In the column that Adam and Michael Kazin already demolished, David Brooks quotes the libertarian econo-blogger Arnold Kling: "One could argue that this country is on the verge of a crisis of legitimacy. The progressive elite is starting to dismiss rural white America as illegitimate, and vice-versa." One could argue that. The thing is, we know what a crisis of legitimacy looks like: we just had eight years of what in a less-stable country would have been an actual crisis of legitimacy: A president who got fewer votes than his opponent, a war based on lies, that sort of thing. We lived through it, and in 2008, we seem to have come out of it, with a president and government that had won not only a clear majority in a democratic vote, but the consent of a far broader majority. But Kling's term is one I'd been thinking about also. What unifies the right-wing reaction, from the Birthers, to the Tea-Partiers, to the Town Halls, to the crusade against "Czars" seems to be a concerted effort to pull us back into a crisis of legitimacy, in any way possible. Consider, for example, the insistence that Obama is trying to "shove through" health reform. (If only he were!) If you really thought there were "death panels" in the bill, for example, in a democratic society one might offer an amendment to have the provision removed. Instead it is proof that the bill has to be stopped. While people given the informal title of "czar" in addition to their formal job are essentially powerless (at best they can encourage some inter-agency coordination), portraying them as if they were actually an American version of Ivan the Terrible (or Stalin, since the Tea-Partiers aren't much on the nuances of Russian history) helps support a story that Obama is governing without consent or democracy. While the range in tone and sanity between the birthers, the anti-Czarists, and the ordinary health-reform opponents is enormous, they are all engaged in a single project -- validating the defection of a sizable minority from the process of governing the country. I see Kling's and Brooks's "vice-versa" -- Southern white America's dismissal of the governing majority as illegitimate. I don't see the reverse. We progressive elites didn't treat Southern white America as "illegitimate" when it held almost total power in the Bush years (I've substituted Southern for "rural," which I think is appropriate) and we don't consider them "illegitimate" now. The difference seems to be that some people are happy living in a state of legitimation crisis, and other people -- notably Barack Obama -- want nothing more than to end it. This, too, is a divide in American politics -- not the divide between Hamilton and Jefferson that Brooks sees, but between, say, Calhoun and Lincoln. But it is also a divide that has a right and wrong side. -- Mark Schmitt
