New alliance parties.

• Author: Postrel, Virginia I.
• Position: Political alliances - Editorial

Strange bedfellows in a "post-ideological" age?

THE REPORTERS AND THE WHITE House were shocked. On a seemingly routine procedural vote, the Clinton crime bill had gone down to defeat in the House. The vote, news stories and pundits agreed, was "stunning," "devastating," "somewhere between crushing and catastrophic," "a startling defeat." It was, said David Brinkley, "a bad week for Clinton, very bad."

And so it was. But the crime bill vote was not primarily a referendum on the president. It was a referendum on government power. And for one rare moment in a city obsessed with the extension and manipulation of that power, the skeptics won.

They were, said all reports, an unusual coalition: liberal black Democrats opposed to the death penalty, conservative Republicans opposed to lavish social spending, and moderate-to-conservative members of both parties opposed to gun control. They had in common one conviction--that increasing the power and scope of the federal government would not make life better for their constituents. For this moment at least, they were skeptics, questioners of conventional solutions.

So the crime bill vote was not just a defeat for Clinton. It was an in-your-face declaration that the tyranny of the power-worshiping center is not inevitable. And it was a suggestion of alliances to come.

In the last several years, it has become a cliche among political analysts that the old ideological categories don't mean much in the post--Cold War world. With right and left in disarray, we have supposedly entered a "post-ideological age" in which "pragmatism" will dominate, giving us rule by a "vital center" with no guiding principles. That way lies the cynical campaigning of the California governor's race, in which Pete Wilson and Kathleen Brown sling insults at one another in a desperate attempt to disguise the fact that they differ hardly at all.

The post-ideological age is a myth, however. The current period of ideological flux has in fact exposed deeper divisions than the ones to which we have long been accustomed. Rather than a post-ideological age, we are now in a radically ideological age, in which ideas are taken to their roots, to their fundamentals, in which the categories are broader and deeper, and the divisions more sharply defined, than the old left and right.

WE SAW ONE SUCH DIVISION--A STARK, old-fashioned one--in the crime bill debate. Over the past several months, others have cropped up, creating "odd alliances": a...