CHANGES THAT SHAPED AMERICA GO WAY BEYOND POLITICAL ARENA

In the soothing ointment of President Clinton's words on Wednesday, one element was especially welcome to people who worry about the political giddiness encouraged, inevitably, by the civic liturgy of an Inauguration. The element was the emphasis placed by Clinton, who as candidate stressed "change" propelled by government, on the autonomy of change: "Profound and powerful forces are shaking and remaking our world."

The forces to which he was referring - forces of communication, commerce, science, intellectual and religious conviction - are always doing that. But because an inauguration is a festival of government, it is apt to make the political class, and perhaps even normal people, susceptible to a fallacious notion about the importance of politics.The political class, in its egotism and self-absorption, is particularly apt to find this notion plausible. It is a notion especially pleasing to Democrats, who are disposed to think of government as the sun around which life revolves.

It is a notion stated last summer by Ted Kennedy: "The ballot box is the place where all change begins in America." There is hardly a page of American history that does not refute that insistence, so characteristic of the political class, on the primacy of politics in the making of history.

Change begins in America when a Yale graduate, Eli Whitney, serving as a tutor on a cotton plantation, gets interested in inventing a machine to separate cotton fibers from cotton seeds. Whitney's cotton gin helped produce the economic foundations of slavery. Another change began in America when, in the 1940s, the descendants of slaves, displaced by new cotton-picking machinery, began their migration to Northern cities.

Change begins in America when John Fitch makes the first American vessel powered by steam and when Connecticut inventor Samuel Colt patents a revolving-breech pistol. Change begins in America when a young blacksmith in Grand Detour, Ill., makes a "self-scouring" steel plow suitable for turning the thick black topsoil of the Middle West. Today you can read the blacksmith's name in yellow print on green machines: John Deere.

Change begins in America when Thomas Alva Edison in Menlo Park, N.J., says he has not failed because 80 materials have proved unsatisfactory for making filament for an electric light bulb - he has succeeded in learning 80 things that don't work.

But wait. Material change is not more consequential than intellectual, moral and spiritual changes, which also do not begin at the ballot box.

Change in America begins when . . .

In a good society some change, some of it very important, begins at the ballot box. But in a good society politics is peripheral to much of the pulsing life of the society. It is in America, where, without the instruction or supervision of the political class, change is continuous.