- 1998 Elections Redefine Will Redefine
U.S. Policies
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- The past week has demonstrated that Bill
Clinton is the most extraordinary politician of our time. He took a draw
in the 1998 by-elections in which the Republicans retained control of both
houses of Congress, and managed to define it as an overwhelming defeat
for the Republicans and a major personal victory for himself. The generally
accepted consensus was that the elections ended any chance of an impeachment
of the President. As pure icing on the cake, the elections destroyed his
archenemy, Newt Gingrich and with it, redefined the Republican Party.
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- The President achieved his tremendous
victory by defining the basic issue as whether having sex with Monica Lewinsky
was or was not an impeachable offense. He was actually aided in this by
Ken Starr and the Republican right wing, which in fact did regard having
sex with Monica Lewinsky as being an impeachable offense. The issue of
lying under oath became a subsidiary matter. The really critical issue:
whether the President raised funds from Chinese and Indonesian government
and commercial sources in return for skewing U.S. foreign policy in their
favor was shoved off to another investigation where it languishes, mostly
forgotten. This was the true tail wagging the dog: Monica Lewinsky's tail
wagged a dog of an investigation.
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- How was this permitted to happen? The
cultural conservatives in the Republican Party simply failed to understand
that the dominant culture in the United States draws a fundamental difference
between public character and private behavior. Most Americans were personally
offended by the President's behavior, but did not translate the private
failure into something that defined the President. Clinton understood
this. He allowed his enemies to do exactly what they wanted to do: paint
Clinton as a degenerate womanizer. He allowed them to win that battle,
knowing that he would win the war, since being a degenerate womanizer was
not an impeachable offense. Clinton sandbagged the Republicans. The Republicans
then sandbagged themselves by permitting the elections to become a referendum
not on whether Clinton was a degenerate womanizer (that was already conceded)
but whether he should be impeached over it. They then allowed the Democrats
to define a draw as a victory, and the results sent Gingrich packing his
bags.
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- There are two domestic political results
here. The Christian Right sees itself as engaged in a struggle for the
cultural soul of the United States. They have just been handed an overwhelming
defeat. The culture that won this battle was the secular, hedonist culture
that holds that what people do of their own free will behind closed doors
not only is their own business, but does not in any way effect public life.
The inability of the Christian Right to bring down a President caught
literally with his pants down will be seen as a signal that the Christian
Right simply doesn't have the power to define the important issues. If
they could not bring down Bill Clinton over admitted sexual misconduct,
they are simply not as powerful as they would like to think they are.
Their influence in the Republican Party will diminish after this, or the
Republics will slip back into minority status.
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- The second political result is the effective
collapse of feminism as a political force. Feminists savaged Clarence
Thomas as being unfit for the Supreme Court because a former employee of
his, Anita Hill, provided uncorroborated testimony that on several occasions
he had asked her out on dates and that he had even made several dirty jokes
in her presence. Feminists seriously regarded this as evidence that Thomas
was unfit to sit on the Supreme Court. Clinton was charged (with certainly
at least as much evidence as Anita Hill brought forward) with exposing
himself to an employee (Paula Jones), groping another employee (Kathleen
Willey), and having an affair with young student doing an internship in
the White House (Monica Lewinsky). Where lesser charges were enough to
mobilize feminists against Thomas, the charges against Clinton were not
seen as sufficient to demand his resignation. In fact, feminists argued
that the good Clinton did the feminists outweighed whatever personal misconduct
he engaged in. In other word's, powerful liberals are to be held to different
standards than conservatives.
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- The feminists have now created the Clinton
Test for sexual harassment. Unwanted sexual advances, actual exposure
of private parts, and taking advantage of a powerful office to seduce young
women, do not constitute sexual harassment if you support the feminist
agenda. Asking employees out on dates and telling dirty jokes in front
of them does constitute sexual harassment if you are on the feminist hit
list. The utter cynicism of the feminists will cripple the movement for
a generation. No one will take seriously NOW's calls for greater protection
of women in the workplace after their refusal to condemn Bill Clinton.
