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Text File | 1993-04-08 | 5.8 KB | 123 lines

                                                                                ESSAY, Page 86

Does Familiarity Breed Contentment?


By Richard Brookhiser


    The English novelist Evelyn Waugh once wrote that the
only human relationships he could abide were intimacy,
formality and servility. "What is horrible . . . in America is
familiarity." Americans will be seeing a lot more familiarity,
horrible or not, because that is the religion of the Clinton
Administration.

    Every President has a religion, in the sense of a creed
that gets him and his supporters through the day. Ronald Reagan
had two religions -- low taxes and traditional values -- plus
a demonology, or at least a demon -- the evil empire. George
Bush disestablished the Reagan religions and offered in their
place little more than a belief in the sufficiency of his own
good character, which is one reason he was a one-term President.

    "Familiarity" is not the name Bill Clinton attaches to the
guiding spirit of his presidency. When he is feeling rhetorical,
he speaks instead of the New Covenant, which he defines as "a
solemn agreement between the people and their government, based
not simply on what each of us can take, but on what all of us
must give." Clinton's New Covenant offers opportunity even as
it demands responsibility. Ask what your country can do for you
and what you can do for your country.

    Clinton's covenant talk mines a long American tradition,
running right back to the Puritans. "It is of the nature and
essence of every society," said John Winthrop, "to be knit
together by some covenant." But what kind of covenant?
Winthrop's was based on obedience to a Calvinist God, which is
not something Clinton is likely to call on. This is where
familiarity comes in, to provide the needed emotional glue.

    Clintonian familiarity establishes itself in a process of
show-and-tell. We show each other our trials, then we tell each
other how concerned we are about them and how determined we are
to make things better. Clinton led the national show-and-tell
with a tour of the stations of his own life -- his father's
death in a car accident, his stepfather's drunkenness, his half
brother's drug addiction, his mother's breast cancer. Even
incidents that at first appeared to be reflections on his
character rather than on his circumstances -- his dithering over
the draft, his alleged dalliances -- became transformed instead
into episodes that tested him.

    The showing continues as Americans tell him their
problems. Clinton's capacity to pay attention, obvious to anyone
who has watched him conducting a forum or working a crowd, draws
them out. During the second presidential debate -- the one with
the stools -- Clinton was the only one of the three candidates
to move to the edge of the stage and engage his interlocutors
intimately.

    The telling comes with Clinton's pledges to solve
America's problems. Clinton's proposals may not be very
different from those of other politicians, but because of the
showing that accompanies them, the proposals appear to have
sprung not from some abstract principle or expert's calculation
but from his bond with us. The experience leaves us united in
empathy for our sufferings and committed to the struggle to
relieve them. It's like a 12-step program, minus appeals to a
Higher Power.

    Clinton is not the only public figure who achieves
familiarity through show-and-tell. At the Democratic Convention,
Al Gore relived the car accident that nearly killed his young
son, and Paul Tsongas told us about his battle with cancer,
which he now must face again. For years Jesse Jackson has been
telling us that he was born out of wedlock. No major political
function these days, Democrat or Republican, is complete without
at least one AIDS sufferer. Clinton is not alone in evoking
familiarity; he just does it better than anyone else. The only
people who might challenge him for that distinction are the
TV-talk-show hosts. There was a lot of comment this year about
how TV talk shows had changed American politics. They did it not
by providing a new forum but by setting a tone. We are all hosts
and guests now.

    The religion of familiarity has problems. The first is
that though it promises to be comprehensive, it in fact leaves
a lot of people out. Suppose you have an unpopular disease? To
hear Clinton and his peers tell it, the only reason anyone dies
in America is because of AIDS, breast cancer or the occasional
car accident. In fact, everyone reading these words will die
some time or other, many of us quite painfully. If your manner
of egress is not on the New Covenanters' list, don't expect any
hugs before you go.

    A second problem with our new religion is that some claims
to be distressed will not be accepted by everyone. Clinton ran
into this problem early in the transition when he repeated a
campaign promise to lift the ban on homosexuals in the military
by Executive Order. Gays see themselves as a wrongfully
excluded minority, but the military sees homosexuals in its own
ranks as prejudicial to discipline. Clinton will probably set
up a commission that will lead the Pentagon around to his view,
but that is old-style jawboning, not the New Covenant.

    The final problem is that show-and-tell, even if it makes
everyone feel better, is not enough. Clinton may succeed in
getting our attention. But to get results, he must navigate
intractable realities such as limited resources and human
nature. Suppose he cannot fund tax relief for the middle class
out of levies on the rich? Suppose that even with welfare
reform, poor families stay broken and city streets remain
dangerous? There may be more in heaven and earth than is dreamed
of in Bill Clinton's religion. If so, he has four years to
change it -- before we get a chance to change Presidents.