Winds of change.

While we talk about democracy in Russia and South Africa, maybe we're due for some at home.

NONE OF the world's politics today is business as usual. Soviet-style Communism is dead. Political leaders who enjoyed great success in the 1980s or even later are being summarily thrown out of office (George Bush, Margaret Thatcher) or declining markedly in popularity (Francois Mitterrand, Helmut Kohl). Socialist parties are losing elections and becoming irrelevant, except in countries like Germany and Spain where they openly embrace capitalism. But unabashedly capitalist parties are hardly thriving, as witness the defeat of George Bush and the low poll ratings of Prime Minister John Major.

Perhaps most startling of all are recent developments in Italy and Japan, where postwar capitalist prosperity has been identified with single-party rule. Japan's Liberal-Democrats are out of office, falling from power in a manner that more closely resembles a form of suicide than displacement by some other party or ideology. And the Italian Christian Democrats are similarly in disarray. Indeed, the entire Italian political establishment has been overturned by a judicial investigation that increasingly resembles a revolutionary tribunal.

The decline in standing of incumbent political elites, including seemingly successful ones, has been remarkable and universal. It greatly resembles the period 1945-46, when Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle were unceremoniously dumped from domestic power following their majestic wartime triumphs. Certainly the swift decline and fall of George Bush in 1991-92 suggests such a dynamic.

A lazy rendering of Bush's defeat says he lost because of the recession. But when the recession ended (in March 1991) his performance rating was in the 80th percentile. In August, after the halo of the Persian Gulf War had faded, Bush was still around 70 per cent.

But it was that same August that the Cold War was won irrevocably. Soviet Communism was dead, and nuclear weapons (however worrisome) seemed much less of a threat. George Bush, regarded by the American people as superbly qualified to guide the country through the endgame of the Cold War, had become irrelevant unless he could successfully adapt to the suddenly redirected interests of the electorate.

He could not, and soon a wild and woolly three-way race was on that left the hapless incumbent with 37.4 per cent of the vote on November 3. Bush's foreign-policy ratings consistently out-stripped those of Bill Clinton and Ross Perot. It is simply that, after August 1991, foreign-policy management shrank massively as a share of the electorate's concern.

What was true in the United States is proving true virtually everywhere. The constant is the electorate's transformed concern. The variable is the response of political elites to that concern

Popular Victories, Elite Rule

IN MY BOOK Populism and Elitism: Politics in the Age of Equality, I argued that the most striking fact of recent global politics is the gulf between popular and elite opinion that opened up in the 1960s. This gulf exists all over the world, but while the Cold War dragged on and the threat of nuclear war, Soviet expansion, and/or leftist gains was taken seriously in most countries, electorates had patience with political elites (such as the Christian Democrats in Italy) that were manifestly ineffectual and remote from popular sentiment in every other way. The sudden end of the socialist idea in the world fully unmasked not only the people's desire for change, but the difficulty political elites of the Right, Left, and Center have in identifying with their electorates at all. The end of socialism is by no means the end of elitism.

What is elitism today? It is much more than a badge of status. Above all, it involves optimism about the ability of elites to solve the problems of ordinary people, relative to the ability of people to solve their problems for themselves. Elitism is not necessarily anti-democratic--to the contrary, elitists tend to accept the right of the people to participate in political decision-making--but elitists are pessimistic about the competence of most people in political, economic, and other realms. On the upcoming debate on health-care reform, for example, it is predictable that elite opinion will push in the direction of a standardized health-care "package" that will leave consumers minimal discretion on the kind of coverage they want, rather than toward reforms that place resources and decision-making ability directly in the hands of consumers.

These tendencies in elitist thought are more or less constants. But some other features of today's elitism are characteristic of, perhaps unique to, our own stage of history.

I believe that much, if not most, of twentieth-century politics can be understood as a struggle over the meaning of equality. This debate of course began much earlier, but it attained central importance in the years 1911-22, during which the great ruling monarchies of China, Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottomans all came crashing to the ground. This ended the five-thousand-year reign of monarchy as humanity's dominant political system and triggered a struggle over what was to come next.

