Mary Dejevsky: At last, a few Americans are looking into the abyss

Beyond the Republican and Democrat song and dance shows, a new style of politics is being born

The city of Philadelphia has just bade farewell to two caricatures: a caricature of a party convention and a caricature of a protest. With a couple of exceptions - all the more notable for how few they were - the Republican Party managed a national convention that was scripted and choreographed into unanimity, culminating in the tumultuous acclamation of the party's official presidential candidate, George W Bush. Meanwhile, on the streets, multifarious protests brought Philadelphia to a halt and attracted corresponding media attention only by mistake, when two separate groups of ragtag activists converged accidentally on the same spot just before the evening rush hour.

The city of Philadelphia has just bade farewell to two caricatures: a caricature of a party convention and a caricature of a protest. With a couple of exceptions - all the more notable for how few they were - the Republican Party managed a national convention that was scripted and choreographed into unanimity, culminating in the tumultuous acclamation of the party's official presidential candidate, George W Bush. Meanwhile, on the streets, multifarious protests brought Philadelphia to a halt and attracted corresponding media attention only by mistake, when two separate groups of ragtag activists converged accidentally on the same spot just before the evening rush hour.

In a week's time the whole charade will start again. The backdrop this time will be the reviving downtown of Los Angeles; the party will be the Democrats; many of the demonstrators will be the same: veterans of the anticapitalist "battle of Seattle" last autumn, Washington DC this past spring and Philadelphia last week.

But as the Republican president nominee and his running mate, Dick Cheney, embark on their coast-to-coast whistle-stop train tour, and Vice-President Al Gore prepares to announce his running mate, something is stirring. And it is not, for all George W Bush's talk of change, in either of these main parties.

The whole point of the Republican convention was to gloss over uncomfortable realities, big and small. So comprehensively entertained were the delegates that they may genuinely not have realised quite what was missing from their agenda. Where, for instance, was any mention of gun crime, which is the biggest killer of young people under 19? Or the death penalty, which has taken the lives of 138 people in Texas alone during Mr Bush's six-year governorship, often after the most perfunctory of court proceedings? Or the drugs problem and the Republicans' favourite remedy, prison; which means that there are now more young black men in prison in the United States than there are in college.

And where, but in one speech - the passionate pleading of the retired General Colin Powell - was any direct mention of the big questions in "equal opportunity" America: race, wealth, and the deformation of democracy by money? Putting all these together, Mr Powell said: "We must understand the cynicism that exists in the black community. The kind of cynicism that is created when, for example, some in our party miss no opportunity to roundly and loudly condemn affirmative action that helped a few thousand black kids get an education, but hardly a whimper is heard from them over affirmative action for lobbyists who load our federal tax codes with preferences for special interests."

Well, Republicans did not really want to understand. And Colin Powell's boldness in drawing attention to the small matter of "special interests" ensured that his speech, given on the first evening of the convention, was never referred to again. But there is not much prospect either that the Democrats will tackle these seemingly intractable issues when they meet in Los Angeles.

They may not be able to replicate the smooth-running machine of the Republican Party, which turned a political event into a non-stop song- and-dance show, but they have no interest whatever in drawing attention to America's big divides in the last months before the election. They would then have to admit not only that the disparities have persisted through two terms of a Democratic administration, but that they have actually got wider.

By all conventional indices, the American economy is flourishing. But the income gap has grown exponentially, with the worst paid now earning less in real terms than a decade ago and often not enough, even with full-time work, to support children. For all his bonhomie and good intentions, Bill Clinton has presided over a country that built more prisons last year than it did schools; where 4 million fewer people have access to health insurance than when he came to office (on a pledge to transform the private health system); and where the cost of seeking elected office at any level much above the local school board requires the candidate to solicit funds from commercial interests.

There are real questions here. Why, for instance, was Mr Clinton unable to reform the ponderous and extravagant health system despite a popular mandate to do so at the start of his tenure? Why did the incomes of the poorest fall even as big companies and the stock market prospered; and why did the role of money in elections only grow, to the point where either Mr Bush or Mr Gore will have paid upwards of $100m for their eventual victory? Is this what America was supposed to be about?

Democrats will be unable to pose these questions in Los Angeles because they expose their vulnerability. Republicans for the most part omitted to pose them in Philadelphia because the answers strike at the very heart of their self-reliant, free-enterprise, small-government philosophy.

But at a conference hall not five miles from the shimmering arena where George W Bush accepted his party's presidential nomination, a diverse group of politicians, academics and social activists was daring to challenge the consensus that brought the New Democrats to power on a free-market platform, and which could yet see the Republicans return to the White House on a centrist platform of "compassionate conservatism".

The exercise will be repeated in Los Angeles, a city where, as in Philadelphia, extremes of wealth and poverty are juxtaposed; where rich and poor, black, white and Hispanic are effectively segregated; and where - perhaps not coincidentally - civil unrest is a not too distant memory.

Convened by the ever-questioning Republican Arianna Huffington, author, opinion-former and socialite, the so-called "Shadow Conventions" brought together - a rare event, this - individuals from inside and outside the establishment who are united by a common idea. That idea - unthinkable to many Americans - is that the United States is ignoring fundamental problems which could, if not destroy it, then change its nature for ever.

Here were all the big subjects: the distorting effects of money in politics, and the failure of the so-called "war on drugs" (also seen in some quarters as a "war" against the black population). The latter has resulted in a tenfold increase in the number of people imprisoned for drugs offences, a rise in addiction, and the potential embroilment of American troops in a foreign war (in Colombia). Finally, and with some passion, they tackled the growing social and economic divide, which could soon leave the US with a social order more akin to that of some Latin American countries than the equality of individual opportunity to which the nation has always aspired.

In the States, there is nothing like the fringe meetings of British political party conferences where dissonant and dissident voices can be heard. The Shadow Conventions are a small beginning; they cannot compete with the money and vested interests of the dominant parties, but nor should they be dismissed as some peripheral gabfest. Theirs are the big issues that confront America, and they will force themselves on to Washington's agenda, perhaps even before the end of the next president's term. And whether that president is called Bush or Gore, he cannot say that he was not warned.