COLUMN LEFT/ MICHAEL LERNER : Is Clinton Betraying His Promise? : Voters expecting a new politics of meaning are dismayed by signs of capitulation to power politics and technocrats.

Bill Clinton is caught between two conflicting paradigms as he attempts to rebuild America. He’d like to finesse the difference, but eventually he must make a choice.

The paradigm that distinguished Clinton from all the other candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination was his “politics of meaning.” While the others emphasized the economic crisis and promised an increase in middle-class economic benefits and political rights of groups that have been oppressed, Clinton addressed a deeper problem: the way that the selfishness of the ‘80s had undermined our sense of social solidarity and caring for others.

Even the various oppressed groups of the Democratic Party coalition--women, blacks, gays, other minorities, the poor, the unemployed, industrial workers--had begun to articulate their demands in narrow, self-interested terms, abandoning any vision of the larger communal good and talking about “identity politics” and using “multiculturalism” as a cover for advancing ethnic or sexual particularism.

Corresponding to the triumph of selfishness in the public sphere, intellectuals began to insist that every attempt to reach a common understanding and common good was merely a “totalizing” of experience imposed from the perspective of the powerful on the powerless. Post-modernists glorified the disintegration of community and discourse, claiming to see liberation in the fragmentation of selves and heralding “respect for difference” as the only principle worthy of respect. Thus, the intellectuals and cultural mavens provided the theoretical foundations for individual or group narcissism that the Reagan/Bush team had already imposed in the economic and political spheres.

Clinton was the one politician to understand that Americans hungered for a way to transcend that narcissism. While acknowledging, with traditional Democrats, that economic entitlements and political rights must be obtained for those who have been deprived, Clinton understood that most Americans faced a deprivation of meaning that was equally pressing.

Implicitly adopting a politics of meaning, Clinton understood that people have a fundamental need to transcend selfishness and me-firstism and to be linked in ethically grounded and spiritually sensitive communities of meaning and purpose.

It was the particular way that Clinton addressed the economy, understanding how the absence of communities and of social solidarity make people much more vulnerable to and scared about economic fluctuations, that gave him his electoral victory.

Yet since the inauguration, the older paradigm of technocratic politics that dominated previous Democratic administrations has emerged once again. Clinton is surrounded by people who have no concrete understanding of how to implement a politics of meaning in policy terms and so have reverted to a more narrowly economistic agenda.

So hungry are Americans to belong to something larger than themselves that they have temporarily joined Clinton’s crusade for higher taxes and cutting the deficit. But the hunger for meaning and for a new ethical compass will not be satisfied when Clinton starts talking as though the highest goal was to create high-tech jobs so that America can better compete in the world market. The real danger of Clinton’s recent capitulation to Western senators, to the military on gays, or of his privileging insurance companies and medical conglomerates as he reframes health care, is that in so doing, he seems to have no guiding moral principle from which specific policies flow. The desire of Americans for some higher good and transcendent purpose cannot be satisfied by technocratic programs that seem to enshrine rather than challenge narrow self-interest.

If Americans ever turn back to right-wing politicians, it won’t be because Clinton went too far, but because he didn’t go far enough toward taking seriously Americans’ need for a politics of meaning. Faced with a yuppified and culturally hip surrender to the logic of corporate self-interest by the Clintonites, the free-floating desire for some meaning and purpose in life might turn back to the promises of meaning that right-wingers traditionally offer, couched in terms of national, ethnic, religious or racial chauvinisms. Clinton may find his programs stymied unless he more fully and explicitly embraces and frames his policies in terms of a communitarian ethos and a politics of meaning.