One way of understanding this debate is to contrast the Western concept of innate equality as expressed (for example) in the Declaration of Independence--all men are created equal--with the elitist vision of equality, which is that equality does not meaningfully exist today and is a future ideal to be managed toward. In this view, equality is a matter of condition, and one or more elites are needed to achieve it for the people over time. In the economic arena, complete fulfillment of elitist equality implies equal economic outcomes: socialism.

At first glance, it might seem that with the worldwide discrediting of socialism we have just lived through, the idea of equality of economic results is now finished. Yet the current economic-policy debate in the United States suggests that the idea of equality of result is far from dead, particularly in elite opinion. President Clinton's tax program has an openly redistributionist rationale. The failure of Republican leaders to directly challenge his upper-income tax-rate increases, in my view, has a great deal to do with the sacrosanct status of the ideal of equality of result in elite opinion. The alternative explanation, that it represents a fear of popular revulsion against low tax rates for the rich, is called into question by President Reagan's ability to cut the top bracket from 70 to 28 per cent and still leave office with the highest performance rating of any departing President in the history of polling.

The elitist obsession with equality of result is evident in many other areas of policy. Affirmative-action quotas continue to be an elitist goal not just in this country but in democracies as far away as India. Weirdly shaped districts continue to be drawn to ensure equality of representation according to race. Among educational elites, there is constant pressure to de-emphasize teaching the gifted and to roll back achievement testing as a criterion of educational success. Federal and state judges have triggered a nationwide revolution in the structure of public education by mandating equalized funding among school districts in much if not most of the country.

In the area of moral values, application of equality of result demands elite imposition of relativism or "moral neutrality." In other words, no one's moral system must in the end be given preference over anyone else's. In the elitist world view, it becomes illicit for a community to set moral standards beyond the most rudimentary needed to deter violence. Hence elitist opposition to democratic standard-setting on such moral issues as abortion, homosexuality, and pornography. Hence, too, the rise to intellectual and academic dominance of such explicitly relativist systems as multiculturalism, deconstruction, and critical legal studies.

It is certainly possible for popular opinion in a capitalist democracy to adopt the elitist agenda of equality of result and institutionalized moral relativism. The world of the twenty-first century could wind up looking not very different from the way Sweden and the Netherlands look today.

But the transnational political unrest accompanying the arrival of the post-Cold War era gives some grounds for believing that popular opinion will not docilely accept the agenda of today's elites. The fact that popular dissatisfaction so far seems indiscriminately directed at all elites could, of course, turn out to mean that it is an outburst of temporary anger, with little or no content. But it could also reflect the fact that elites in modern society, whether of the Left, Right, or Center, are unusually wedded to the elitist world view--and thus incapable of understanding the nature of popular unrest, much less of satisfying it.

In past periods when elite opinion became persistently estranged from popular opinion, the gulf was bridged by the emergence of elite populists--leaders from an elite background or who had attained elite status, but who harbored populist views, which I would define as optimism about people's competence to make political, economic, and other decisions, relative to the ability of various elites to make those decisions for them. In the English-speaking democracies of the nineteenth century, such figures as Andrew Jackson in the United States, William Gladstone in Britain, and George Brown in Canada had populist views on politics and economics.

In our own time, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher had many of the characteristics of elite populism, and for a time looked as if they might succeed in resolving the Sixties-generated split in public opinion in the direction of popular values. But Thatcher was ousted and Reagan succeeded by men who did not share their stubborn vision, and for all their policy successes in winning the Cold War and revitalizing capitalism, neither Reagan nor Thatcher succeeded in transforming politics at home by resolving the values gap. The clearest evidence of this is the remarkable success of American elites--and not just Democratic ones--in deconstructing Reagan's record and diminishing his popular standing once he was no longer in office to defend himself.

