An infection is in the bloodstream of American politics, and journalists are not immune to the virus. We know approximately when and where it was introduced -- in Washington, between John Kennedy's assassination and Richard Nixon's resignation -- but we do not know how to rid ourselves of the contamination. Our political institutions have been in a slow-motion free-fall for a couple of decades, their authority, vitality, in a word, their legitimacy slowly being eroded. A strong presidency, an independent judiciary, a self-governing Congress, and a free press are our most precious institutions. The republican ideals embedded in them provide the foundation for a democratic state and free public life.

The actors driving the current scandal in Washington -- lawyers who show contempt for the law, journalists who revel in voyeurism, and political vigilantes ready to profit from any dishonor -- seem no longer to understand this nor to hold the republic in their imaginations. They have created new sites for prurience and indignation but not for democratic politics.

As a result, our institutions are interacting in a whirlpool of mutual degradation. These understandings are widely shared if dimly grasped by the American people and they resist mightily the further erosion of the presidency. They may sense what is often forgotten. A central belief of the Founding Fathers, based on the experience of history, was that republican institutions are fragile, the moments of their existence fleeting in historical time, and the threat of lurching back into a life of repression always present. These institutions are now taken for granted as if they were indestructible. Journalists seem to believe that democratic politics, which alone underwrites their craft, is a self-perpetuating machine that can withstand any amount of undermining. They are wrong.

***

We are not in an imaginative proximity to revolution. Americans love change but hate revolution. But revolution is not the only option. People can also retreat deeper into private life, inside gated communities, seeking private solutions to public problems, consigning politics to the realm of game and spectacle for mass distraction. But who is most hurt by this? The weakest and most vulnerable among us. "Nations are the skin of the poor," a Latin American economist says, understanding that nations are most precious to those orphaned and defenseless.

Democratic institutions will survive this president and special prosecutor. As we said post-Watergate, "the system works." But that is not inevitable. The increased speed of interaction among these institutions has its own multiplier effect. One day they could spin wildly out of control. The best we can hope for now is that the whirlpool will bottom out with this episode and we can begin the task of reconstructing democratic institutions, including the press. What is more likely, however, is that Bill Clinton's supporters, whatever the outcome, and aflame with vengeance, will lie in wait for the next Republican president, and political hysteria will start all over again.

 In the last thirty-five years, one president was assassinated and attempts made on two others, one declined under extreme pressure to seek re-election, one was compelled to resign, and two served unsuccessful first terms and were denied a second. We had a two-year presidency for an unelected vice-president and even Ronald Reagan was on the ropes during Iran-Contra, though the country pulled back at the moment of truth. Not a record of stability in our highest office.

 There is a deep irony here. We came through the Great Depression and World War II with our institutions relatively unscathed, never really tempted by the afflictions of authoritarianism and totalitarianism. As a result, democracy could sum up the dreams of revolutionaries in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. Timothy Garton Ash tells us that "the leaders of the revolutions . . . had a startlingly clear idea of the constitutional order they wanted to build which bore not a little resemblance" to that of the American revolution. They must now feel they are being integrated into a burning house as we act with reckless disregard toward our own.

One is not reassured by comparisons of the current crisis with Watergate. Much has changed. The judiciary was a benign and sober guide through that crisis. It is at the center of this one, following a series of "scandals" which have deeply undermined the integrity of that institution. Congress and the press have suffered parallel declines in public trust and esteem. The "new media" have quickened the cycles of interaction. The twenty-four-hour news cycle is now a twenty-two-minute one and, as a result, we move from an initial report to discussion of impeachment within a working day or two.

 Indeed, the tone and imagery of these scandals, if not their origins, are now a function of unused capacity in communications: too much time and space chasing too little information. As a result, news is displaced by hyperbole, rumor, and innuendo as if the technology had caused a cultural stroke. And in the midst of this, journalists, particularly on television, seem to derive unusual pleasure from the national trauma, suggesting they no longer have a stake in the Republic. After all, if it is good for journalists, it ought to be good for the country.

Attempts to excuse the press from diminishing the authority of democratic institutions simply will not work. The standard excuses -- "it's always been this way," "competition is driving us to excess," "we're only satisfying the appetites of the audience," "don't blame the messenger" -- will work at gatherings of journalists and owners but will not withstand reasoned debate. The apparent indifference to the erosion of democratic institutions is predicated on a belief that times will always be good. However, when the economic going gets rough, as it will again, people begin to doubt the constitution of liberty and are tempted by illiberal, apolitical projects. In such a crisis it might prove impossible to reinvent and repair institutions we have so carelessly damaged.

 The ultimate justification for journalism and the First Amendment is that together they constitute us as a civil society and set us in conversation with one another. Journalism is our public diary, our day book, and as such it forms our collective memory. Republics are structures of memory and as Milan Kundera says in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, "the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting." But as one crisis succeeds another, each becomes eminently forgettable, though each leaves a trace, an image on the national unconscious -- one eighth grader interviewed on television could only remember the "semen on a dress." Because history, fiction, comedy, and conversation are happy parasites on journalism -- they begin from the news of the day -- these destructive images are what remain in public memory.

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