And I worry that this might be the fault of my own age cohort, Generation X.
Thinking back, it is easy to roughly identify when the following must have occurred. It must’ve taken place in September, 1990, when I was a 1st year law student. One of our core classes was a general Constitutional Law class, and our instructor – Professor Gerhardt – had to spend some time getting all of us (ostensibly) adults up to speed on how the U.S. federal government works.
One day Professor Gerhardt was outlining the various ways the different branches of the federal government police each other, and a few of my classmates started asking some rather pointed questions. It had not escaped them that – while what Professor Gerhardt was describing might be all well and good in the abstract – there seemed little formal power in the Constitution or the law that constrained a lot of potential mischief. After quite a few students pointed out that what Gerhardt was describing seemed to rest not on any formal mechanism of restraint, but more upon a sort of tacit understanding between the branches as to what needed to be done to make the government work, Gerhardt got a little exasperated: “You people need to get over this kind of naïve, 8th-grade understanding of how political power works,” he told us, “governmental power is not something that is necessarily explicit.”
You see, way back in 1990 it made sense to assume that actors in the federal government would continue to abide by all the unspoken norms that had been worked out over 200 years and by which the United States government manages to, y’know, not come to a complete and shuddering halt because someone like Ted Cruz gets a little pissy. It made sense a quarter-century ago to imagine that no one would really challenge the norms by which the governmental gears continue to turn.
But years later, during the Bush II administration, I would contact Professor Gerhardt at his new gig (which, coincidentally, turned out to be at my old undergraduate university) to remind him of this exchange and to ask how it is the government is supposed to function when one branch has decided that such norms can simply be ignored. He apologized for having given back then what he characterized in hindsight as a glib answer, but I didn’t think he needed to bother. He had been right back then to assume that elected officials would think that their job required them to keep the government running, as opposed to blowing it right the hell up.
And now, in about 3 weeks, we are going to get a new government, one headed by a guy who clearly has no interest whatsoever in abiding by the rule of law or the Constitution itself (I’m looking at you, Emoluments Clause), let alone these so-called “norms.” And I’m wondering how much of that is the fault of people my age.
Twenty-six years ago, my fellow students were quick to note that - technically speaking - a lot of what we were being taught about how the federal government works were mere customs and not actual laws. Today, I can turn on my cable TV news and there will be at least one pundit arguing that whatever revolutionary new, norm-breaking shit the GOP has decided to pull, it’s still okay because “there’s no rule against it.” (Wanna filibuster every single vote in the Senate? It’s okay, ‘cause “there’s no rule against it.”)
And I dunno . . . maybe it was the gung-ho action movies of the late 70’s and the 80’s that we grew up on. Movies like the Dirty Harry and Deathwish franchises that actually celebrated vigilantes and dirty cops taking the law into their own hands, away from the jurisdiction of the actual courts, and executing people on the streets . . . maybe we imbibed those lessons and decided that the rule of law and societal order had to take back seat to straight up convenience and expediency. Maybe what warped us was just the general go-go nature of the 80’s themselves, the idea that life is about taking whatever and doing whatever you can get away.
Or maybe what taught us it was cool to just blow shit up was all those advertisements that began telling us we could be “rebels,” and “individuals,” and “people who find their own way” . . . by purchasing whatever mass-produced dreck was being hawked at us. (I remember an ad in a surf magazine from back in the day, the tag-line being: “What am I rebelling against? Waddaya got?” That struck me, even then, as almost mind-bogglingly stupid. Hmmmm . . . these days we have antibiotics, indoor plumbing, refrigeration, and air conditioning – are these things we should be “rebelling against”?)
But, whatever it was, the cohort that was only 21 or 22 back in 1990 is now 47 or 48. Generation X – my generation – are the middle-aged adults working for a living, trying to support their families, and hoping that they might just be able to retire. And, apparently, quite a few think it’s just fine to run the country based on nothing more than brute force and a complete disregard for any nicety that might get in the way of punishing their political enemies.
And so, now, we are all 8th-graders. My former classmates’ naïve understanding of how political power works has become everybody’s understanding.
It’s gonna be a show.
