Before the November elections, President Clinton and Congress together indulged in some election year spending that undercut recent progress toward reducing the federal budget deficit. Eliminating the deficit--the stated aim of both parties--will never happen without steadfast devotion rooted in a clear and expressed understanding of why such action is necessary.

During the presidential campaign, Bill Clinton bragged that the federal deficit had declined for four years in a row. True enough, but he left out one little detail: In the very fiscal year in which he was doing his boasting (the one that began on October 1), the deficit was rising again. It's budgeted to increase by more than 40 percent and keep climbing.

This is the cold reality that confronts all the warm bipartisan talk about balancing the budget. It's the result of a lack of discipline, occasioned by a politics without backbone.

It's discipline and principle, not cozy feelings and accommodation, that bring the best public policy, both for a party and a country. Investors with the willpower to stay with the stock market over the past six years know the lesson of discipline well. Politicians ignore it at the nation's peril. Let's look quickly at what they did to the budget while you weren't watching.

As the election approached this fall, both Democrats and Republicans loosened the reins on spending. Hardly anyone noticed, and neither side wanted to raise a ruckus.

At the end of September, Congress approved an increase of $14 billion in the part of the budget that it can most easily control--discretionary spending, which is everything (defense, education, law enforcement . . .) except entitlements like Medicare and Social Security and interest on the federal debt.

GOP leaders figured that, if they didn't give in, Clinton would refuse to sign the appropriations bills and government would have "shut down," with Republicans getting the blame.

In their first budget after gaining control of Capitol Hill, Republicans trimmed discretionary spending from $508 billion to $489 billion. But in their second budget, it's back up to $503 billion.

As a result, in fiscal 1997 (the current year), federal spending will rise 4 percent. That compares with a rise of 3.8 percent in fiscal 1996 and 3.7 percent in 1995. We're moving in precisely the wrong direction, and a year of lax discipline like the last one only makes achieving a balanced budget (which the country wants and needs) that much harder.

The irony is that a balanced budget--like other felicitous policies--can be achieved not through quick compromise but only through toughness and, yes, antagonism.

The press is repulsed by political conflict. That's why we continually heard "civility" being celebrated as a high value in the election campaign. But the truth is that principled Democrats and Republicans really do disagree on important matters--and they should. When they get together through weakness and pandering, as they did this fall on the budget, then the country suffers.

Republicans won't achieve their goals by being sweetly bipartisan. They'll win when they can convince a large majority of Americans that they're right. That won't happen immediately, and, in the meantime, their aims should be to educate and to stand on principle. It's a long march.

The same holds for liberal Democrats. If they want to recapture their party from the pallid centrists and move the nation back in the direction of providing more social welfare for people who need it, they have to stay disciplined and keep their eyes on a far-off prize.

But to return to the Republicans: On issue after issue last year, they abandoned principle, hardly mentioned it. When the minimum wage hike was proposed, why couldn't just one leader say that the government shouldn't interpose itself between an employer and an employee in a free and private agreement on compensation?

And, yes, it's fine for new mothers to spend forty-eight hours in the hospital, but why is Washington setting these rules? What's next: thirty-six hours for an appendectomy? Such issues are important because they will be the gist of the Clinton agenda in the coming two years. He will try, for example, to expand the Family and Medical Leave Act. Sure, employees should get time off to go to parent-teacher meetings, but should Washington require by law that all employers give all employees that time?

And, without much money to spend, the administration will certainly try to load more mandates onto businesses, which will serve as government's social policy surrogates. Pragmatic arguments against such measures won't work (like the forty-eight-hour maternity rule, they're popular and they don't increase the budget deficit). Only principled arguments will do.

Unfortunately, since their 1994 victory, Republicans have defined a smaller government as one that spent less money (well, actually, one that increased spending at a slightly lower rate). In fact, a smaller government is one that does fewer things, and the great failing of Republicans is that they didn't specify what things government should and shouldn't do.

In a column last year, I quoted from "Why I Am Not a Conservative," an essay by Friedrich Hayek, the late Austrian philosopher who was a "classical liberal," or libertarian. Hayek argued that conservatism "cannot offer an alternative to the direction in which we are moving." Instead, all Republicans can say is, "Whoa! You're going a little too fast!"

That's certainly what's happened here in the past year. "The tug of war between conservatives and progressives," wrote Hayek, presciently, "can only affect the speed, not the direction, of contemporary developments."

How to change the direction? The first step is to delineate the limited realm of government from the expansive realm of free individuals--and to glorify the latter. (After all, who created those ten million new jobs Clinton bragged about?)

Americans may not be ready to change direction yet, but, unless politicians put principle and discipline first, they'll never be.

James K. Glassman is DeWitt Wallace-Reader's Digest Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.