I suggested that perhaps the seminal moment of our era was the autumn of 1989, when first the Berlin Wall, then the entire Warsaw pact disintegrated.
This caused my acquaintance to call me silly. She said that ultimately the collapse of the Soviet empire was one of those things which our generation didn't read about in the New York Times. The real defining event -- the one which had very real effects on people's lives at the time and would continue to have effects on people lives -- was the havoc wrought by twelve years of Reagan-Bush administration.
At the time I thought this assertion somewhat dotty. In the not too distant future Reagan and Bush will recede from the public consciousness as have Harding and Coolidge. But I suspect that two or three centuries from now distinguished educators will publish disturbing reports that two-thirds of all American tenth graders think the important feature of 1989 was the Battle of Waterloo.
Of course, the argument between my acquaintance and me stemmed from our insistence on talking about two entirely different matters. While I puffed about the sweep of history, she was talking very simply about the intellectual effects political events have had on our generation.
Now that I revisit the matter, I realize that the effect Reagan and Bush have had on my co- generationists -- particularly those of liberal- leftist beliefs -- has been profound, and, I believe, rather damaging. Quite simply, after seeing men they despised elected to the Presidency three straight times, leftists and even liberals have developed something of a distrust for democracy.
To a certain degree the distrust results from the quite accurate perception that the American public elected and re-elected two men whose performance left something to be desired. One need not be a fiscal hawk to wonder if George Bush might possibly have kept the deficit beneath $300 billion annually. Nor need one be a bluenose to ask what was going on in the Reagan administration that prevented it from keeping the number of high officials indicted on felony counts to double digits.
How does a liberal countenance losing 49 states to a man who appeared just shy of senility? How does a leftist explain inside in her head how Michael Dukakis -- who was far too conservative for her tastes, anyway -- lost in a landslide to a far more conservative man, whose main political issue appeared to be the Pledge of Allegiance?
Actually this aspect of losing could be explained relatively easily. In Carter, Mondale and Dukakis the Democrats nominated men who were better educated, more informed about the issues, perhaps even more intelligent than Reagan and Bush. Yet even left- leaning liberals (we'll call them progressives) could shrug this off to a degree: ``the Republicans were better financed and bought better advertising. They got lucky on economic cycles. And besides the Democrats still hold Congress.''
Doubts about presidential competence have not been the only, or even the central, component of the new progressive's doubts about eighties politics. The electorate chose two Presidents who disagreed with everything generation x's progressives believed on a whole raft of issues, including abortion, gay rights, affirmative action and welfare. Most gallingly, the electorate appeared to stand closer to Reagan and Bush on these issues than to the progressives.
Don't worry; there is no horde of twenty and twenty- four-year-old radicals itching to burn down buildings, become anarchists or reconstitute the Communist Party. They're going to law school. Now, lawyering is often an honorable profession. District attorneys put guilty people in jail, and defense lawyers keep innocent ones out. Other lawyers, however, particularly young and idealistic ones, see the law as a club with which to over-rule duly- elected legislatures and inflict unpopular, but progressive ideas on the electorate at large.
Legal contempt for democracy is by no means a novel concept. The great-grandmother of political lawsuits is Roe v. Wade, which guaranteed women the right to abortion. It has been followed by lawsuits on almost every one of the issues where the democratic consensus is considered to be reactionary.
The rising generation of progressives takes for granted the idea that political battles are to be fought in the courtroom, rather than at the ballot box. By now the suggestion that abortion should be legal, but that abortion rights are not constitutionally guaranteed is enough to incite a minor riot on many college campuses.
The retort to doubts about over-reliance on the courts is a simple one: ``If the Warren Court had been judicially conservative, desegregation would never have happened.'' Unfortunately, this response assumes that every progressive cause is as morally clear-cut as desegregation. It also ignores the fact that the much of the heavy-lifting of the civil rights movement was not done by lawsuits, but by Dr. King's ability to convince large numbers of Americans of the rightness of his cause, and the attendant passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts.
The dangers of substituting judicial activism for the hurly-burly of politics are twofold. First, the process of reform through lawsuit alienates large segments of the population who feel their suffrage diminished. Justice Ginsburg rightly points out that had the Supreme Court ruled more narrowly in Roe -- and let the political process take its course -- abortion rights might have been attained with much less social discord. The second danger is even more grave. In confining themselves to the law dockets, the progressives intentionally disconnect themselves from the act of persuading citizens and winning votes. Is it any wonder the conservatives have held so much political territory?
Many people, myself included, thought the alienation of the progressives from politics would come to a grinding halt with Fleetwood Mac blaring from White House stereos and Bill Clinton holding court in the Oval Office. Unfortunately the doubts started to surface even before the Inauguration: ``Lloyd Bentsen? Richard Rubin? Is Clinton even a Democrat?'' Through the spring we heard: ``He ditched Lani. He surrendered on gays in the military. Why is Hillary getting so much grief?'' And recently: ``Who is this guy Gergen?''
I'm afraid the result is that a lot of progressives have come to believe that even if Clinton wanted to do the right thing, he couldn't because society is so sexist, racist and reactionary. Therefore, the best way to bring about reform is not to convince millions of citizens to vote progressively in Presidential and Congressional elections, but to concentrate on bringing lawsuits before a small number of powerful judges.
That plan may numb the wounds of political defeat, but is, in the end, futile. Good government is not just the imposition of enlightened policies in the place of unenlightened ones. It is a process of debate, negotiation and compromise, which aims to achieve the consent of the governed. Until the progressives of our generation understand this, their impact on the body politic will be minimal.
James Kaplan (71223.1134@CompuServe.COM) is a Multimedia Producer at Show & Tell, Inc.