Indeed, there was a brief time, first in the United States and then in Britain, when a return to pre-Reagan and pre-Thatcher politics as usual seemed likely. George Bush and John Major enjoyed early political successes and surges in popularity. Bush effectively dismantled Reaganomics without suffering immediate consequences, then surged to record levels of popularity in the wake of the Gulf War. Major cut back Mrs. Thatcher's tax reforms and removed the remaining barriers to full integration with Europe under the Maastricht treaty. His upset victory in the national election of April 1992 seemed to confirm that the Thatcher era would be succeeded by a careful, mildly elitist regime. Given the uniqueness of Reagan and Thatcher as populist leaders, their eclipse raised the possibility that elitism would have few challengers. The shape of future policy would be orchestrated by unelected elitist figures like Jacques Delors of the European Community and Richard Darman in the United States.

Toward an Elite Populism

THEN came the end of the Cold War and the worldwide collapse in popularity of political elites, as well as such arguably related events as the popular revolt against the elitist Maastricht model of European integration. It now would seem that the emergence of post-Cold War elite populist leaders is the likeliest resolution of today's turbulent politics.

The leading model for an elite populist on today's political scene is Ross Perot. The trouble is, Perot in his own beliefs is not particularly populist. No one who talks as if the answer to the nation's problems is letting him get under the hood to fix things can be said to be very optimistic about people's competence. If what the electorate is looking for is a change of style, the election of Perot as President in 1996 would cure today's political alienation. But if, as I believe, the postCold War popular revolt is simply the latest manifestation of a gulf in values between elite and popular opinion that first erupted in the 1960s, Perot's election would lead to bitter disappointment and would do little or nothing to foreshadow a successful politics of the future.

If not Perot, then who? What kind of leaders, what kind of platforms will come forward to heal the breach in today's politics?

Given the lack of imagination of most political leaders today, it is tempting to speculate that elite populists will come from outside current political circles. It could happen this way--but not necessarily. In the past, elite populists have often benefited from knowledge and contacts acquired within the system that they are attempting to reform or displace. An important current example is Russian President Boris Yeltsin, who spent a lifetime as a Communist apparatchik before becoming the central agent in the destruction of the Communist system.

Nor is it by any means certain that elite populists will emerge from the Right rather than the Left. The attempted populist realignments led by Reagan and Thatcher did come from the Right, but their brand of reformism has virtually disappeared from the Republican and Conservative Parties since their departures from office. In the United States there has been no impressive Left populist since the death of Robert Kennedy but that does not mean one will not emerge in the 1990s.

These uncertainties make it difficult to write a platform for future populist politics. It should therefore be kept in mind that my own picture of a successful populist platform is shaped by my background and prejudices as a conservative Republican.

The clearest avenue of populist reform is the drive to make political institutions more accountable to the people. For instance, a major cause of elite unresponsiveness is parliamentary government, particularly the type of parliament elected by proportional representation. This kind of system claims to offer an exact expression of the popular will, but in practice fosters minority governments and endless maneuvering by parliamentary elites. In addition, pure parliamentary systems give incumbent political elites excessive control over the emergence of new party leaders.

Presidential systems divide power between the executive and legislative branches, giving popular opinion two branches of government to influence. And fixed dates for elections give political elites less leeway to shape events by timing re-election bids according to the economic cycle or other factors.

At least in the short run, few political elites will emulate the unusually open presidential system of the United States, or ,the total power to overrule elite decisions possessed by the Swiss electorate. An example of a successful hybrid reform was the late-1950s plan by Charles de Gaulle in France, which retained parliament but inaugurated a powerful independent presidency elected directly by the people. The Gaullist provision for a presidential runoff ensures majority rule while letting the first election serve as a vehicle for new candidates to emerge from outside the consensus of party elites.

