Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds has a piece in the Washington Examiner that’s thought provoking: Consent of the governed – and the lack thereof. Starting out with the rather striking poll results from Rasmussen:
[O]nly 21 percent of American voters believe that the federal government enjoys the consent of the governed. On the other hand, Rasmussen notes, a full 63 percent of the “political class” believe that the government enjoys the consent of the governed.
Leaving aside for a minute exactly how they define “political class”, that’s such a huge gulf, something’s clearly afoot. Glenn has an interesting theory: that we’ve arrived where we are today, through a long series of small incremental outrages, none of which by themselves were enough to arouse the outrage of the public, but taken together have ruined the legitimacy of their brand.
To illustrate this, he uses an example of a beer:
But we’ve had enough political drama in recent years, so I’ll go for a more prosaic comparison: The once-heady brew of American freedom has become watery and unsatisfying.
In fact, when I think of the federal government’s brand now, I think of Schlitz beer. Schlitz was once a top national brew. But, in search of short-term gains, it began gradually reducing its quality in tiny increments to save money, substituting cheaper malt, fewer hops and “accelerated” brewing for its traditional approach.
Each incremental decline was imperceptible to consumers, but after a few years, people suddenly noticed that the beer was no good anymore. Sales collapsed, and a “Taste My Schlitz” campaign designed to lure beer drinkers back failed when the “improved” brew turned out not to be any better. A brand image that had been accumulated over decades was lost in a few years, and it has never recovered.
That’s often the way it goes. Without hard absolute standards to maintain bright lines, you slowly slouch toward mediocrity. The nickel you save on hops times a million units a year is $50,000 of real money. And the rubes customers will never notice the difference. The tax increase is only a pizza a week, and those fat constituents can do without it, anyway. There’s no point in writing good software, just tell the idiots users to upgrade the hardware.
Eventually, this attitude eats up all available resources, and then belatedly sewage hits the proverbial centrifugal blower. Case in point: Greece. But we’re in no position to be congratulating ourselves. The political singularity is upon us.
The federal government, alas, finds itself in much the same position. The political class sold its legitimacy off in drips and drabs. As “smart politics” has come over the past decades to mean not persuasion but the practice of legerdemain, the use of political deals, cover from a friendly press apparat and taking advantage of voters’ rational ignorance, the governing classes have managed to achieve things that would surely have failed had the people known what was going on.
But though each little trick may have slipped by the voters, the voters have nonetheless noticed that the ultimate product isn’t what it used to be. The end result, as with Schlitz, is a tarnished brand. And rescuing tarnished brands is hard.
But 63% of them don’t realize it yet. Everything’s wonderful, and the taxpayers are hiding a pile of money that’s rightfully the government’s, and all they have to do is find where they’re hiding it, and take it, and all will be even more wonderful.
In the past, America has managed to reinvent itself without transformations as wrenching as the Civil War or the Revolution. As the legitimacy of our current arrangements becomes increasingly threadbare, it is perhaps worth thinking about how this might be accomplished again. Because when a great beer dies, it’s sad. But when a great nation dies, it’s tragic.
The Euros don’t look at it that way. There, governments and empires come and go, but nations are forever. That’s probably why they take this kind of brinkmanship so lightly. But here, the government is the nation. The Europhillic political class doesn’t seem to get that, either. They think that they can raid the economy without limit, but they can’t imagine what happens after the political singularity.
We can brew our own. That’s what they haven’t figured out.
