Will Politicians Matter?

By Peter Beinart

In the fall of 1995, Louis Farrakhan led the most celebrated African-American march in Washington since the 1963 March on Washington. A stone's throw from the spot where Martin Luther King declared, "We've come to our nation's capital to cash a check" for the "riches of freedom and the security of justice," Farrakhan voiced a new black generation's claim upon its still largely white government. And it was no claim at all.

"Freedom can't come from staying here and petitioning this great government," Farrakhan thundered. "Freedom cannot come from no one but the God who can liberate the soul from the burden of sin."

Last February, Paul Weyrich came to a similar conclusion. In an open letter to his Free Congress Foundation, Weyrich, perhaps the most influential conservative strategist of the past two decades, declared his life's work a failure. "Conservatives," he wrote, "have learned to succeed in politics. That is, we got our people elected. But that did not result in the adoption of our agenda. The reason, I think, is that politics has failed."

Two radically different leaders. Two calls for political secession. And a glimpse, possibly, of the 21st century's antipolitical response to the lessons of the end of the 20th.

The 1990s, after all, were a decade when first liberals, then conservatives, scored thrilling political victories, only to find those victories strikingly irrelevant to society at large. For 12 long years, Democrats watched Ronald Reagan and George Bush hack at the government safety net they held dear. Finally, in 1992, the party wrenched itself from its stupor, shook off its dead weight and found a winner. But when the Clintonites showed up for work, sleeves rolled up and ready to reverse years of trickle-down social policy, they received some bad news. In the post-cold war world, their new Wall Street buddies informed them, you couldn't pump government money into the economy and watch it spring to life because the bond market, punisher of fiscal indiscipline, would force up interest rates and slam its foot on the brake. Bill Clinton adapted; he cut spending and the deficit, thus handing over the economic reins to Alan Greenspan. Not a bad strategy, except that honest liberals must now admit that inequality is greater, the safety net is thinner, and capitalism is fiercer after two terms of Democratic occupancy of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue than it was before. Clinton trumped the Republicans. But market power trumped government power. And that mattered more.

The Republicans soon discovered the same thing. In 1994 they won the most stunning congressional victory of the late 20th century. And where they tried to roll back government, they had some success--they cut back welfare and agricultural subsidies and abolished the national speed limit. But where they tried to wield government power--to remoralize a culture they believed was degenerating before their eyes--they hit a wall. Under G.O.P. congressional control, government sanctions against abortion and homosexuality have, if anything, grown weaker. And when the G.O.P. tried to rally the public against a President they believed epitomized all that was wrong in the culture, the public refused to get on board. Americans, it turned out, were becoming less morally judgmental, and government could do little about it. Conservatives might influence Washington, but Washington wasn't influencing the culture.

And so activists of all stripes have started looking for a back door. Twenty-first century America will surely witness multiple ideological trends and clashes--left, right, internationalist, populist, nativist. But what will separate it from past eras will be not its particular factions or conflicts but the terrain on which they play themselves out. And the primary terrain will not be electoral politics. Battles for the national soul will be won or lost not in presidential elections or budget battles. They will be won or lost in civil society, and the passion to shape civil society will come largely from the one force able to inspire men and women in the way politics once did: religion.

Barely any other industrial democracy has seen belief in government fall as low as it has in the U.S., and almost no other has seen belief in religion remain so high. The percentage of Americans who vote and who say they trust government has dropped like a stone over the past four decades. But the percentage who worship regularly and say they believe in God remains higher than in almost any nation in Western Europe. According to Gallup, two-thirds of Americans, more than at any point in the 1970s or '80s, say religion can solve all or most of today's problems. Some, like the University of Chicago's Robert Fogel, suggest that we are in the grip of a great awakening, a surge of religious fervor that wells up cyclically in American history.

One of the reasons religion is up and government is down is that religion is increasingly doing what politics once did: offering an alternative to the values of the free market. Americans have a love-hate relationship with capitalism. It brings wealth and liberty, which they love, as well as materialism and individualism, which they fear. When government prestige is high, Americans look to it to provide the sense of common purpose that the market does not. But over the past two decades, many of the social programs meant to temper market inequality have been judged to be wasteful and counterproductive. And the money-drenched campaign-finance system often makes politicians seem like just another commodity, bought and sold by corporations. Religion, by contrast, seems to offer a principled critique of the narcissism and rootlessness of contemporary America. Polling by Princeton University sociologist Robert Wuthnow shows that the Americans most bothered by society's materialism and lack of community are also the ones most likely to attend church regularly.

