Lexington - The end of ideology

Lexington

The end of ideology
Dec 1st 2005
From The Economist print edition



On the exhaustion of political ideas in the Bush era

FORTY-FIVE years ago one of America's great public intellectuals, Daniel Bell, published a big, fat book with a big, bold title: “The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties” argued that the great ideologies that had dominated intellectual life since the Victorian era—Marxism, liberalism and conservatism—had all lost their power to grip people's minds and stir their emotions. Few liberals any longer believed in huge social engineering projects; and few conservatives believed that the welfare state was the second-to-last stop on “the road to serfdom”. The future lay with technocrats rather than ideologies, with pragmatists who prefer itty-bitty ideas to bold blueprints.

Mr Bell could hardly have been more unlucky with his timing. If the 1950s was a graveyard of ideologies, the 1960s proved to be a breeding ground. Presidents Kennedy and, particularly, Johnson revived “big-government liberalism”. The New Left embraced Karl Marx's uncompromising critique of capitalism (albeit with more emphasis on dippy Hippie counter-culturalism than on the proletarian revolution) while the New Right hollered for cowboy capitalism and a return to moral values.

The past 45 years have been shaped by the interplay between these three ideologies. Big-government liberals introduced an American version of the welfare state and affirmative action. New-left activists took over the universities—first through sit-ins and then through tenure. And Hayek-reading conservatives marched to the polls behind Barry Goldwater (unsuccessfully) and Ronald Reagan (triumphantly). But have Americans finally had enough of ideologies?

The clearest evidence for exhaustion lies with the most successful ideology of the past few decades—conservatism. George Bush has been a surprisingly ideological president. He introduced swingeing tax cuts, shifting his justification, as only a true ideologue can, from returning the surplus to stimulating the economy. He has tried to use government to reinforce traditional virtues such as marriage. And, in the wake of September 11th, he threw his support behind the neo-conservative project of using American power and principles to remake the Middle East.

But this ideological activism is producing a widespread weariness with conservative ideas. Mr Bush's enthusiasm for cutting taxes while using government to promote virtue has left the impression that conservatism is a recipe for both fiscal irresponsibility and government meddling. And neo-conservatism has been mugged by reality in the backstreets of Baghdad.

Moreover, the exhaustion with big conservative ideas does not look like being replaced by an enthusiasm for big liberal ideas. The American left is certainly in a frenzy at the moment. But this ideological frenzy is driven more by hatred of the status quo—a hatred that has the “Bush-Cheney junta” as its epicentre but extends outward to include Wal-Mart and “Big Pharma”—than by any coherent vision of the future. Granted, most leftists cling to the flotsam and jetsam of old ideologies, from support for oppressed minorities to enthusiasm for more government spending on health care. But big-government liberalism lacks the coherence it had in the 1960s. It is a measure of the American left's ideological exhaustion that, during the last election, it was reduced to rallying around Howard Dean, a man who supported gun rights and fiscal prudence.

What about the centre? Back in 1992, Bill Clinton came to power with a compelling vision for updating liberalism. Drop shop-worn ideas about protectionism and industrial policy. Accept the wealth-creating power of globalisation. But prepare people to deal with increased competition by investing in education and training. This remains intellectually plausible. But it has lost much of its grip on the imagination. September 11th has raised difficult questions about the underside of globalisation. The left has embraced protectionism with renewed fervour. And the Democratic Party as a whole has never reconciled its enthusiasm for investing in education with its alliance with the most reactionary force in the educational world, the teachers' unions.

The age of the pragmatic Hillary McCain

This exhaustion with big ideas is going hand in hand with a growing enthusiasm for pragmatism. The two most prominent candidates for the 2008 presidential election—Hillary Clinton and John McCain—are both willing to mix and match ideas from across the political spectrum. Mrs Clinton has broken with her party's ideological commissars on everything from Iraq (she has generally backed Mr Bush) to abortion (which she describes as “a sad, even tragic choice”). She has formed public partnerships with conservatives such as Rick Santorum (on protecting children from sex and violence in the media) and Newt Gingrich (on health-care reform).

Mr McCain is even more of a maverick: more hawkish on Iraq than Mr Bush but also more left-wing on everything from campaign finance to taxation. He shares Teddy Roosevelt's worries about the creation of a decadent American aristocracy (hence his support for retaining inheritance taxes); and he relishes doing battle with his party's self-appointed ideological guardians (his chief of staff recently told the Boston Globe that it is as pointless to respond to Grover Norquist, an anti-tax crusader, as it is to respond to “some street-corner schizophrenic”).

This is not to say that America is now free from ideological temptation. The Democrats are searching for what consultants call “a narrative” to stitch together their policies. Washington is full of think-tanks committed to producing the next big idea and ideological zealots determined to stamp out heresy. But the public seems to be losing patience with airy-fairy ideological crusades—and growing ever hungrier for down-to-earth pragmatism. The electoral rewards for the party that feeds that hunger could be considerable.