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

• Author: Fallows, James

E.J. Dionne Jr. Simon & Schuster, $24 By James Fallows One year ago the most prominent Republican spokesmen were Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh, each of whom carried the message that government was inherently bad. Now the party's nominee is Bob Dole, its most vigorous stump orator is Pat Buchanan, and its dreamed-of savior is Colin Powell. In different ways, each of these men conveys the message that government has a necessary and even beneficial role. Dole has devoted his whole working life to legislative deal-making; Buchanan urges that the federal government protect Americans from foreign products and immigrants; Colin Powell worked in and ultimately led the nation's largest public bureaucracy. As part of the military's recovery from Vietnam to Desert Storm, Powell illustrates the difference between a branch of government run poorly and one run well, and how a government-imposed change in rules--desegregation and then affirmative-action in the military--can create new opportunities for genuinely talented individuals.

This shift in Republican symbolism may be an early confirmation of the trend that E.J. Dionne predicts in They Only Look Dead, which was completed last year while Gingrich, Limbaugh, Dick Armey, and Phil Gramm were still riding high. (Disclosure: I have known Dionne for years.) The book's argument, in essence, is that today's Republicans have fundamentally misread Americans' real attitudes toward government. Americans say they fear, mistrust, and resent government, especially the federal government. But this is nothing new. With the rare exception of the mid-1930s through the mid-1960s, when the federal government seemed the bulwark against world depression, the Nazis, and the Soviet Union, Americans have almost always said they felt this way. Yet even as they complain about federal power, they have relied on it heavily, for functions ranging from building canals and highways to providing medical care for retirees.

Today's Republicans, Dionne says, have made the mistake of pushing an abstraction--America's theoretical hatred of government--much further than people, in reality, want it to go. "The new conservatism will fail," Dionne concludes, " ... because it seeks to define away almost all the problems that Americans want politicians to grapple with." The first sign that the Republicans had overreached came with their sweeping proposals, now muted, to scale back environmental regulations. Dionne argues that the faith in...