I’ve been away for awhile – grades and students and graduations! – but while away I’ve caught faint hints of bleating cries emanating from our esteemed Beltway commentariat. See, said commentariat is all aflutter with news about The Scandals that Will Wreck the Second Obama Term.™ First there was Benghazi; then there was the IRS; and finally there was the AP shenanigans. Ezra Klein has a great rundown of these “scandals,” if you, like me, have been living under the metaphorical rock. But it’s Klein’s larger point that I want to highlight today: there are scandals afoot, but they’re not the political scandals that typically get the Politico minions worked into a tizzy.
Rather, they’re policy-oriented scandals. Or perhaps I should say they’re those issues which Beltway pundits routinely ignore. Hiding behind the shrieks of hysteria, Klein explains, are a litany of “other problems Congress is ignoring, from high unemployment to sequestration to global warming. When future generations look back on the scandals of our age, it’ll be the unchecked rise in global temperatures, not the Benghazi talking points, that infuriate them.” Abso-fucking-lutely.
It’s worth taking a moment to reflect upon how Americans usually remember administrations and the “scandals” they wreak. Those of us engaged in the daily humdrum of political news easily forget that very few voting Americans give a shit about anything that goes on in Washington in the immediate aftermath of a Presidential election. They’re certainly not watching cable news. We also forget that after some time has passed, very few of the discourses that animate the political world at any given moment survive in popular memory. As Klein points out, Benghazi and the other “scandals” probably deserve the scare quotes. Thus they’ll be forgotten, while other things – the very things that have no traction in the press because they’ve been there all along – will dominate historical memory.
Consider our memories of older administrations. Only a handful examples of Presidents brought down by political scandals come to mind: maybe Adams, possibly Grant, and certainly Nixon. Otherwise we recall administrations like those of Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, and FDR not for the political animus they engendered – each of those administrations earned the type of enemies that make the Tea Party look quaint – but for their larger structural accomplishments and failures. And usually it’s not even that complicated. Jefferson symbolized the first peaceful transfer of power; Jackson stood up for the common man; Lincoln won the war; Roosevelt helped solve the Depression. Insofar as we are critical, it’s for a specific set of policy decisions that were entirely calculated at the time, and not scandals in any traditional sense: Jefferson’s disastrous embargo; Jackson’s Indian Removal; Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus; FDR’s Japanese internment.
More recently, we’ve already begun to remember the Reagan years as an era of deregulation and the Clinton years as an age of peace and prosperity. More likely, in a few more years time we may even begin to see those administrations as coherent with each other, as part of a new Gilded Age. But what most of us won’t be discussing are Iran Contra, Monica Lewinsky, and the legions of political crises that arose throughout the 1980s and 1990s. I’m not saying that’s right; I’m just saying that’s just the way it is. That’s just how historical political memory works.
If you don’t believe me, come to class one day next year. The surprise my students show when I discuss the internal hatreds of the Founders, or the wars radicals, conservative Republicans, and Democrats waged with the Lincoln Administration during the Civil War: that surprise is always apparent, and real, and telling. Our history may be conflict-driven, but our memories aren’t. Consensus is the rule. I’m betting it will stay the rule – at least, it will stay the rule until somebody finds the smoking gun.
We’re just not there yet.
