Does Familiarity Breed Contentment?

By Richard Brookhiser

The English novelist Evelyn Waugh once wrote that the only human relationships he could abide were intimacy, formality and servility. "What is horrible . . . in America is familiarity." Americans will be seeing a lot more familiarity, horrible or not, because that is the religion of the Clinton Administration.

Every President has a religion, in the sense of a creed that gets him and his supporters through the day. Ronald Reagan had two religions -- low taxes and traditional values -- plus a demonology, or at least a demon -- the evil empire. George Bush disestablished the Reagan religions and offered in their place little more than a belief in the sufficiency of his own good character, which is one reason he was a one-term President.

"Familiarity" is not the name Bill Clinton attaches to the guiding spirit of his presidency. When he is feeling rhetorical, he speaks instead of the New Covenant, which he defines as "a solemn agreement between the people and their government, based not simply on what each of us can take, but on what all of us must give." Clinton's New Covenant offers opportunity even as it demands responsibility. Ask what your country can do for you and what you can do for your country.

Clinton's covenant talk mines a long American tradition, running right back to the Puritans. "It is of the nature and essence of every society," said John Winthrop, "to be knit together by some covenant." But what kind of covenant? Winthrop's was based on obedience to a Calvinist God, which is not something Clinton is likely to call on. This is where familiarity comes in, to provide the needed emotional glue.

Clintonian familiarity establishes itself in a process of show-and-tell. We show each other our trials, then we tell each other how concerned we are about them and how determined we are to make things better. Clinton led the national show-and-tell with a tour of the stations of his own life -- his father's death in a car accident, his stepfather's drunkenness, his half brother's drug addiction, his mother's breast cancer. Even incidents that at first appeared to be reflections on his character rather than on his circumstances -- his dithering over the draft, his alleged dalliances -- became transformed instead into episodes that tested him.

The showing continues as Americans tell him their problems. Clinton's - capacity to pay attention, obvious to anyone who has watched him conducting a forum or working a crowd, draws them out. During the second presidential debate -- the one with the stools -- Clinton was the only one of the three candidates to move to the edge of the stage and engage his interlocutors intimately.

The telling comes with Clinton's pledges to solve America's problems. Clinton's proposals may not be very different from those of other politicians, but because of the showing that accompanies them, the proposals appear to have sprung not from some abstract principle or expert's calculation but from his bond with us. The experience leaves us united in empathy for our sufferings and committed to the struggle to relieve them. It's like a 12-step program, minus appeals to a Higher Power.

Clinton is not the only public figure who achieves familiarity through show- and-tell. At the Democratic Convention, Al Gore relived the car accident that nearly killed his young son, and Paul Tsongas told us about his battle with cancer, which he now must face again. For years Jesse Jackson has been telling us that he was born out of wedlock. No major political function these days, Democrat or Republican, is complete without at least one AIDS sufferer. Clinton is not alone in evoking familiarity; he just does it better than anyone else. The only people who might challenge him for that distinction are the TV-talk-show hosts. There was a lot of comment this year about how TV talk shows had changed American politics. They did it not by providing a new forum but by setting a tone. We are all hosts and guests now.

The religion of familiarity has problems. The first is that though it promises to be comprehensive, it in fact leaves a lot of people out. Suppose you have an unpopular disease? To hear Clinton and his peers tell it, the only reason anyone dies in America is because of AIDS, breast cancer or the occasional car accident. In fact, everyone reading these words will die some time or other, many of us quite painfully. If your manner of egress is not on the New Covenanters' list, don't expect any hugs before you go.

A second problem with our new religion is that some claims to be distressed will not be accepted by everyone. Clinton ran into this problem early in the transition when he repeated a campaign promise to lift the ban on homosexuals in the military by Executive Order. Gays see themselves as a wrongfully excluded minority, but the military sees homosexuals in its own ranks as % prejudicial to discipline. Clinton will probably set up a commission that will lead the Pentagon around to his view, but that is old-style jawboning, not the New Covenant.

The final problem is that show-and-tell, even if it makes everyone feel better, is not enough. Clinton may succeed in getting our attention. But to get results, he must navigate intractable realities such as limited resources and human nature. Suppose he cannot fund tax relief for the middle class out of levies on the rich? Suppose that even with welfare reform, poor families stay broken and city streets remain dangerous? There may be more in heaven and earth than is dreamed of in Bill Clinton's religion. If so, he has four years to change it -- before we get a chance to change Presidents.