Looking for The Radical Middle

By Michael Duffy/Washington

WHY AMERICANS HATE POLITICS

by E.J. Dionne Jr.

Simon & Schuster

430 pages; $22.95

For the past year or so, a group of conservative and liberal activists have been meeting quietly for dinner in Washington. Given the guest list, one might expect this parley to produce the sort of verbal food fight that typifies American political debate and alienates so many voters. But the New Paradigm Society, as the participants call their group, isn't looking for arguments; it is searching for bipartisan solutions to America's problems. The fact that they meet at all suggests a sort of harmonic convergence between those who believe that the ideas that powered both the political left and right in America have ceased to be useful.

One of the group's occasional guests is E.J. Dionne, a Washington Post reporter whose new book, Why Americans Hate Politics, is something of a New Paradigm manifesto. Dionne's contention is that the central tenets of both political parties have ossified. Rather than providing genuine solutions to rising crime, declining educational standards and deteriorating race relations, conservatives and liberals offer "false choices" that divide voters in order to maintain power.

The author directs most of his fire on the Democrats, who he claims are unwilling to promote the kind of "public values" -- self-reliance, responsibility, family stability and hard work -- that most Americans still hold dear. Fragmented by an intraparty civil war that began in the 1960s, Democrats misconstrued voter complaints about crime as racism and mistook the tax revolt of the 1970s for selfishness. Eventually, George Bush crucified Michael Dukakis when the Democratic nominee refused to comprehend why support for the Pledge of Allegiance mattered deeply to voters.

Conservatives, meanwhile, dutifully paid homage to these values and scooped up disaffected Democrats. But conservatives failed Americans by trying to ; placate both supply-siders and traditional Republicans with an economic model that included massive tax cuts and higher defense spending. The Republican legacy is a $3 trillion debt, held in large part by foreign investors, and a populace that feels cheated by a government that doesn't seem to work. By 1990, when Bush agreed to raise taxes in exchange for budget cuts from the Democrats, the G.O.P. had run out of promises to make to voters.

The next step, the author argues, is a compromise between the two parties in which the aims of liberals and conservatives can be accommodated. Dionne supplies some evidence for this: last year Congress passed a child-care bill that combined the best principles of both conservatives and liberals. By tying child-care benefits to the earned-income tax credit, conservatives won incentives for those who would work their way out of poverty. At the same time, liberals were able to broaden government support for working mothers. There are other signs that America is ready for bipartisanship: no line in George Bush's Inaugural speech received more applause than his admonishment to Congress, "They didn't send us here to bicker."

But are there many opportunities for common ground? Probably not. One of the problems with the new paradigm is that it presumes Americans all want the same things. In a general sense this is true: all people, for example, want a decent wage, a comfortable and safe place to live and better opportunities for their children. But the differences about the means of achieving this dream are so fundamental that the means, in essence, become the ends.

Take crime. Conservatives believe criminals should be punished, and thus the solution is more jails. Liberals believe criminals are victims too, and thus the answer is more antipoverty programs. What could be more fundamental? The differences are, if anything, deeper in matters of race relations. Everyone in America believes in equality. To many whites it means color-blind laws. But to blacks equality means affirmative action.

As communism wanes, Dionne sees the 1990s as a rare opportunity to merge the politics of left and right into a new "politics of the center." In some issues there may be room for compromise. But it seems unlikely that at a time when both parties are struggling to define themselves anew, either will seek to cohabit with the other.