR's Critic-at-Large, writes a twice-a-week column for Universal Press Syndicate.