What Ever Became of the American Center

By Charles Krauthammer

The death of Senator Henry Jackson has left an empty stillness at the center of American politics. Jackson was the symbol, and the last great leader, of a political tradition that began with Woodrow Wilson and reached its apogee with John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey. That tradition--liberal internationalism--held that if democratic capitalism was to have a human face, it had to have a big heart and a strong hand. At home that meant developing and defending the institutional embodiments of the national conscience: civil rights, Social Security, Medicare, welfare (what ambivalent conservatives, using the language of rescue teams and circuses, call the "safety net"). In foreign affairs it meant an unapologetic preference for democratic pluralism everywhere, and a willingness to "bear any burden" in defense of the cause (what the left now calls "the cold war mentality"). In short: big government for big enterprises, at home and abroad.

In the postwar period that creed gathered such a following and such power that it became the dominant, almost consensual, political tendency in the U.S. Viet Nam destroyed that consensus. It did something more. It destroyed the sense of equilibrium that underlay that consensus, and introduced a period of volatili ty that is with us to this day. Not only is the center fractured, but the political system now oscillates between the remaining extremes. Revulsion with Viet Nam pulled the Democratic Party to the left: to Mc-Govern in 1972, and to an abiding distrust of American power and intentions ever since. A countervailing revulsion with growing American weakness--for example, economic prostration before OPEC and national humiliation by Iran--helped pull the Republican Party into the orbit of the Reagan right.

Jackson not only stood his ground, he never lost his equilibrium. He bestrode the center, while others sought refuge from the responsibilities of the Western alliance and the welfare state. He believed, with the Preamble to the Constitution, that the purpose of the Union was to provide for both the common defense and the general welfare. Today the two parties have neatly divvied up those responsibilities between them, Republicans committed to defense ("strength"), Democrats to welfare ("fairness").

Liberal internationalism stands for both. To be sure, it is not the only centrist alternative. Another option is to stand for neither or, more precisely, for as little involvement in either as Government can manage. That is the party of small government. Its creed is civilized restraint, and its constituency the brand of Tory that Americans call "moderate Republican" and the British call "wet."

There is a third centrist alternative. It rejects all the foregoing categories. It is aggressively nonideological, neither pro-nor antidefense, welfare or anything else. It seeks only programs that work: weapons, cars, food programs that are lean, clean and mean. It wants guns that shoot straight; it is not terribly concerned what they shoot at. Most of the world calls these people technocrats; in America nowadays they are called neoliberals.

Of all the varieties of centrist experience, the liberal internationalist is the most significant, and not only because of its pedigree and former dominance. Most centrism is negative: afflicted by on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand passivity that searches constantly for the lowest common denominator, that seeks the neutrality of the center as a refuge from the passion of the extremes. Liberal internationalism is a passion for democratic principles, and for bold interventionist Government to carry them out. It is a standing challenge, a rebuke, to the rigidities and timidities of the newly dominant right and left. That is perhaps why it commands so large a following among intellectuals, even it it has lost ground among politicians. And lost ground it has. In the end, Jackson stood virtually alone. With his death and the abdication of his heir apparent, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who has quietly moved to the orthodox liberal fold, the center is now weaker than ever.

But great democracies cannot long tolerate such a void. In stable polities the most powerful forces, those that make for stability in the first place are centripetal. When the major parties pull apart, the political system, abhorring a vacuum, throws up a centrist alternative. In Britain, when the Tories' heart went hard and Labor's head went soft, a Social Democratic Party was born and quickly achieved remarkable strength. The S.D.P., however, had the advantage of being able to coalesce around the nidus of a small, old, still breathing third party, the Liberals. The U.S. is less hospitable to new forms of political life. Third parties in America gravitate not only to the extremes, but to irrelevance. (John Anderson's upcoming presidential campaign will undoubtedly confirm both tendencies.)

If an organic center does not exist, what is to be done? The American answer seems to be: build a synthetic one. The can-do country (its creations include synthetic rubber, artificial flavors and plastic hearts) has come up with a substitute: ad hoc centrism. The mechanism is government-by-commission, and unlike the "commission on the future" of years past, today's commission is not meaningless, temporary employment for eminent and idle statesmen. It is an essential political instrument for improvising a center. And it is the political story of 1983.

There have already been three major commissions, each charged with solving an intractable problem, each problem more complex and treacherous than the last. The first of these, the Social Security commission, had the easiest task. It had only to put together a one-shot arrangement, a mathematical compromise between the purely economic demands of various constituencies. When it succeeded in locating a kind of arithmetic mean of the competing claims, its work was done. It packed up and went home.

