Essay: Back to the Future

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After a respite of barely a year, with the banality of the refrain still ringing in the ear, "the politics of the future" is back. When Gary Hart announced a fortnight ago that he would retire from the Senate (to run, he all but admitted, for the presidency in 1988), he couldn't lay off the word. In a four-page statement, he reached for it eight times. In 1984 he had "pointed our party toward the future." For '88, he pledges "to help move our party and our country into the future." Why? Because even now "we are drifting backward into the future."

This kind of talk is rhetorical emptiness at its most pristine. Why does Hart do it? It's not as if he has nothing to say. He has a host of important ideas. Whether or not they are new is irrelevant. A good idea is a good idea: military reform, national service, a notion of sacrificial patriotism, as opposed to the superficial I-Love-Miss-Liberty kind now in vogue. (Though, unfortunately, even here Hart cannot resist defining patriotism as "more than slogans celebrating past achievements. It's an opportunity to draw a blueprint for our future.")

This makes Hart a reformist liberal, a venerable, once honorable political label. Admittedly both ends of the term have poor p.r. value nowadays. Perhaps he does need a better handle. But what is the pull of the future? It sounds good--for about ten minutes. Even in 1984, voters quickly grew cynical about it and its companion, "new ideas."

Still, even an empty notion can be pressed into political service. A liberal talking about the future is perhaps trying to distinguish himself from old-line, constituency-centered liberalism, what Kevin Phillips contemptuously calls "reactionary liberalism." That might have served some purpose in 1984. But what is the point now? Carter and Mondale are no more. Kennedy is gone, and even he supports Gramm-Rudman. We are all--Biden, Bradley, Babbitt, Gephardt and Robb--neoliberals now. There are no paleoliberals left, unless Mario Cuomo's principled disinclination to issue ostentatious rejections of the "past" tempts some to make the charge.

Talk of the future can also be code for saying, "I'm young." Old people, presumably, are simply not going to see the future. So if the job is to take us there, they are disqualified. But you can't say that without offending a rather important constituency. Future talk serves to muffle the message.

But the message continues to grate. It grated when John Kennedy, in his Inaugural Address, congratulated himself for being "born in this century," a distinction Dwight Eisenhower lacked. It grates now when practitioners of "generational politics" imply that youth carries some special virtue.

Now one can say that the young are generally more energetic than the old, although Ronald Reagan and Deng Xiaoping have rendered even that proposition somewhat dubious. But the other characteristic of youth is an absence: the absence of the memory and experience of age. "New generation" politicians, unlike a Reagan or a Mondale, have no memory of the great transforming events of this century such as the Depression, World War II or postwar reconstruction. Only the peculiar arrogance of youth can make a virtue of that vice. That vice, of course, is no fault of the young, but it is hardly a great qualification for the challenges of the presidency.