RH: You talk a lot about how the Republicans have been
struggling to redefine themselves since the 1992 elections,
and how that led to their 1994 comeback. How do you see that
process continuing into the campaign this year?
EJD: I think that the Republicans
engaged in some remarkable philosophical footwork, if you
will. People like Bill Kristol were really trying to figure out how to square the circle, how to get libertarians and traditionalists, low-tax economic
conservatives and the Christian right together. They had
this idea that if you said that the main problem
traditionalists and conservative Christians faced was a
powerful central government that usually opted for liberal
values, then you could persuade the Christian conservatives
that their interests lay with the libertarians and that the
answer was to shut down, or rather to reduce, the power of
the federal government: for example, have school vouchers
increase indirectly the power of institutions such as the
churches.
The problem with this project is that the
differences between these two wings of the Republican
coalition are too fundamental to paper over
easily. In particular, I think a lot of people who are
followers and supporters of the Christian right are also
people whose economic interests do not really coincide with
the low-tax, upper middle class libertarian constituency.
That has come out forcefully in Pat Buchanan's candidacy; he's
managed to take the social traditionalist message and combine it
with an economic populism which often makes him sound like Jesse
Jackson, especially when he talks about Wall Street. And he
has really sharpened this contradiction among conservatives.
The other problem is that Newt Gingrich, with his far-reaching
efforts to think through where the Republicans are, is really
proposing to roll back the whole progressive project. What he
has in mind ... is a kind of nineteenth century laissez
faire conservatism in which the government's role is steadily
shrunk back. He's very candid about this; he says he wants to speed
up the transition to the Third Wave, as he calls the new Information
Age. Again, the problem with that philosophy is that what a lot of voters are
looking for are protections from some of the economic
chaos created by this transition.
RH: Let's talk about why it's necessary for the
Democratic Party to get back on track with the redefinition
of the party that Clinton and others initiated in the 1992
campaign. Explain how the 1992 project got sidetracked and
then how you think it might be revived.
EJD: I think the 1992 project has sometimes been
mischaracterized as simply Clinton moving the Democratic
Party away from a philosophy described as "Old Democrat" to
a new philosophy described as "New Democrat." In fact, it was much
more complicated than that: Clinton was indeed in certain respects a
New Democrat, in his willingness to say that we needed to reform the
welfare system to make it a system that encouraged work, to
"reinvent" government which essentially means reforming
it, and to accept that voters wanted the party to
address moral issues like crime and family breakup. At the same
time, Clinton was very much an Old Democrat in his economic
populism, and used that forcefully in his campaign. A lot of his
rhetoric about the Reagan years was rhetoric indistinguishable from,
say, Ted Kennedy.
In 1992, Clinton basically managed to keep all the balls in
the air at once, and every wing of the Democratic party saw
enough in Clinton to support him, with increasing
enthusiasm as the campaign went on. Once he got elected,
Clinton started dropping the balls, and each
wing of his constituency found itself alienated from him.
The New Deomcrats kept saying he had become an Old Democrat
and they used the health care plan as their central piece of
evidence. But the older Democrats, the labor Democrats, were
furious with Clinton for his strong support of NAFTA, believing the
environmental and labor protections he added
really weren't all that significant. And by making the
budget deficit his central goal, he found himself neither
able to make his commitments to the older Democrats nor to
fund the programs the New Democrats supported. By 1994, all wings of the party
were at Clinton's throat. I have a line in the book I put there partly
to see how many people would take me to task for it, where I say
that the problem with Clintonism is that it was never really tried.
RH: You go into great detail about how the Republicans
made an active movement to ensure Clintonism never was
tried.
