Chuck Spinney's sig at d-n-i:

"A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives." - James Madison, from a letter to W.T. Barry, August 4, 1822

Kinda says it all , huh? to prak & the Chef -- I've been thinking further about your remarks on the reduced generational sensitivity to checks & balances -- I guess you're not the "me" generation but rather the "just do it" generation ? I'm curious -- how much was The Federalist or its authors drilled into you early and often -- either in its origiinal form or as aphorisms? We got a pretty heavy dose from grade school onwards -- the ultimate antidote to Communism, don'cha know? And then we had it tatooed into our collective psyche over Vietnam (especially the Pentagon Papers & Cambodia) & Watergate. Abuse of power, or "America always right and d*'d the consequences" just seemed to always go hand in hand with secrecy and skirting the basic rules of the game. After enough such experiences, it's hard for a certain portion of my generation to avoid concluding that transparency is a precondition for a liberal society: both the disninfecting effects of sunshine and the ability of a citizenry to inform itself when it so chooses. We also tend to be a bit cautious about elevating ends -- no matter how noble and well-intentioned -- above means. Part of why so many of us got exercised about Iran-contra and Casey in Managua, regardless of whether we thought that sustained opposition to the Sandinistas and the left-wing insurgency groups were for the long-term benefit of the hemisphere. [BTW -- another example of you're with us or agin' us. If you thought Oli North should be locked up for a significant prison term, you had to be pro-communist and betrayers of freedom in Central America. Sheesh! The world was and is a bit more nuanced but you wouldn't know it from the absurd mischaracterization of anti-contra views that sprang forth during the Salvador Option brouhaha.] I doubt that it's a matter of the newer group of today's college students and recent graduates being somehow less idealistic and more cynical/realistic than those who came before. I'd hazard a guess it's more a matter of a different aculturation process going on in each generation's civics laboratories. But that's just a guess. Here's an hypothesis. Maybe the Federalist principles wern't sort of mothers milk for the generations after '78 or so first and foremost because the communist threat was definitely waning -- it was now just an ideologically impotent Soviet Union that was the enemy. On the domestic front, the application of the checks & balances had produced two unique results in US history. It had forced a President out of office, and it had produced -- for a majority of the population -- a questioning of the automatic "rightness" of American projection of power. And don't let people tell you it was because of the bloodshed that turned off the couch potatoes at home or the number of body bags. The violence that couldn't be ignored merely underscored a sense that something underneath was rotten. The foundation of that sense was the Credibility Gap I've written about so frequently. The process of applying the checks and balances, however saluatory as a remedy, clearly produced a partisan backlash. To hail the merits of the checks & balances mechanisms becamse a set of liberal "code words" that were anti-Nixonian,(and later anti-Reagan in Central Am) etc. So with that partisan context, it's possible that people avoided a constant reference to the Federalist aphorisms. Somehow in the mix is the hero worship of the god Reagan. It is a phenoomenon I continue to find not just mystifying - for me it's like something from another planet. I think somehow the emotional attachment to him reflects the anxiety that was produced by the confrontation of the liberal system with the partisan process which resulted in the apparent victory of those people who had a different world view. Lakoff's "father" and "mother" division of the electorate would go to that somewhat, but his division is basically ahistorical. Whereas the enormous emotive power Reagan generated -- and continues to produce in iconographic form to this day -- is a bit extreme for American history, I'd assert. So Reagan was speaking to some deep anxieties and/or some passionately held hopes. Just speculating. Don't know how we'd demonstrate any of that. First we'd have to document the generational difference that prak senses in the "just do it" generation.