Few politicians have had the courage to stare so directly into The Great American Fear, which has festered 20 years now (pollsters say) since the triple shock of Vietnam, Watergate and the first Arab oil embargo. The Fear is a remarkable phenomenon, perhaps the most significant, sustained public-opinion development in the 20th century. Americans were chronic optimists until the early 1970s. They were convinced–and this distinguished them from other peoples–that next year would be better. But a profound sense of dread has gathered over the past 20 years.
“It’s kind of shocking: we’ve lost our national confidence,” says Fred Steeper, who polled for George Bush in 1992. Bush, like most Republicans, simply ignored the phenomenon; Ronald Reagan seemed able to abolish it by sheer force of will. Democrats were more candid about the deepening miasma, but their solution–more government–was rejected by a public rightfully sick of flabby-thinking politicians. In recent years, the left has moped off in the direction of myopia and reaction: the nativist, protectionist wing of the Democratic Party is now where the passion is. And make no mistake, the anti-NAFTA movement is about both nativism and protectionism: “People want to send a message to the Mexicans,” says Frank Luntz, who polled (briefly) for Ross Perot in 1992. “They want to push them back across the border and put up a wall.”
From the start of the presidential campaign, Bill Clinton refused the temptation to play this game cheap. His willingness to face The Big Fear head on, without appealing to the public’s worst instincts, was the most attractive aspect of his candidacy. People sensed he understood their anxieties Oust as Ross Perot understood their anger). When Clinton said the campaign was about “change,” he wasn’t talking only about switching parties or policies, but about the phenomenon itself: “change,” as in having to change jobs eight times–a favorite statistic–in the course of an average working fife and all the other lonely, unrelenting terrors of a suddenly capricious world. Indeed, confronting The Big Fear has become the central organizing principle of his administration, although the president hasn’t communicated that very well yet.
It was, no doubt, frustrating for Clinton to have the first six months of his presidency hijacked by lifestyle issues (gays in the military) and deficit mania. Both were peripheral to his original vision; worse, they added to the fire he was trying to put out. The deficit is a metaphor for a nation out of control and Clinton has, over time, come to understand the therapeutic value of reducing it. But that’s not where his heart is. He wants to act. He wants to make people feel more secure. He can’t guarantee lifetime employment-and anxiety over job loss is at the core of The Big Fear–but he can do some things to ease the transitions. Hence, the intense interest in health care, especially the notion of “health security.” Clinton wants to make it impossible for anyone to lose coverage, a deep and consuming American fear: “That’s what matters most to him. Almost everything else is negotiable,” says an aide. His attempt to provide more money for job retraining–another transition balm–was slaughtered during the budget fight, but that may not have been such a bad thing: Labor Secretary Robert Reich wants to transform the current job-training morass-150 programs run out of 14 different departments–into a marketplace where the various programs will have to compete for customers.
The rest of Clinton’s agenda, a Kansas of wheat and chaff, begins to make more sense when seen through the prism of middle-class anxiety. He is looking to make government more trustworthy by “reinventing” it. He wants to reduce the most immediate of fears of violence–by putting more police on the streets. He hopes to recreate a sense of common purpose through national service. He and his wife have been ridiculed for talking about the spiritual value of community, but that is the surest antidote for the anxieties inherent in an atomized global society. The trouble is, community can’t be ordained from above. It comes from individuals taking responsibility for their lives, holding common values, having common interests and moral standards. Clinton’s s hope–and it is an audacious one–is that if he can help reduce The Big Fear, a broader sense of community, and confidence, will begin to flower. He has been inept at times, almost always obscure, overly ambitious and less than courageous in pursuing this goal, but he is taking the “fears and insecurities…gripping the great American middle class” seriously–a rare compliment from a politician.
