Domestically, the parties differ primarily about the modalities for administering -- and expanding -- the welfare state. These are not trivial differences, but neither are they akin to those that existed in living memory when the parties differed about whether there should be a welfare state. Bush's interest in serious reforms of Social Security and Medicare have been relegated by his war preoccupations to a second term, for which they would be unsuited by his lame- duck status, even if Congress were not paralyzed by acrimony.
In 2000, six years after Republicans gained 52 House seats by promising, among much else, to abolish the Department of Education, candidate Bush promised to increase federal involvement in the quintessential state and local responsibility -- primary and secondary education. And he has delivered. In 2000, he, like Vice President Gore, promised to enrich, with a prescription drug benefit, the entitlement menu of the emblematic achievement of the Great Society, Medicare. And he has delivered. Neither Bush nor Kerry is illuminating about reducing the deficit, or about coping with something that will begin in the fourth year of the next presidential term -- the retirement of 77 million baby boomers.
So why the bitter sense, on both sides, of apocalypse soon if the other side prevails? Because at long last we have the parties that intellectuals have long wanted.
Until now America has never had an almost complete congruence between ideological and party identities. A great sorting out has put almost all liberals in one party, conservatives in the other. Intellectuals, with their hankering for clarity and coherence, have long desired this condition. Europe has long had it. Now that Americans have it, their politics has become what it is.
The tone-setting activists of both parties exemplify an unpleasant product of modern government -- the entitlement mentality. They believe not merely that their party deserves to govern because of the superior wisdom of its policies, but that they are entitled to govern because of their moral and intellectual superiority.
Tonight Kerry speaks in the city where Ralph Waldo Emerson espoused a belief that much contemporary historiography, with its egalitarian bent, rejects -- that ``there is properly no history; only biography.'' Historians may say history is made as much by the pepper trade or scullery maids as by presidents, but Kerry's biography matters greatly because presidents do. His biography suggests more banality than menace, although banality in high office can be its own kind of menace.