Imagine a panel of eighteenth-century physicians with a royal patient who has a persistent fever and a hacking cough. Learned doctor Newt Gingrich wants to bleed three pints, learned doctor Richard Gephardt one. Doctors Bill Clinton and Bob Dole want to split the difference at a quart, but they can't decide which of them should make the incision. The next day the patient has acute pneumonia; the following day he dies and the kingdom goes into mourning.

That is what our political debate increasingly resembles. Led by the politics-is-a-game media, we have defined American politics along a single left-to-right dimension. We know that the new conservatives of the House of Representatives are on the right and the old liberals of the Kennedy-Johnson tradition on the left. And the votes are in the middle, so that's where President Clinton and ex-senator Dole have gone. The middle of the road may be mathematically equidistant from the right and the left, but the symbolic middle toward which both candidates have moved is meaningless for making real national policy.

For liberals it is worse than meaningless. It is harmful, because most of the terms defining the political debate are inherently conservative: "less government", "middle-class tax cut", "tough on crime", "abolish welfare as we know it". And for most Americans, who just want solutions to the nation's problems, the symbolic middle is useless, because it provides only symbolic solutions. We need real solutions. The correction of our national problems requires neither right nor left, neither moderation nor extremism. The political debate needs a new dimension: reality.

Robert A. Levine,The Empty Symbolism of American Politics
Published in The Atlantic Monthly, October 1996
Copyright © 1996 by The Atlantic Monthly Company. All rights reserved.

Posted 14 October 1996

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