There are signs that populist reforms are getting under way. Political parties in a number of countries, including Germany and Japan are beginning to experiment with primaries for national party leader. One hopeful sign from Europe is progress toward abolition of proportional representation in the Italian parliament. Above all, the drive for term limits in the United States is a clearly populist movement toward opening up politics. Swiss-style initiative and referendum, widely though not universally adopted at the state level here during the Progressive wave early this century, show signs of winning new adherents for state and perhaps even national issues.

But it is in the United States that one of the greatest threats to popular rule flourishes: the runaway judiciary. Twelve years of Reagan-Bush appointees have hardly obstructed continued micromanaging of social policy and school budgets. Judicial elitism knows no party. It is more accurately seen as an outgrowth of the gulf between elite and popular opinion. Institutional limitations to judicial power are far more likely than future "strict contructionist" appointments to curb this continuing assault on democracy.

Freeing the Economy

IN ECONOMIC policy, there is now widespread consensus on the need for deficit reduction. There is no consensus on how to go about it.

A populist solution would focus on reducing government claims on the people. The logic is that in a time when downsizing, often quite painful, has proved essential to private-sector vitality, bureaucratic central governments and their myriad activities and programs should prove no exception. In countries where nationalization was widespread, privatization  has proved an important populist reform. A balanced-budget amendment to the U.S Constitution is a proposal that arouses opposition along generally populist-elitist lines. Elite opinion tends to attack the amendment as putting a straitjacket on legislative elites. The reply of most populists is: exactly.

Tax policy has also been a major populist-elitist battleground. The thrust among populist leaders like Ronald Reagan was a flattening of the progressive tax code combined with a cutback in special preferences for various economic elites. The continued elitist obsession with managing toward equality of result has moved tax policy back toward high rates and special preferences under Presidents Bush and Clinton. A populist platform on taxes is likely to combine a simple flat tax rate and generous exemptions according to size of family. On business taxes, a frequent populist thrust is encouragement of small business with low taxes on income and capital.

A common perception about populist politics is that it is isolationist and protectionist. Historically, that is not the case. The great populist leaders in the nineteenth-century English-speaking world-Jefferson, Jackson, Gladstone, among others--were all aggressive free-traders and evangelizers of democracy in the world. In our own time, Reagan and Thatcher continued that tradition.

It is when economic integration is accompanied by a price tag of centralized elite regulation--as in aspects of the Maastricht agreement or, less clearly, in NAFTA's side agreements--that populists get off the train. The efforts of Jacques Delors and other European Community elitists to make uniformity of social policy a prerequisite for integration is a vivid example of the elitist obsession with equality of result--and one that has served to discredit the European Community in the eyes of many voters.

Nowhere is the gap between popular and elite opinion greater than on moral values. The present-day elitist commitment to relativism means that most elites consider most forms of democratic setting of community standards to be illegitimate. The idea that community standards should be few and permissive, and at all times subject to review by judicial and other elites, is at the heart of today's elitism.

It cannot be denied that elitism has made enormous progress in eroding traditional standards and putting relativism at the heart of such institutions as education and entertainment. Because of the degree to which elite opinion has become united against traditional morality, this is the area in which some version of elite populism appears least likely to emerge or to be successful if it does.

The most difficult area is also the most essential. The triumph of relativism, erosion of the traditional family, and depopulation have a clear tendency to go hand in hand. The growing resistance to foreign immigration, in the U.S. and Western Europe, is anti-people and therefore anti-populist, but also has the populist component of a desire to preserve traditional culture. With the prospect of shrinking native populations in Germany, France and elsewhere, this desire has an increasingly desperate character.

The elitist world of managed equality of result and institutionalized relativism is a comparatively new one, fully observable in only a few countries in Northern Europe where it is well advanced. For whatever combination of reasons, this world is increasingly a world without children, and thus ultimately a culture without future existence. Of the many challenges confronting an emerging elite populism in the years ahead, this is the one that cannot be dodged.

Mr. Bell, author of Populism and Elitism: Politics in the Age of Equality (Regnery), is president of Lehrman Bell Mueller Cannon, an economic and political forecasting firm in Arlington, Virginia.