And the houses of worship aren't only preaching these new values; they also seem more effective in carrying them out. Churches get things done because they generate, in the think tank-speak of the day, social capital. They possess the moral authority to call people to service on behalf of others, something politicians generally lack the stature even to try. Americans, Everett Carll Ladd of the Roper Center writes in the Ladd Report, are more than twice as likely to volunteer as people in Germany or France. And the percentage of Americans volunteering, unlike participating in government, is going not down but up; it more than doubled between 1977 and 1995, from 26% to 54%. Andrew Greeley, a Roman Catholic priest and professor of social science at the University of Chicago, argues that these high rates stem largely from America's religiosity. Americans who attend religious services weekly are twice as likely to volunteer their help as those who attend barely at all. One-third of the people who volunteer for even purely secular causes cite religious conviction as their motive.

Government, of course, isn't going away, but it is possible to imagine a future America in which it does not mediate the great national struggles. Already, growing numbers of conservatives are suggesting that the battle against abortion should be waged culturally, not politically. George W. Bush and John McCain rarely emphasize new laws to criminalize abortion. Instead they stress a hearts-and-minds strategy based on moral suasion--essentially turning the President into a cheerleader for community efforts to offer women abortion alternatives.

In Blinded by Might, former Moral Majority staff members Cal Thomas and Ed Dobson ask whether it is better to send "money to an organization vowing to pass legislation that would restrict the practice [of abortion] or volunteer at a local crisis pregnancy center." Their implied answer is clearly the latter. And there is mounting evidence that even within the Christian right, that perspective is winning the day. In the late 1990s, the hyperpolitical Christian Coalition went into steep decline, while Promise Keepers, an organization that believes many of the same things but shuns political action as the route to achieve them, has grown.

On the left, the antiglobalization activists who came of age at the World Trade Organization conference in Seattle see government as neither the problem nor the solution. They carried signs saying END CORPORATE RULE. And the masked hoodlums who turned the city into a battleground didn't trash government offices; they went after Niketown, Starbucks and the Gap. The labor-environmental coalition that stymied the WTO wants powerful global organizations that will punish companies that exploit workers and pollute the countryside. Ask them what they want Congress to do, and you'll get a puzzled look. For them, Congress is pretty much beside the point.

Establishment liberals acknowledge government's limitations in other ways. After the Littleton, Colo., tragedy, not only conservatives but even many liberals admitted that the shootings spoke to a void that political solutions could not fill. Yes, Democrats pushed gun control, but House minority leader Richard Gephardt also said, "The answer won't be found in state legislatures or the halls of Congress." In his speech at a Columbine High School memorial service, Al Gore devoted two sentences to gun control and much of the rest of his speech to Scripture, which he invoked eight times.

Gore has endorsed government funding of religious social-service programs, joining a growing consensus that in antipoverty policy, government can no longer lead the charge. Neither he nor Bush wants government to stop spending money on the poor, but both imply something almost as radical: that religious organizations know better how to use that money to change lives. Both candidates call for a partnership in which faith-based groups, not the government, take the lead in formulating policy. Gore says government should help "not by dictating solutions from above but by supporting the effective new policies that are rising up from below." Bush says religious groups should not "be dictated to by government. We want them involved on their terms, not ours."

Behind these statements is a massive, decades-long decline in government's intellectual and moral self-confidence. Once upon a time, government service was considered the highest aspiration of every bright young thing who wanted to use his or her brainpower to make the world a better place. We may be entering an age when that is no longer the case--when even high government officials are seen as mere functionaries, following the lead charted by civic groups. The media are already lavishing attention on a new category of activists--from antigang crusader the Rev. Eugene Rivers in Boston to Chuck Colson, who runs the Prison Fellowship in Texas, to philanthropist George Soros--who are offering responses to entrenched social problems that basically ignore politics. Not all these efforts stem from a shared ideological base, and many of the divisions that have long showed up in state legislatures may also increasingly divide churches and communities. But at the very least, the chronic decriers of American apathy will have to start defining idealism more broadly. A recent poll sponsored by former Clinton chief of staff Leon Panetta found that only 27% of college students discuss politics at least three times a week, but almost three-fourths have volunteered in the past two years. "Students are very tuned in to public issues and community involvement," said Panetta. "They're just not expressing that interest through participation in electoral politics."

In late 1965, TIME's cover bore the image of John Maynard Keynes. The British economist was 19 years dead, but his arguments that government intervention could mitigate capitalism's savage inequities were partly responsible for the surge of governmental self-confidence that underlay Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. Early the following spring, TIME's stark black cover bore the words IS GOD DEAD? The accompanying article spoke of the "brutal reality that the basic premise of faith--the existence of a personal God who created the world and sustains it with his love--is now subject to profound attack." It is difficult to imagine a TIME cover in the year 2025 bearing Keynes' visage or indeed that of any such prophet of governmental mastery.

But it is not hard to imagine God's making it again. Next time, he's likely to be pictured as alive and well.

Peter Beinart, a contributor to TIME, is the editor of the New Republic