THE NATION : POLITICAL SPECTRUM : Loss of Predictable Moorings Makes for Political Misalliances

This news just in from the social-issues front: Eight months ago, the state of New Jersey, trying to curb welfare dependency, ruled that women on public assistance who gave birth to additional children would no longer get increased welfare payments. Last week, state officials announced that since the policy change, the birth rate for women on welfare has dropped significantly. The abortion rate for these same women increased slightly.

Predictably, the National Right to Life Committee has denounced these developments, saying the New Jersey “family caps” on welfare grants led to the increase in abortions and are therefore morally objectionable.

Not so predictably, the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League, a leading pro-choice group, has also condemned the announcement. Kate Michelman of NARAL said the New Jersey figures demonstrate that the “family caps” are depriving women of their right to choose whether or not to bear additional children.

Right to Life and NARAL on the same side? What kind of political confusion is this?

Answer: Precisely the sort of confusion that characterizes more and more of our politics. We haven’t been ourselves since the Cold War ended. You can’t tell the players without a program--and ours has been ripped to shreds.

When the United States was up against the Soviet Union, the struggle against communism not only shaped our internal foreign-policy divisions but also set the bounds to positions in domestic affairs. If you were a dove, you argued that victims of poverty and injustice here at home deserved more of the nation’s attention. If hawkish, you insisted that whatever our shortcomings, they were not so great as to prevent us from being a democratic model for the rest of the world.

You usually didn’t have to waste time or precious polemical energy figuring out where you stood. But then those kids from East Berlin chewed through the Wall and the contradictions started.

They showed up in foreign policy, of course: The country’s strategic and missionary needs collided, while nationalism and free trade, once comfortably allied, suddenly diverged in a yellow wood.

More interesting, U.S. domestic-policy divisions are now equally unpredictable.

A few old standbys remain, thank goodness: In general, you can still count on conservatives to snarl at the federal regulatory apparatus and on liberals to offer up some sort of defense of it.

Elsewhere, though, it’s roller-derby time. For example, the question of whether federal power should shrink or expand used to be a reliable device for sending conservatives and liberals to their respective corners. But no more. Stout-hearted conservatives like Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) are busily pushing tort reform, which would impose federal limits on states’ abilities to award damages in product-liability cases.

You can’t understand the players’ positions on tort reform until you take the issue off your mental states’-rights grid and plunk it down next to a key conservative-vs.-liberal yardstick, the pro-business-vs.-anti-business continuum.

Got it?

Or consider the question of health care: When President Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton produced their reform plan, it turned out to rely heavily on getting more people into managed-care organizations. Conservatives--House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), for one--pointed out that managed care would significantly restrict the ability of many individuals to choose their doctors.

But now we’ve moved on to the puzzle of balancing the federal budget, which simply cannot be done without curbing the growth in Medicare expenditures. So Gingrich and others in the GOP leadership have begun to talk about reforming Medicare. What does that mean? Among other things, it means getting more of the elderly into--yes!--managed care.

To wrap your mind around this contradiction, you have to take the Medicare issue off the old individual-vs.-bureaucracy chart in your head and rearrange it on the budget grid. See how simple?

If economic issues are looking squirrelly around the ideological edges, social issues have been out of control for several years. Last week’s brief duet between NARAL and Right to Life is just one recent example. Andrea Dworkin and the anti-pornography wing of the women’s movement and Pat Robertson’s religious conservatives have long since lain down together--right on top of traditional civil libertarians.

The anti-vice component of the Conservative Coalition has gotten powerful reinforcement from the Federal Drug Administration’s David A. Kessler and the anti-smoking, anti-alcohol health activists of the left.

Activist Jeremy Rifkin has organized parts of the religious left to try to deny patents for biotechnology discoveries, while the futuristic right wants to give every poor child a computer.

Finally, the issue of law and order has become an ideological swamp. The Oklahoma City bombing was the last straw and totally screwed up both sides. No longer can we count on right-wingers to spend their political breath calling for more cops, fewer constraints on police behavior and longer and more unpleasant prison terms for violent malefactors. Now we have law-enforcement agencies cutting their ties with the National Rifle Assn. and conservative organizations and pundits waxing eloquent on the subject of civil liberties.

So what’s going on? Can we detect any emerging general outlines in today’s unusually large number of unexpected--even bizarre--alliances?

The short answer is “no.” The current milling around certainly shows how easily positions on specific issues become scrambled when they are cut loose from their moorings in large political ideas. We do not yet know how these positions will rearrange themselves for the next long haul. The only thing we know for sure is that people who say they do know are selling snake oil.

But here is one shape that appears dimly: A good number of today’s political divisions also seem to be religious ones--not religious in the sense defined by the Christian right alone but religious in that they pit those satisfied with ordinary, everyday pluralist politics and institutions against those who want some kind of transcendence of them.

Do we want to pursue a realpolitik foreign policy or to infuse our actions with some post-Cold War brand of idealism? Do we want to stick with the old, established free-trade discipline or break free and give vent to our understandable economic resentment?

Do we want to put a lid on lawsuit damages for the sake of an orderly market or allow the injured their symbolic revenge? Should we accept budgetary constraints on health care for the elderly or persist in treating their access to medical service as an inalienable right?

To what extent do we want to force virtuous behavior on the populace for the sake of its own physical and moral health? How much do we want to curtail freedom of speech and association for the sake of public safety?

Some of the old limits on our politics are gone: Citizens and politicians are clearly searching for a sense of which remaining ones we can discard and which we must respect. Whoever comes up with a coherent way of telling us the difference will have the political advantage for the generation to come.