COLUMN RIGHT : We Won’t Let Anyone Govern : Voters have never been so reluctant to entrust government to a single party.

The voters have spoken, and the result is a muddle. Every candidate in this election, especially the incumbents, sensed voters’ rumbling discontent with the status quo, and so unfurled the banner of “change.” But when everyone stands for change, no one does.

Presented with such vapid partisan appeals and confronted with a bewildering array of initiatives, California voters split the difference once again, electing a Republican governor and emphatically rejecting new taxes and expensive environmental programs, but re-awarding the Democrats control of the other state elective offices and both houses of the state Legislature. Then the voters pronounced a pox on all of them by approving Proposition 140’s strict limits on tenure in office.

The results nationally were not much different. Republicans held their losses in the House and Senate to respectable numbers. The Democrats seized some important statehouses and tightened their grip on every level of government from county courthouses to Congress. In short, the Democrats remain indisputably the majority party in American politics, but the voters dislike many of their ideas, particularly those involving new taxes. So the voters won’t let them govern unchecked by Republican executives or unconstrained by the prospect of tax revolts and, now, legislative term limitations. Never before have the voters been so reluctant to entrust government to a single party.

Voters are looking for a way to limit governments that have become unlimited, to control departments and agencies that are increasingly uncontrollable.

In the beginning, American governments, both state and national, were emphatically limited by written constitutions and by the natural rights of republicanism that informed them. The purpose of government was to secure men’s safety and happiness in conformity with their pre-existing natural rights, which could be threatened by bad government as well as by marauding individuals.

But over the past few decades, Americans have increasingly seen their rights in economic and social terms, as “entitlements” arising out of, rather than preceding, the social contract. The purpose of modern government is largely to create and fulfill these entitlements, to redress the needs or satisfy the desires of certain groups (young people, old people, minorities, small businessmen, millionaire farmers) not to protect us from one another or to assist us in governing ourselves.

But if government now has the tendency to expand to meet any claim of need, how do the people retain control of it? Successive attempts to answer this question have driven domestic American politics since the mid-1960s. First, the people stumbled on the device of divided government. By putting the executive and legislative branches in the hands of different political parties, they hoped to check the excessive growth and other pretensions of government without surrendering the fruits of a moderately activist state.

When spending pressures, generated by the network of clients the government now served, proved too strong even for divided government to resist, the people resorted to tax revolt movements. In California, Proposition 13 attempted to control government by restricting its revenues. This week, voters revolted again, disapproving every budget-busting program and tax increase, and even most of the bond measures listed on the ballot.

Faced with rising red ink and the sinking feeling of losing control over their own government, Californians have turned to legislative term limitations as a way to break the vicious cycle of interest-group politics. But Proposition 140 is a blunt instrument that will punish good and bad legislators alike without affecting the most important causes behind the growth of government. Tinkering with the electoral machinery is no substitute for political courage and wisdom.

The voters’ opinions and interests appear to be increasingly discordant. As citizens, they wish to make independent and deliberate choices about the common good; as dependents or beneficiaries of various government programs, they tend to think first of their own private good.

In healthier times, our interests and opinions were brought closer by a common understanding of justice--the kind of understanding that bound us both as citizens and, more narrowly, as members of a political party sharing an interpretation of the common good. There is not much left of this important function of parties, particularly in California, where every candidate is on his own and so is every voter. In the absence of common political purposes, however, the people have little choice but to mark time--as they did in this election.