EJD: The problem with Clintonism is that it was a
very carefully balanced thing, and that you had to do lots
of different things at the same time. Health care reform
would be balanced with welfare reform, new spending on
public works would be balanced with reinventing government,
gays in the military would be balanced by a tax cut for
middle class families with kids. As each of these policies
died, the Republicans gained ground. Clinton killed
the middle class tax cut himself; the Republicans actively killed the programs, but Democratic fingerprints ended up being on the weapon. Paul Starr, who
wrote a very good piece for The American Prospect on
the health care plan, referred to its demise as the definition of
the perfect crime. But I think it was a perfect crime
because Democrats didn't understand as clearly as Bill
Kristol did what a danger it was to end those two years with
so little to show the voters.
RH: And now that Clinton pretty much has a lock on the
Democratic nomination, the challenge for the Democrats is to
rediscover Clintonism or the New Democratic vision. How are
they going to do this?
EJD: Well, I think Newt Gingrich has achieved
something that no human being in American history has
accomplished: created some sense of unity within the
Democratic Party. What's so striking about the last
year is that all wings of the party realize what a disaster
those two years of the Clinton administration were for
all of them, and that they also realize the threat
that all of them face from the Republican project.
New Democrats and Old Democrats may be separated on a whole
lot of things, but they broadly agree on the need to use
government to solve certain problems. They're not anti-
government in the way that the Republicans are.
Even on the farther left, there is a sense that a certain
kind of practical politics is necessary to confront this new
style of Republicanism.
This creates some new opportunities to try to
rediscover what was best about 1992 Clintonism and see how
it can be redfined and pushed forward. It's complicated
because there still is real disagreement within the
Democratic Party on the best way to cope with the changes
wrought by the global economy. That's the
central issue facing the country, and that's what voters are
concerned about.
Indeed, one of the striking things about
how the issues in our politics have changed is that in the
Republican primaries, you're hearing very little about
balancing the budget in seven years or about smaller
government... instead, Bob Dole gave a speech about corporate
leaders geting pay raises while workers were losing five percent of
their income...When one side steals the other's lines like that, it
suggests a shift is going on. Clinton may steal some of
their lines about big government, but the Republicans are
starting to steal rhetoric about the global economy not only from
Clinton but from people well to his left.
RH: Do you see any danger of another third party split
rather than a reunification of the Democrats behind the
principle of progressivism?
EJD: Perot could mount the most serious challenge
because he's the only one who could finance a serious
challenge. I think it's crazy to ever predict what Perot
will do,but he's setting up a vehicle to do it if he wants.
I'm not sure how much of a threat that is to Clinton,though;
it could end up being at least as much of a threat to the
Republicans. I think that in the short term, the potential
for third party politics is limited. Ralph Nader is on the
ballot in some states as a Green Party candidate; that could
cause Bill Clinton some trouble if the election got very
close.
At the moment it's very hard to imagine what a
centrist third party would look like because the center
includes lots of different people who have nothing in
common. Ross Perot brought some of them together for his 19
percent the last time, but the center includes libertarians
who are very liberal on social issues but want low taxes and
smaller government; it includes angry people that I describe
as the "Anxious Middle" who aren't libertarian at all, and
mostly want protection from economic change. Those two
constituencies have very little in common. They were willing
to use Ross Perot as a vehicle for protest; he got Tsongas
Democrats and Buchanan Republicans along with a lot of other
kinds of people...
The real problem for the Democrats is that if they
don't reembrace a commitment to reviving and reformulating
the progressive project, I don't know what purpose that
party has. It's not a sufficient purpose for a party to say,
"We're not Republicans." The only way you become the central party
is to redefine the terms of the political debate.
What I'm trying to do in the book is redefine the debate in
terms of people's attitude towards government. We've gone through
this long period of cynicism towards
government and we have said over and over that politics and
government can't do anything good. That is so
antithetical to the American democratic tradition, and it's
really quite a recent thing. We've always had a sensible
suspicion of government. We've always had a sensible view
that we don't want government to be too powerful, but we've
also always had a sense that government can improve people's
lives and can make improvements in our society. And I think
voters are tired of the cynical view and would like to
embrace a more positive view of government's possibilities.
