Lapham

This is a good interview with Lewis Lapham, the outgoing (yes, you read that right) editor of Harper's. Two excerpts that caught my eye below.

Q: What do you make of the Times’s editorial that said calls for impeachment and even Senator Feingold’s censure bill will only embolden the right?

Lapham: Well, the right doesn’t need emboldening. The right is perfectly happy to lie, cheat, steal, say anything that comes conveniently to mind. If you make your politics a matter of waiting to see what the other fellow will do, you have already lost the argument, or the election. And it is this kind of pussyfooting on the part of the Democratic Party that has led us into this morass.

That deserves emphasis, I thought. I also thought this exchange was on point:

Q: What’s to be done now?

Lapham: In the short term, it’s trying to get the Democratic Party in the forthcoming election to take control of at least one of the houses of Congress. And if the Democrats fail to win control of either the House or Senate in November, then they are utterly useless and must be replaced with a third party.

We also need an awakening on the part of large numbers of people, both Democrat and Republican, of a political consciousness that has been dormant for the better part of the last thirty years. We have to change the notion that politics isn’t important, that what’s important is the economy and money, and that politicians serve at the pleasure of their corporate sponsors. They might as well be hired accordion players at a hospitality tent at a golf tournament.

I graduated from Yale in the 1950s, and the word “public” was still a good word. Public meant public health, public service, public school, commonwealth. And “private” suggested greed, selfishness, and so on. Those words have been turned around. That was the great triumph of the Reagan Revolution. By the time we hit the end of the Reagan Administration, “public” had become a dirty word, a synonym for slum, poor school, incompetent government, all things destructive. And “private” had become glorious: private club, private trout stream, private airplane.