(4 of 4)
Yet the fundamental problem is not with commissions. It is with a political system so weak at the center that it has grown addicted to them, so paralyzed by ideological conflict that it needs to call on collections of wise men to do the work of Government. Republicans stop a Democratic Administration from getting arms control through Congress; then Democrats stop a Republican Administration from getting its arms (MX) through. A commission (Scowcroft's) is then convened to plead the obvious: that both are linked and must get through together or not at all. A Republican Administration wants more aid to El Salvador and a surrogate war in Nicaragua; a Democratic House tries to cut the aid and end the war; both sides prepare to blame the other for a halfway policy that failed. A commission (Kissinger's) is now convened to solve what is at root a domestic political problem.
Henry Jackson was so aware of that problem that he proposed and helped create the Central American commission. He saw imminent danger in an increasingly assertive (bellicose to some) Administration policy, proceeding without political support. In the absence of a strong natural constituency—his old constituency—to provide that support, he sought an alternative, however makeshift.
No doubt, ad hoc centrism is better than none. But it is at best a temporary and incomplete solution to a structural flaw in American politics. In the meantime, until it is corrected, until the liberal internationalist tradition can rebuild itself into a political force, we can look forward to more oscillatory democracy and, to dampen its abrupt left-right swings, more commissions.
And what happens in the meantime to the old constituency?
While the world awaits its renaissance, there are choices to be made and, for the liberal internationalist, unpleasant ones. On the one hand is a Republican Party that obeys the minimal decencies of the welfare state, but is still alien to its ethic, still nibbling at the edges of civil rights, union power and social welfare. On the other hand is a Democratic Party so embarrassed by any assertion of American power that it meets even the Grenada operation with automatic, almost reflexive opposition (that is, until the opinion polls come out, at which point most Democrats neatly reverse field).
Today the liberal internationalist center is without an economic base (what Big Business, for example, is for the Republicans), without institutional support (except for a wing of labor led by Lane Kirkland), and, now that Henry Jackson is gone, without leadership. With little to hold it together, it will likely fracture along existing political fault lines and disappear into the landscape: those most concerned with domestic policy returning to the Democrats, those most concerned with foreign policy casting their lot with the Republicans.
What ever happened to the American center? It died and left no heirs. A commission has been appointed to look after the estate. —By Charles Krauthammer