c. 1996 Religion News Service

(Charles W. Colson, former special counsel to Richard Nixon, served a prison term for his role in the Watergate scandal. He now heads Prison Fellowship International, an evangelical Christian ministry to the imprisoned and their families. Contact Colson via e-mail at 71421,1551(at sign)compuserve.com.)

(RNS)-The ongoing Republican primary campaign reconfirms the small-world theory: During my White House years I worked closely with three of the top contenders. Then, as now, Bob Dole was a political professional; Lamar Alexander was a quiet functionary; Patrick J. Buchanan was an active volcano.

And while I wish I could attribute my distress at the tenor of the primary campaign to personal reasons-one hates to see old comrades having at each other so brutally-my distress is at a deeper level. What we are seeing in this shrill and angry campaign, I believe, is not merely a case of spirited political debate, but the continued degeneration of the political process, which I believe is linked to the central phenomenon of our age: The loss of moral consensus.

The clearest sign of this is the general public’s anger against its own government. Voters are at war with the political system because the system no longer represents their values and interests. Whoever represents this system, then, is seen as a sort of enemy. This attitude was reflected in the massive purge of incumbents in 1994.

In 1996, the tactic is slightly different: Whoever becomes the front-runner in the primary becomes a target. Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole was knocked off in New Hampshire by Pat Buchanan. The next week, Buchanan, riding high, was knocked off by Steve Forbes.

Exit polls make it clear that people aren’t voting for candidates as much as they are voting against them. There is, however, one constant theme: A general disgust with the entire process.

Lost in this turmoil and the shrill debate is our ability to carry on what the eminent philosopher Hannah Arendt called the”democratic conversation.” What she meant was that in a free society it is essential for people to debate issues, to be able to talk freely about moral values, and arrive at some consensus of what they believe as a people, a consensus that can be reflected in their laws.

So it was in our country, until relatively recently. You could argue, without having to watch your back, that euthanasia, for example, was absolutely wrong. You could argue that we should be compassionate toward the needy because it was absolutely the right thing to do.

But can that be done today? Hardly. The longstanding principles that emphasized the common good, most of them based on Judeo-Christian tradition, have been consciously and systematically rejected. Now public policy is geared toward promoting and protecting the unencumbered self.

That the government, along with cultural elites, have been busy scrapping longstanding traditions is not in doubt. The right to life has been compromised, at least for the unborn. So has the tradition of school prayer, along with the idea that we can include religious arguments in public debate. Homosexual marriage is the latest passion. Same-sex marriage may well be legally established in Hawaii, thus overturning a 5,000-year-old belief that only men and women should marry.

Parental rights have been narrowed as the state’s prerogatives expand. More and more citizens feel as if they are living under a government of occupation, as if the moral traditions the nation has shared for so long have been ripped away from them.

The relationship between the loss of moral cohesion and public upheaval has been a subject of intense study by scholars. In his 1981 book,”After Virtue,”Alasdair MacIntyre of Notre Dame University wrote that without a moral consensus, politics becomes civil war carried on by other means. If we can’t agree on what’s morally and socially desirable for our nation, we’re left with each political contingent trying to impose its will on everyone else.

Stanley Fish, professor of law and literature at Duke University, has argued that since there is no objective proof, there are no principles. There remain only preferences, so the object of moral discourse is to impose your preference on someone else before they impose theirs on you.

And so our candidates rail, both because the chasm between the government and the governed is widening, and because we have created a moral vacuum. Like other vacuums, this one does not carry sound, leading the candidates to shout louder still. The shrillness of modern political life reflects the moral emptiness of the public square.

MJP END COLSON