THE NEXT DEAL: The Future of Public Life In The Information Age.

• Author: Schaffer, Michael
• Position: Review

THE NEXT DEAL: The Future of Public Life In The Information Age by Andrei Cherny Basic Books, $24.00

GENERALIZING ABOUT GENERAtions is risky business, At the very least, conventional wisdom tends not to last as long as the 25 years demographers assign to a cohort. Five or six years ago, America's twenty-somethings were said to be a generation of the amiably disenchanted, content to wallow in caffeine-fueled chatter about Saturday- morning cartoons. And then, all of a sudden--faster than Jennifer Anniston's "Friends" character could quit the coffee shop and move up to a pay scale commensurate with all that Pottery Barn furniture in her apartment--the slackers had disappeared. Their demographic had become the amazing IPO generation. News accounts marveled at the new generation's casual-Friday entrepreneurialism and Internet riches.

Unless the NASDAQ reverses its decline, you can bet those of us born after 1970 will soon get yet another media image, if not another sit-com plot twist. But lest the Internet wunderkind reputation get erased as completely as its slacker predecessor, historians will have at least one document with which to remember our heyday: The Next Deal, 25-year-old Andrei Cherny's self-proclaimed political manifesto for a new generation.

Cherny himself was just such an overachieving twenty-something, the youngest White House speechwriter in American history, feted in newspaper and magazine profiles. And his first book proclaims that the oldsters have failed to move the American agenda beyond simply balancing the budget. Cherny goes to speechwriterly excess in lamenting some of his former patron's squandered opportunities; but the book seems a perfect artifact of Bill Clinton's 1990s, with its boundless optimism about the bright young things of the Internet generation, preternatural ability to make small-bore proposals sound grandiose, and boom-time notion that no one really ever has to lose in America. Just weeks after Clinton left town, in fact, the book already feels like a time capsule. It says a lot more about the tiny dreams of contemporary Democrats than about the future.

Cherny's basic thesis is simple, and hard to argue with: Just as Theodore Roosevelt's Progressives remade government to meet the needs of an industrial society dominated by corporate behemoths, so too must contemporary Americans remake government to meet the needs of what Cherny calls "the Choice Generation" It's an interesting moniker. Young people who...