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- This is the interesting outcome of the
elections. The two wings of the cultural wars, the Christian Right and
feminists, have both suffered massive damage. The ability of the Christian
Right to strike fear into the hearts of politicians has been severely diminished,
certainly on a national basis. The moral and intellectual credibility
of their main opponents, the Feminist Left has also been shattered. Thus
we will make an extreme but we think defensible statement: the cultural
wars that have defined much of the nation's politics since about 1980 are
over. Both sides have lost and have lost decisively.
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- If this is true, then the battles that
energized the Christian Right and the Feminist Left, but which left the
center generally uneasy and unengaged, should slowly decline in importance.
Abortion is, of course, the core issue. Issues like pornography, on which
both flanks agreed and which failed to excite the rest of the spectrum
should also decline in importance. In short, a new political agenda should
be emerging in time for 2000. What will that agenda be?
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- It is increasingly clear that Bob Livingston
of Louisiana will be the next Speaker of the House of Representatives.
That means that the Republican leader of the House will be from the Deep
South, along with the Republican leader of the Senate, Trent Lott. This
is an extremely dangerous situation for the Republicans, who have just
been devastated by cultural conservatism. But there is a reverse twist
to this. Precisely because both Livingston and Lott come from the deep
south and have strong credentials among the powerful Christian Right within
the Republican Party, they have more room for maneuver within the Party
than others might have. Moreover, both Lott and Livingston are more creatures
of Washington than the South by now, and we should remember that Washington
won this election. They will be able to define a new agenda without alienating
the Christian Right. They can lighten up on family values if they have
another issue that the Christian Right resonates to but that has broader
appeal.
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- That issue is economic nationalism.
Bob Livingston was the key figure in the recent debate over an $18 billion
payment to the IMF for use in addressing the global economic crisis. While
some in the Party wanted to block the payment altogether and while the
President was simply in favor of it, Livingston crafted a solution which
permitted the money to be paid if the IMF underwent massive reforms that
would actually change its very nature. Rather than supporting proposals
for increased power to the IMF bureaucracy, Livingston crafted legislation
that both supported the IMF while decreasing its power. He forced Clinton
into accepting what was, when viewed carefully, a very radical piece of
legislation. Given the new proposals being floated for $80 billion bailouts
and the creation of a larger, more powerful bureaucracy to control international
currency controls, proposals almost but not quite creating a global central
bank, Livingston has already shown himself to be a powerful opponent to
Clinton and Rubin.
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- It is interesting to note that issues
like the power of the IMF are increasingly motivating the Christian Right
as much as cultural issues. There is a deep and growing distrust on the
part of the Christian Right of the trend toward multilateral solutions,
like NAFTA, IMF, UN, WTO and so on, that the Democrats are so fond of.
What is most important, is that this sense of unease is not unique to
the Christian Right. Dick Gephardt represents a serious faction within
the Democratic Party that is equally dubious about what is seen as a transfer
of power from the United States Government to multilateral organizations.
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- Now, the most important issue facing
Congress when it returns will be the future of the international financial
system founded at Bretton Woods. There are proposals being made to dramatically
increase the power of organizations like the IMF and World Bank, transferring
regulatory powers over world financial markets into their hands. These
proposals are being made by France, Germany and Japan. The Clinton administration
has recently appeared to be increasingly in favor of these changes. These
proposals will rip Washington apart. They may well be supported by major
banks looking for a way out of the crisis. Free traders who have tended
to line up with the banks, like Jim Leach who chairs the House Banking
committee, will be torn between his ideological loyalties and his institutional
proclivities. Labor Democrats like Gephardt will be opposed to any such
institutional shift. The Christian Right will be utterly opposed. Corporate
Republicans will tend to favor the proposals. In short, there will be
chaos.
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- With the cultural wars at an end, the
new defining issue in the United States will be economic nationalism versus
internationalism. This is an issue that cuts between parties. Pat Buchanan
and Bill Gephardt are on one side, Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton are on
the other. But Newt Gingrich is gone. Pat Buchanan is a pale reflection
of his old self. In fact, both parties are up for grabs. It is not clear
which party will become the party of economic nationalism. However, the
dynamics surrounding Bob Livingston's elevation to power seem to indicate
that he will take the mantle of economic nationalism and run with it.
It will protect his Christian Conservative flank while allowing him to
define the difference between Republicans and Democrats. Livingston could
turn out to be a pivotal figure in American history.
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