The election campaign is in full blossom here in America, and many foreigners (and, frankly, Americans, too) are convinced that this campaign is one of small differences, that it is about personality and style, and that the past eight years should be put aside and forgotten. (“This is about the future, not about the past,” is the popular, populist mantra.)
But to be frank, the more I see of the two candidates and of the two parties, the more I think those analyses are woefully incorrect. I would even bet that, in the future, this election will be seen as one of the most important turning points in modern American history.
Now, I can hear you thinking, “She’s finally gone off her rocker.” But I haven’t. I just see this campaign in a slightly different way. This is a campaign at heart about either rebuilding healthy institutions in America–with all that could mean for reinvigorating traditional institutions like our schools and military–or continuing gradual bureaucratization of a mass-society America.
Most people would say that the Democrats are the party of liberal and centrist ideology and the Republicans (outside of the right wing, of course) are the party of business and individualism. That is still true on many levels, and yet a new political-social syndrome is developing in which the Republicans are the ones espousing the new ideology.
This is the anti-centrist but, more importantly, anti-dependency ideology that George W. Bush personifies. According to his philosophy, for instance, welfare recipients should be made not ever more dependent upon the central government’s morally vacuous dole, but more independent as autonomous human beings.
This philosophy is already solving many social problems by having them addressed cautiously by faith-based organizations. Thus, of course, traditional American morality is reintroduced into the treatment of social problems. For 50 years, it has been squeezed out of American society by the welfare state. And the welfare state–and its supporting constitutencies–is alive and well among many elites in Al Gore’s Democratic Party, if only because so many of them (the teachers unions, the education departments, for example) depend upon dependency.
You see, underneath all the grandiose hoopla about our indispensable, wondrous economy and prosperity, our institutions are gradually dissolving. Every day, we get a new report on officers leaving the armed forces (today’s headline story: The number of colonels refusing commands has skyrocketed in the past five years). Every day, we hear disheartening news about the miseducation of our schoolchildren. (This year’s presidential candidates spoke in the debates at a 7th- and 8th-grade level, while presidents Carter and Reagan spoke at 12th- and 13th-grade levels.)
But the true characterization of these last eight years–and of the unfortunate moral impoverishment of so much of the Democratic Party’s leaders today–is to be found (once again) in the figure of the man many hoped would somehow just go away. Who else but Bill Clinton?
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There, on the cover of Esquire magazine is the man Americans entrusted their fate and sacred honor to, not once but twice, the man in charge of the world, the man with his finger on the button. He is sitting there with a smug, contemptuous smirk and his legs wide open. (Jay Leno quipped that he looked like the “breeder of the free world.”)
Revealingly, the White House is furious, not because of his posing for such a suggestive picture (or because of his outrageous complaints that the Republicans owe him an apology for forcing the impeachment), but because it was released a week before the campaign. This, too, is suspect. Psychologically speaking, what the eternal William Jefferson Clinton truly seems to want is for his own vice president, Al Gore, to lose. This behavior is common with charismatic leaders, because they constantly nurse the belief that no one can truly succeed them.
And so, that is where we are, at a moment of profound change in our country and in greater danger in the long run than most Americans, confident of our economic superiority, think.
Let me leave you with one last thought: Cleaning up, you know, can be an ideology, too.
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Georgie Ann Geyer is a syndicated columnist based in Washington, D.C. E-mail: [email protected]