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The High Stakes of 2004: Why the next election will be the biggest in at least a generation. (William Kristol, 09/01/2003, Weekly Standard)

Let's start with foreign policy. The Bush administration's response to September 11 was ambitious and unambiguous. It seemed to have bipartisan support for a while. No longer. Bush's Democratic opponent in 2004 looks likely to oppose fundamentally the Bush Doctrine and its most prominent instantiation so far, the war in Iraq. So we will have a Reagan-Mondale degree of difference on foreign policy, made more consequential by the fact that we are at the genesis of a new foreign policy era. The implications of September 11 for American foreign policy, the basic choices as to America's role in the world, will be on the table. They will not be resolved in November 2004 once and for all--things never are. But they may well be resolved for a generation.

At home, the entire federal judiciary is at stake. Again, it's not that every Bush appointee will be a Scalia, or every Democrat a Souter (oops)--but no one doubts that the (unfortunately) ever more powerful courts will look radically different by 2008 if Bush or a Democrat is president. Indeed, in thinking of the judiciary, one is reminded of the court-packing effort following the election of 1936. Issues of the size and role of government will of course be nowhere near so dramatically posed in 2004 as they were then--though the contrast between a Bush administration proud of its tax cuts and a Democratic opponent pledged to roll many of them back is not trivial.

But even more striking is the divide over social and cultural issues. Bush is no aggressive culture warrior. But he is pretty unambiguously on the pro-life, anti-gay-marriage, worried-about-Brave-New-World, pro-religion-in-the-public-sphere side of the culture divide. The Democratic candidate is likely to pretty unambiguously embody a secular, progressivist, liberationist worldview. The partisan divide between religious and secular voters has been growing, and in 2004 it might well be the widest in modern American history. The losing side won't surrender, and the winner won't have an entirely free hand to make policy. But who wins will matter a lot.

Mr. Kristol actually seems to have missed what may be the most important issue at stake, whether the social welfare net can be effectively privatized and citizens made to take responsibility for themselves. This has the potential to transform what kind of country we are, whether we remain essentially statist in orientation or whether we devolve social services back to ourselves. Posted by Orrin Judd at August 22, 2003 5:58 PM