Triumph of the Political ‘P’s’: Populism, Pragmatism, Personalism : Politics: All around the world, frustrated voters are looking for a change. But they don’t want to go back to what they had before.

This weekend’s summit meeting between U.S. President Bill Clinton and Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin symbolizes the beginning of a new era--not just in world affairs, but also in politics. The era of ideological politics is over. The populist era has begun. Both Clinton and Yeltsin have proved they know how to survive in it.

Clinton and Yeltsin are trying to do the same thing in their respective countries. They want to restructure their economies, albeit in opposite directions: more public investment in the United States, more private investment in Russia. They want to reform their political systems: campaign reform in the United States, a new constitution in Russia. Both leaders are having to fight battles with the entrenched forces that represent “politics-as-usual”--Congress, in both countries.

Clinton and Yeltsin are both self-styled populists. Clinton took his campaign directly to the voters last year when the press threatened to destroy him, and the voters bailed him out. He did it again after his State of the Union address this year. When the Russian Congress took away Yeltsin’s power, he insisted on taking his case directly to the voters in a referendum.

The power of the two leaders is essentially personal. The people support them , not their party or their ideology. They don’t need a party or an ideology. They have television. Clinton is running a permanent campaign--town halls, speaking tours, call-in shows and meetings with children. All on television. Yeltsin appears on television regularly to take his case to the Russian people. In fact, the Congress of People’s Deputies seized control of Russian television as an act of retribution against Yeltsin.

The two men have something else in common. No one knows if their ideas will work. But no one in either country wants to go back to the way things were before. When Americans were asked last month how they would vote if faced with the same choice as last year, support for both Clinton and Ross Perot went up. George Bush’s support collapsed. Americans don’t want to go back.

In last week’s CNN poll of Moscow and St. Petersburg, Russians said life was better under a communist government than under a democratic government. By 4 to 1, however, they said they would rather live in a democracy. Russians don’t want to go back.

What is happening in the United States and Russia is happening all over the world. Old ideological divisions are disappearing. A new style of politics is emerging. Its features are the same everywhere: pragmatism, populism and personalism.

Pragmatism means opposition to ideology. Whatever works is right. The Cold War is dead and, with it, the justification many conservative parties used to stay in power: anti-communism and a strong national defense.

But socialist economics has also been discredited, and with it the dreams of the left. Economic policy is now the domain of management, not causes. In the new politics, ideology has been replaced by problem-solving: finding the proper mix of government power and private power that will produce economic growth and security.

All over the world, the left triumphed in the 1960s and failed in the worldwide economic decline of the 1970s. Big government came to mean high taxes, rigid bureaucracy and out-of-control inflation. To survive in the 1980s, the left had to move to the center.

After a brief and disastrous flirtation with socialism from 1981 to 1983, the Socialist government of French President Francois Mitterrand became firmly committed to managing a market economy. The Australian Labor government of Bob Hawke slashed government spending, cut taxes and deregulated the financial sector. In the United States and Britain, the Democratic Party and the Labor Party jettisoned their ideological baggage to prove they were problem-solvers, not taxers and spenders.

What happened to the left is now happening to the right. Conservatives triumphed in the 1980s but they are failing in the worldwide economic decline of the 1990s. Now it’s the right’s turn to move to the center.

Unpopular conservative governments are doing just that in Britain, Canada and Germany. Discredited conservative opposition parties are going to have to do that in the United States, Australia and France. They have to acknowledge that deregulation and unrestrained free-market capitalism don’t always work. Conservatives have to prove they, too, can be pragmatic.

Populism, the second feature of the new politics, is anti-elitist. Populists build their support on resentment of the Establishment. Governments are the Establishment everywhere, and so governments are in trouble almost everywhere. Look at the approval ratings: John Major, Great Britain, 28%; Kiichi Miyazawa, Japan, 26%; Mitterrand, France, 26%; Brian Mulroney, Canada, 17%.

A lot of the discontent is attributable to sluggish economies. But in many countries, the voters seem to be fed up with politics-as-usual. Look at what happened in the United States last year and in France this year.

In both countries, the people voted against the system. After six years of gridlock between the President and Congress, Americans voted to put the Democrats in full control. After five years of unified socialist government, the French voted for gridlock last month. French conservatives won a spectacular victory--84% of the seats in parliament. Mitterrand now has to share power with a conservative government.

In Italy and Japan, the same parties have been in power for more than 40 years. The voters don’t seem to be able to vote them out of office so they’re putting them in jail.

In Italy, more than 1,000 politicians, public officials and businessmen have been arrested in an continuing series of investigations of kickbacks, vote-rigging and connections to organized crime. Five Cabinet ministers and the leaders of three political parties have been forced out. The prime minister has offered to resign.

The scandal has achieved the ultimate populist objective: It discredited the country’s entire ruling class.

The same thing is happening in Japan. The boss of the ruling party, who once appointed and dismissed prime ministers, has been indicted for tax evasion. Newly discovered documents reveal that Japan’s biggest construction companies distributed millions of dollars in payoffs to politicians. The size of each payoff was based on a letter grade reflecting how much influence the politician had over the awarding of public contracts. The prime minister got an “A.” The party boss got a “Special A.”

Why are these systems of organized influence-peddling falling apart now? Because the voters are fed up and the ruling parties have no ideology to defend themselves. It’s the same populism that fuels the attack on congressional privileges and the movement for term limits in America.

Personalism, the third feature of the new politics, is anti-party. It means that politicians replace parties with their own personal followings.

Political parties are declining everywhere. They are being replaced by two forms of direct communication between politicians and voters. Politicians talk to the voters through TV. Voters talk to the politicians through polls.

In Britain last year and Australia this year, unpopular governing parties figured out how to use personalism to stay in power. They got rid of unpopular leaders and replaced them with new faces. In Britain, the ruling Conservatives forced out Margaret Thatcher after 14 years and replaced her with Major. He pulled an upset and won. In Australia, the ruling Labor Party ousted Hawke after 10 years and replaced him with Paul Keating. With Keating at the top, Labor defied the odds and won.

The Progressive Conservatives hope to do the same thing in Canada later this year. Mulroney, the massively unpopular prime minister, didn’t have to be ousted. He announced he will step down in June. His party is likely to replace him, not just with a new face, but with a new female face--Kim Campbell, the government’s 45-year-old defense minister. She is given a good chance of winning another term for the Tories.

When politics is about personalities rather than ideologies, there is only one way to discredit a politician. It has to be done personally. Character attacks and scandal become the normal mode of politics. Which is exactly what has happened in the United States

And in Europe. Here’s what a French scholar wrote recently about his country’s politics: “Political life revolves around scandals. . . . The new politics that emerges from all this will be closer to American politics.”

And here’s the way a German scholar characterized politics in his country: “The political discussion here is rapidly moving away from policy toward an emphasis on corruption--a personalization of politics that we have not had before.”

The new politics is enormously volatile. Look at what happened to Bush. He will go down in history as the President who blew one of the biggest leads ever.

Clinton is popular right now, and he got his budget approved by Congress in record time. But his negatives are rising. In Russia, Yeltsin is clearly preferred over the communist apparatchiks who run Congress. But he is not given high marks for his job performance. Both Clinton and Yeltsin may discover that, in the new era of populist politics, it doesn’t take long to go from a hero to a bum.