Washington Identity Crisis: How to Be Important Again : Politics: Increasingly, our capital is bypassed by global dynamics and by states enjoying decentralized government.

Washington, D.C., once the center of everything important that happened in the world, no longer is. This is the cause of a permanent state of depression that can’t be lifted by a summit with Gorbachev, or by the wedding of a Cuomo and a Kennedy.

The feeling that official Washington is “losing it” is reflected by journalists. Time magazine ran a cover story last October titled “The Can’t Do Government.” Columnist Hodding Carter III says of Washington that “intellectual and political arteriosclerosis seems to have set in. . . .” Conservative author Kevin Phillips wrote an article called “America’s Brain Dead Politics.” Warren Brookes of the Washington Times says that the press corps is “mired in malaise over what it believes to be Washington’s increasing irrelevance in a world racing to democracy and free markets.”

While the most obvious reason for Washington’s slippage from center stage is the unprecedented rate of change in the world, that does not explain its irrelevance in domestic politics. The Reagan years saw innovation slip back to the statehouses, leaving a national politics that is best characterized by uncertainty, stasis and boredom--all of which leads to an apathy among average Americans that parallels the depression among those who inhabit official Washington.

What’s happening here? Are our politicians worse than they used to be? Is the public dumber? Of course not. We are, however, in the midst of a period in which all the old paradigms that used to govern our political world have collapsed and we are left with no clear, opposing visions with which to organize political reality.

For 40 years, our foreign policy was governed by the existence of the Cold War and defined by the vigor with which each party pursued that war. The collapse of communism leaves everyone looking for a new way to understand the world and our place in it. For nearly half a century, our domestic politics was governed by the New Deal approach to government and by opposition to the New Deal approach.

These days, all the old assumptions are obsolete. The centralized welfare-state bureaucracies of the New Deal and the Great Society have failed at dealing with poverty and a host of other human needs, and the free-market, deregulation mania of the Reagan era has also failed--just look at the enormous losses of the savings-and-loan scandals.

The collapse of the old models of government means that elected officials now govern without ideological compasses; the Democratic Party’s failure to cut regressive payroll taxes is the clearest example.

Some Democrats sound like Republicans and some Republicans sound like Democrats. Confusion reigns, fear of doing the wrong thing abounds, stasis is the order of the day; not surprisingly, voters drop out.

Politicians know that this cannot go on, and they are searching for new models, as is evident in two little-noticed political speeches.

President Bush went before conservative leaders meeting in the White House in April to talk about a new paradigm for government--a government that, “like the spirit of ‘76, gives power back to localities and states, and most important, to the people.” Empowerment of poor people through government is a new theme for a Republican.

The other speech was by Sen. Charles Robb (D-Va.), who urged the Democratic Party to rethink its historic support for “the vigorous and expansive use of federal power. Our fundamental and enduring goal” said Robb, “should be to expand opportunity, not government.”

Each party is trying to see what the new paradigm in domestic politics looks like. Bush urged basing it on what works; Robb urged Democrats to return to innovation by challenging some of the old assumptions. Both criticized centralized government--exactly the kind of government that used to make Washington important.

One thing is clear: Washington is not going to be as important as it once was. As economist Richard McKenzie argues, the globalization of almost every aspect of the economy, including the “growing mobility of people, capital and goods and services” decreases the ability of any one national government to control the economy. And the failures of centralization will continue to empower states and localities at the expense of Washington.

Thus Washington will continue to be a pretty dismal place until a leader comes along who can articulate the new paradigm in a way that is compelling to average voters (and in a way that doesn’t use words like paradigm). When this happens, our politics will seem relevant again and Washington will come--kicking, screaming and chastened--into the new world.