In the fall of 1995, Louis Farrakhan led the most celebrated African-American march in Washington since the 1963 March on Washington. A stone's throw from the spot where Martin Luther King declared, "We've come to our nation's capital to cash a check" for the "riches of freedom and the security of justice," Farrakhan voiced a new black generation's claim upon its still largely white government. And it was no claim at all.

"Freedom can't come from staying here and petitioning this great government," Farrakhan thundered. "Freedom cannot come from no one but the God who can liberate the soul from the burden of sin."

Last February, Paul Weyrich came to a similar conclusion. In an open letter to his Free Congress Foundation, Weyrich, perhaps the most influential conservative strategist of the past two decades, declared his life's work a failure. "Conservatives," he wrote, "have learned to succeed in politics. That is, we got our people elected. But that did not result in the adoption of our agenda. The reason, I think, is that politics has failed."

Two radically different leaders. Two calls for political secession. And a glimpse, possibly, of the 21st century's antipolitical response to the lessons of the end of the 20th.

The 1990s, after all, were a decade when first liberals, then conservatives, scored thrilling political victories, only to find those victories strikingly irrelevant to society at large. For 12 long years, Democrats watched Ronald Reagan and George Bush hack at the government safety net they held dear. Finally, in 1992, the party wrenched itself from its stupor, shook off its dead weight and found a winner. But when the Clintonites showed up for work, sleeves rolled up and ready to reverse years of trickle-down social policy, they received some bad news. In the post-cold war world, their new Wall Street buddies informed them, you couldn't pump government money into the economy and watch it spring to life because the bond market, punisher of fiscal indiscipline, would force up interest rates and slam its foot on the brake. Bill Clinton adapted; he cut spending and the deficit, thus handing over the economic reins to Alan Greenspan. Not a bad strategy, except that honest liberals must now admit that inequality is greater, the safety net is thinner, and capitalism is fiercer after two terms of Democratic occupancy of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue than it was before. Clinton trumped the Republicans. But market power trumped government power. And that mattered more.

The Republicans soon discovered the same thing. In 1994 they won the most stunning congressional victory of the late 20th century. And where they tried to roll back government, they had some success--they cut back welfare and agricultural subsidies and abolished the national speed limit. But where they tried to wield government power--to remoralize a culture they believed was degenerating before their eyes--they hit a wall. Under G.O.P. congressional control, government sanctions against abortion and homosexuality have, if anything, grown weaker. And when the G.O.P. tried to rally the public against a President they believed epitomized all that was wrong in the culture, the public refused to get on board. Americans, it turned out, were becoming less morally judgmental, and government could do little about it. Conservatives might influence Washington, but Washington wasn't influencing the culture.

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