2006 & 1974: Heads They Win, Tails We Lose

There has been a good deal of talk over at TPM Cafe about why the Glorious Revolution of 1974 failed, and what the parallels are to 2006. Max Sawicky says it's because the Democrats elected in 1974 were insufficiently ideological. Josh Marshall thinks it's because the Democratic sweep in 1974 was bucking a broader, longer-term conservative realignment.

Neither of them, I think, gets to the heart of the matter. The reason we failed is that most people learned the wrong lesson from Watergate.

As a 13 year old in 1974, the lesson I got from Watergate was that Republicans Are Evil. It's not a very sophisticated lesson, but it's looking pretty damn good in retrospect. As an adult, I see a lesson--a whole damn sermon--about unchecked executive power, about the corrosive nature of secret government in an open society, about the wisdom of a system of checks and balances. Most of us here, I think--generally liberal, generally more politically focused than the average American--take away some combination of these two lessons. They seem so obvious that it's hard to imagine anyone not getting them.

And yet...

In the real world, outside of the wonkapaloozas, outside of my liberal activist family and my liberal activist friends, most people got a very different message: government can't be trusted. Or, still less sophisticated: government is bad.

The very lesson that Reagan and all his successors have exploited.

And I see it happening again.

Yesterday I saw poll results in which 49% of those responding saying 'most members of Congress are corrupt'. I'm in the 49%, but that's because most members of Congress are Republicans; I have a feeling most of the people giving that response aren't looking at it exactly that way. (The faux 'balance' of press reports on these scandals don't help, of course.) The Abramoff scandals may work to our short-term benefit, but at the price of diminishing trust in Congress as an institution. Bush's catastrophic incompetence and corruption may help us in 2006 and 2008, but at the price of further discrediting activist government. Which is to say, at the price of making it much more difficult to accomplish any of our goals.

This is the central problem, the problem of 1974 and 2006 and always: we believe in building things, and the Nihilist Party believes in destroying things, and it's always easier to destroy than to build.

So, having said that Max Sawicky is wrong, I will say he is partly right: running on corruption isn't enough. The impossible task before us is to make the case for the possibilities of government even as we make the case that those currently in charge of government are corrupt and incompetent. We have to make the case that government can be trusted to act in our interest at the same time as we make the case that this government is actively working against the interests of most Americans. The latter is the easier case to make; the former is the more essential in the long term.

[That's all, folks]