The death of Senator Henry Jackson has left an empty stillness at the center of American politics. Jackson was the symbol, and the last great leader, of a political tradition that began with Woodrow Wilson and reached its apogee with John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey. That tradition—liberal internationalism—held that if democratic capitalism was to have a human face, it had to have a big heart and a strong hand. At home that meant developing and defending the institutional embodiments of the national conscience: civil rights, Social Security, Medicare, welfare (what ambivalent conservatives, using the language of rescue teams and circuses, call the "safety net"). In foreign affairs it meant an unapologetic preference for democratic pluralism everywhere, and a willingness to "bear any burden" in defense of the cause (what the left now calls "the cold war mentality"). In short: big government for big enterprises, at home and abroad.
In the postwar period that creed gathered such a following and such power that it became the dominant, almost consensual, political tendency in the U.S. Viet Nam destroyed that consensus. It did something more. It destroyed the sense of equilibrium that underlay that consensus, and introduced a period of volatili ty that is with us to this day. Not only is the center fractured, but the political system now oscillates between the remaining extremes. Revulsion with Viet Nam pulled the Democratic Party to the left: to Mc-Govern in 1972, and to an abiding distrust of American power and intentions ever since. A countervailing revulsion with growing American weakness—for example, economic prostration before OPEC and national humiliation by Iran—helped pull the Republican Party into the orbit of the Reagan right.
Jackson not only stood his ground, he never lost his equilibrium. He bestrode the center, while others sought refuge from the responsibilities of the Western alliance and the welfare state. He believed, with the Preamble to the Constitution, that the purpose of the Union was to provide for both the common defense and the general welfare. Today the two parties have neatly divvied up those responsibilities between them, Republicans committed to defense ("strength"), Democrats to welfare ("fairness").
Liberal internationalism stands for both. To be sure, it is not the only centrist alternative. Another option is to stand for neither or, more precisely, for as little involvement in either as Government can manage. That is the party of small government. Its creed is civilized restraint, and its constituency the brand of Tory that Americans call "moderate Republican" and the British call "wet."
There is a third centrist alternative. It rejects all the foregoing categories. It is aggressively nonideological, neither pro-nor antidefense, welfare or anything else. It seeks only programs that work: weapons, cars, food programs that are lean, clean and mean. It wants guns that shoot straight; it is not terribly concerned what they shoot at. Most of the world calls these people technocrats; in America nowadays they are called neoliberals.