The Scowcroft commission on strategic forces had a harder task. change had to devise nuclear strategy, an area of constant change not given to final, static compromises. It also had to take into account the moves and countermoves of an unpredictable adversary. (Social Security, a purely domestic problem, brought together players who could all be made to sit at the table and behave.) Then came the thought: If a commission could mute the ran corous debate on the MX, why not Central America? Why not indeed? Enter the Kissinger commission, charged with solving the Rubik's Cube of Central America. The game here is not a two-sided affair where missiles are shuffled and traded; it is a multisided affair with seven independent countries and innumerable factions at odds, sometimes at war, with each other. Un like Social Security or nuclear policy, Central America is a living, moving, changing target. A week after the commission's report is delivered, events on the ground may very well have rendered it obsolete.

This is not to say that the Kissinger commission is bound to fail, only that commissions are not the wisest way for a country to make foreign policy. Commissions are at best an expedient. They may be fine in the breach, but, with the collapse of an organic center, our politics is becoming all breach.

What is wrong with government-by-commission? First, finding solutions is only half the job. The other half is building support for them. Centrist politics requires not only that one locate common ground, but that one then encourage people to settle there. Commissions, unfortunately, are designed to issue findings, not create consensus. That is the task of a political party. But at the center there is none, which is why the Scowcroft compromise is so shaky and the Kissinger commission so criticized months before it has pronounced its first official word.

Second, even the most distinguished commission must fold its tent. Kissinger's reports in January, and then what? A new Kissinger commission for the next hot spot? What will the next Democratic President do? Call a Brzezinski commission? No problem, says Thomas J. Watson Jr.. former U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union. We can improve upon "palliatives such as the Scowcroft and Kissinger commissions," he writes. How? With "a permanent blue-ribbon commission to deal with the central issues and to take our nation's survival out of politics-as-usual." His "National Security Commission" will enjoy more than permanence. It will be given "built-in independence" and "take up only watershed issues of U.S.-Soviet relations, including nuclear weapons." Presumably the rest--fishing rights?--will be left to the President and Congress.

Yet the fundamental problem is not with commissions. It is with a political system so weak at the center that it has grown addicted to them, so paralyzed by ideological conflict that it needs to call on collections of wise men to do the work of Government. Republicans stop a Democratic Administration from getting arms control through Congress; then Democrats stop a Republican Administration from getting its arms (MX) through. A commission (Scowcroft's) is then convened to plead the obvious: that both are linked and must get through together or not at all. A Republican Administration wants more aid to El Salvador and a surrogate war in Nicaragua; a Democratic House tries to cut the aid and end the war; both sides prepare to blame the other for a halfway policy that failed. A commission (Kissinger's) is now convened to solve what is at root a domestic political problem.

Henry Jackson was so aware of that problem that he proposed and helped create the Central American commission. He saw imminent danger in an increasingly assertive (bellicose to some) Administration policy, proceeding without political support. In the absence of a strong natural constituency--his old constituency--to provide that support, he sought an alternative, however makeshift.

No doubt, ad hoc centrism is better than none. But it is at best a temporary and incomplete solution to a structural flaw in American politics. In the meantime, until it is corrected, until the liberal internationalist tradition can rebuild itself into a political force, we can look forward to more oscillatory democracy and, to dampen its abrupt left-right swings, more commissions.

And what happens in the meantime to the old constituency?

While the world awaits its renaissance, there are choices to be made and, for the liberal internationalist, unpleasant ones. On the one hand is a Republican Party that obeys the minimal decencies of the welfare state, but is still alien to its ethic, still nibbling at the edges of civil rights, union power and social welfare. On the other hand is a Democratic Party so embarrassed by any assertion of American power that it meets even the Grenada operation with automatic, almost reflexive opposition (that is, until the opinion polls come out, at which point most Democrats neatly reverse field).

Today the liberal internationalist center is without an economic base (what Big Business, for example, is for the Republicans), without institutional support (except for a wing of labor led by Lane Kirkland), and, now that Henry Jackson is gone, without leadership. With little to hold it together, it will likely fracture along existing political fault lines and disappear into the landscape: those most concerned with domestic policy returning to the Democrats, those most concerned with foreign policy casting their lot with the Republicans.

What ever happened to the American center? It died and left no heirs. A commission has been appointed to look after the estate. --By Charles Krauthammer This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.