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Pinkerton, who is only 32, a onetime libertarian, explains paradigms in terms of the Ptolemaic and Copernican models of the universe. The mind, in order to explore and solve problems, must operate upon certain models, certain sets of assumptions. For 13 centuries, humankind assumed, as Ptolemy taught, that the sun revolved around the earth. It was a workable paradigm of the universe, in its way, but became the Old Paradigm when Copernicus propounded the New Paradigm that the earth revolved around the sun.
In Pinkerton's universe, centralized bureaucracy and Big Government are the Old Paradigm. The idea, of course, has been evolving since the abdication of Lyndon Johnson and the dawning realization that the American government does not have endless money to spend. In Pinkerton's New Paradigm, government would be subject to market forces as never before and people would be empowered to make their own individual choices (using school vouchers, for example), while government would be decentralized and decision making pushed down as close as possible to the level of the people affected. Programs would be judged by output rather than input -- by results rather than appropriations. The test of the New Paradigm is What Works. It universalizes John Kennedy's definition of politics as the art of the possible.
Or is this New Paradigm, as some say, only a bright intellectual flourish meant to cover the retreat of the Federal Government from almost everything? "No," says Pinkerton, "it is an intellectual construct to make things work. It is a way of thinking about change and making it rational. I have never said we should cut spending. The conventional wisdom around Washington is that nothing works. Americans don't believe it."
The New Paradigm is above all struggling toward a working model for the information age. The great totalitarianisms of the 20th century (Stalin's, Hitler's) depended upon the dictator's power to isolate the people and control their minds by controlling all information. The great work of inspiring the democracies also required heroic manipulations of image and information -- by F.D.R., by Churchill, for example. Such leaders gave an eloquence and resonance to the Old Paradigm -- a powerful accumulation of moral experience. It is possible to feel wistful sometimes for those profound frames of reference while wandering around in the New Paradigm, which is almost by definition callow. You must not let daylight in upon magic. Now that information is transnational, daylight pours in. Certain shadowy and thunderous effects upon which charisma and old leadership depended have now become impossible. The New Paradigm is not haunted by the furies and ghosts of its parents. It looks upon the world with a disconcerting alien's eye. It is not a sentimentalist.
A fragment of poetry by the Greek Archilochus recorded these enigmatic lines: "The fox knows many things, the hedgehog knows one big thing." In a famous essay, Isaiah Berlin described Tolstoy as a fox who knew many things and Dostoyevsky as a hedgehog who knew one big thing. The Old Paradigm knew one big thing (centralized government, one organizing ideology, one big idea). The New Paradigm is a fox that accommodates many things -- it is decentralized, undoctrinaire, pragmatic, multifaceted.