They Only Look Dead: Why Progressives Will Dominate the Next Political Era.

• Author: Henderson, Rick

Did reporters, pundits, and politicians completely misread the meaning of the 1994 elections? Did voters bring the Democrats' 40-year congressional reign to a screeching halt because the public believes government was trying to do too little rather than too much? Are Americans ready to end their flirtation with Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole and instead enter the 21st century embracing government activism?

Washington Post political columnist E.J. Dionne Jr. thinks so, and these contentions form the surprising and "debatable" (as Al Hunt of The Wall Street Journal says in a cover blurb) thesis of They Only Look Dead, Dionne's latest book. Dionne, whose weekly column relentlessly cheerleads for the Clinton administration, believes the anti-government fervor articulated by the 104th Congress is in fact out of touch with the desires of middle-class voters. As soon as the Republican coalition collapses from its own internal contradictions, he says, a new, more muscular form of Progressivism will lead the Democrats to victory for decades to come.

Those who haven't read Dionne's columns or seen him on the weekend talk shows may remember his best-selling Why Americans Hate Politics, one of the most talked-about political books of 1991. In it, Dionne argued that the Republicans and Democrats had become obsessed with beating each other up over differences in "ideology" (defined by him as such divisive but symbolic issues as flag burning, Willie Horton, and abortion) and had turned off average voters because they refused to openly discuss government "solutions" to problems. Dionne almost eerily fore shadowed the ways in which populists (Ross Perot, Pat Buchanan, Jerry Brown) and technocrats (Paul Tsongas, Bill Clinton, Perot again) would attract disaffected voters in 1992 by reminding them that the political process was unresponsive and government no longer worked.

Because Dionne was so prescient, he merits serious attention. But since his last book was published, the 1994 congressional election - the most ideological national campaign in 30 years - has intervened. Dionne says that his goal this time is to flesh out the thesis he put forward in Why Americans Hate Politics: "Voters are angry at government not just for what it has done, but for what it has failed to do," he writes. "The current political upheaval can thus be defined less as a revolt against big government than as a rebellion against bad government - government that has proven ineffectual in grappling with the political, economic and moral crises that have shaken the country" (emphasis in original).

But this book does not extend the arguments made in Why Americans Hate Politics; it repudiates them. Instead of offering a defense of the pragmatic, New Democrat policies Dionne recommended in his earlier book, They Only Look Dead eviscerates free markets and capitalism and touts Progressive Era - style central planning as the key to national salvation.

The early Progressives were wildly successful reformers. They busted the trusts, routed the big-city political patronage machines, professionalized government and corporate bureaucracies, and even replaced the narrowly targeted, partisan newspapers of the day with mass-circulation, "objective" dailies.

But Progressives didn't shake up the establishment merely to make trouble: They had a coherent philosophy, which stressed the role of the government in making citizens - especially those in the lower classes - informed, politically active, and virtuous. (Alcohol prohibition was a logical consequence of the temperance movement the Progressives encouraged.) The Progressives were the first political movement to institutionalize the nanny state, with the conscious strategy of making individuals, above all else, political creatures. As Dionne notes, Progressive icon John Dewey "saw democracy not simply as a form of government but as a 'way of life.'"

Dionne believes the four American "crises" he identifies - economic, political, moral, and international - beg for New Progressive solutions. He begins by singling out a bloc of swing voters he calls the "Anxious Middle," a group that "feels pressed by economic change and worries that the country is experiencing a moral and social breakdown. Its members are angry at government but uneasy over the workings of the economic system. They crave self-reliance - and honor this virtue...