Back to the Future

By Charles Krauthammer

After a respite of barely a year, with the banality of the refrain still ringing in the ear, "the politics of the future" is back. When Gary Hart announced a fortnight ago that he would retire from the Senate (to run, he all but admitted, for the presidency in 1988), he couldn't lay off the word. In a four-page statement, he reached for it eight times. In 1984 he had "pointed our party toward the future." For '88, he pledges "to help move our party and our country into the future." Why? Because even now "we are drifting backward into the future."

This kind of talk is rhetorical emptiness at its most pristine. Why does Hart do it? It's not as if he has nothing to say. He has a host of important ideas. Whether or not they are new is irrelevant. A good idea is a good idea: military reform, national service, a notion of sacrificial patriotism, as opposed to the superficial I-Love-Miss-Liberty kind now in vogue. (Though, unfortunately, even here Hart cannot resist defining patriotism as "more than slogans celebrating past achievements. It's an opportunity to draw a blueprint for our future.")

This makes Hart a reformist liberal, a venerable, once honorable political label. Admittedly both ends of the term have poor p.r. value nowadays. Perhaps he does need a better handle. But what is the pull of the future? It sounds good--for about ten minutes. Even in 1984, voters quickly grew cynical about it and its companion, "new ideas."

Still, even an empty notion can be pressed into political service. A liberal talking about the future is perhaps trying to distinguish himself from old-line, constituency-centered liberalism, what Kevin Phillips contemptuously calls "reactionary liberalism." That might have served some purpose in 1984. But what is the point now? Carter and Mondale are no more. Kennedy is gone, and even he supports Gramm-Rudman. We are all--Biden, Bradley, Babbitt, Gephardt and Robb--neoliberals now. There are no paleoliberals left, unless Mario Cuomo's principled disinclination to issue ostentatious rejections of the "past" tempts some to make the charge.

Talk of the future can also be code for saying, "I'm young." Old people, presumably, are simply not going to see the future. So if the job is to take us there, they are disqualified. But you can't say that without offending a rather important constituency. Future talk serves to muffle the message.

But the message continues to grate. It grated when John Kennedy, in his Inaugural Address, congratulated himself for being "born in this century," a distinction Dwight Eisenhower lacked. It grates now when practitioners of "generational politics" imply that youth carries some special virtue.

Now one can say that the young are generally more energetic than the old, although Ronald Reagan and Deng Xiaoping have rendered even that proposition somewhat dubious. But the other characteristic of youth is an absence: the absence of the memory and experience of age. "New generation" politicians, unlike a Reagan or a Mondale, have no memory of the great transforming events of this century such as the Depression, World War II or postwar reconstruction. Only the peculiar arrogance of youth can make a virtue of that vice. That vice, of course, is no fault of the young, but it is hardly a great qualification for the challenges of the presidency.

In many cultures--old cultures, like the Chinese and the Jewish--youth has long been considered an impediment to wisdom and very nearly a disqualification for governance. Even in our culture, the word elder is a synonym for leader. In the age of MTV, pastlessness may appear to be a political asset, but Reagan's career tells another story. The most fixedly conservative President of the century--and the oldest ever--has proved one of the most successful and certainly among the most popular.

Future talk does announce that one is young, but it also carries a hint of rootlessness, which is still, even in hypermobile America, a political liability. It was a major reason Hart lost the nomination in 1984. Perhaps it was a bum rap. But a return to futurism--an idea so artificial that it amounts to a confession of rootlessness--is no way to beat it.

Hart is not, of course, the only politician to indulge in future talk (though at the moment he is the most prominent). Among post-Mondale Democrats, future talk is endemic. After the 1984 Democratic debacle, Consultant Robert Squier summarized the party consensus: the choice it faced was no longer "left vs. right" but "past vs. future." Why are Democrats talking this way? There is, in the end, one truly substantive, if disturbing, reason: to divert attention from the past. Future talk tries to ensure an electoral contest that does not look back. It is part of the crisis of liberalism that it feels it can't.

Liberalism sees conservatism with a lock on the past, in fact on two pasts: the immediate and the mythical. The immediate past is the contrast of (failed) Carter vs. (successful) Reagan. And the mythical past is the city on a hill that Reagan has succeeded in annexing to the Republican Party with his promise, in the words of Political Philosopher Richard Hofstadter, to "recreate the old nation of limited and decentralized power, genuine competition, democratic opportunity, and enterprise."

But it was not always so. Those words, written in 1948, were describing the appeal of a Democratic tradition, the turn-of-the-century progressives, Bryan, La Follette and Wilson. They practiced what Hofstadter aptly called backward-looking progressivism.

Liberals now feel that they cannot afford to look back. But there is a past that belongs to them, the vast zone of time that lies between myth and yesterday and deserves the name history: 50 years of astonishing achievement, of a New Deal that built at once a welfare state and a superpower. With a past like that, Democrats should not be afraid to contest the terrain.

Yet they are. In the final analysis, future talk is a declaration by liberals that they have conceded the past to conservatives, and will instead take their chances on staking a claim to the gleaming barrenness that lies over the next horizon and that, conveniently, no one has yet seen.

Who owns the future? The father of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, insists that this is the crucial political question of the day, one that will determine who inherits power in America and in the world. What is overlooked is that people tend to decide the answer to that question in the most rational way possible. They ask first: Who owns the past? Liberalism senses that its decline is due to its failure to "seize the future." Whatever that means, if it means anything, forfeiting the past hardly seems the wisest way to begin. --By Charles Krauthammer