For a generation American politics has been bogged down by a debilitating argument as to whether welfare liberalism or free market capitalism is the best solution to our problems. The 1988 presidential campaign presents an opportunity for the discussion to be opened up in dramatic new ways by questioning many of the assumptions that both Democrats and Republicans have taken for granted for a long time. Both parties have seen the task of government as furthering the aggregate interests of individuals while providing a degree of security for our nation in a dangerous and complex world. Reliance on welfare liberalism and free market capitalism as our only visions for guiding public deliberation has narrowed the ability of our political parties to confront changed realities. Both of these visions rest almost exclusively on a combination of cost-benefit analysis and interest-group mediation, techniques that allow manipulation of existing structures but do not permit discussion of the nature of those structures or the ends of society as a whole. The discussion of “the common good,” a discussion that would allow us to consider critically the present structure of our society and the directions we have previously taken for granted, would open up new possibilities, possibilities that might allow us to escape the debilitating impasses into which we have fallen both at home and abroad. Our recent difficulties have arisen because of problems that come at us from many sources and from all directions. Chief among them are two related problems involving our economy and our position as a world power. While our economy has continued to grow, that growth has been very uneven, involving high levels of consumption by the affluent while our country’s infrastructure has been allowed to deteriorate. Furthermore, this growth has been sustained by unprecedented borrowing from abroad, turning the United States, in a breathtakingly short time, into the world’s largest debtor nation. Even more serious than our loss of interna- jional economic competitiveness is the fact that our economic growth has caused grave problems, not only for the "truly deprived,” but for the affluent as well, whose lives seem to lack personal meaning and social cohesion. At the same time, we can no longer consider ourselves the dominant military power, despite our largest peacetime military buildup. Massive unsettling economic and military changes seem certain to mark the next administration’s tenure of office. Things have not been going too well for the Soviet Union either. Yet the last couple of years have brought a surprising breath of fresh air from Russia. We have heard about glasnost, openness, and perestroika, restructuring. And we have seen a rather attractive man, Mikhail Gorbachev, eloquently arguing for and attempting to embody those terms. Could it be, despite our legitimate skepticism about these changes, that the new leaders of the USSR are sincere, that they believe that the conditions of an increasingly technologically sophisticated and interlinked world economy require that international relations, in Gorbachev’s words, “can and must be kept within a framework of peaceful competition which necessarily envisages cooperation”? Could the present moment mark a really new situation — one that poses difficulties for the United States because it requires major readjustments in thought and behavior, but also a moment of historic opportunity? The opportunity we speak of is the chance to lead this nation in a much more hopeful direction as we approach the year 2000. '0 Clinton St. Quarterly— Fall, 1988
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