(On the USAir Shuttle to DC) Mark Danner in the New York Review of Books:

However cynically we look to our political past, it is there that we find our political Eden: Vietnam and its domestic denouement, Watergate—the climax of a different time of scandal that ended a war and brought down a president. In retrospect those events unfold with the clear logic of utopian dream. First, revelation: intrepid journalists exposing the gaudy, interlocking crimes of the Nixon administration. Then, investigation: not just by the press—for that was but precursor, the necessary condition—but by Congress and the courts. Investigation, that is, by the polity, working through its institutions to construct a story of grim truth that citizens can in common accept. And finally expiation: the handing down of sentences, the politicians in shackles led off to jail, the orgy of public repentance.

But today, Danner writes, scandals have no repercussions. Powerful people are “exposed” doing bad things and just keep on doing them. “Revelation of wrongdoing leads not to definitive investigation, punishment, and expiation but to more scandal. Permanent scandal. Frozen scandal.”

The present situation is the typical one, I believe, and the Watergate era was an exception. In general, information is not a form of power. Information and analysis are essential conditions of good political action, but they do not cause things to happen. We expect far too much from disclosure and transparency, when we actually need motivated, skilled, and organized citizens. The important truths are already clear enough; we need ways of acting on them.

There is a great old American tradition of believing that publicizing and exposing once-secret facts will influence power. According to the historian Robert Wiebe, the Progressives of 1900-1924 believed that “the interests thrived on secrecy, the people on information. No word carried more progressive freight than ‘publicity’: expose the backroom deals in government, scrutinize the balance sheets of corporations, attend the public hearings on city services, study the effects of low wages on family life. Mayor Tom Johnson of Cleveland held public meetings to educate its citizens. Senator Robert LaFollette of Wisconsin heaped statistics on his constituents from the back of a campaign wagon. Once the public knew, it would act; knowledge produced solutions.” Lewis Brandeis captured this theory in an aphorism: “Sunlight is the best disinfectant.”

The edenic period to which Danner refers, the 1970s, saw a revival of these ideas. John Gardner, Ralph Nader, and their allies were heirs to Brandeis and La Follette. They won and used the Freedom of Information Act, sued corporations to force disclosure of their records, and barraged the media with statistics. Meanwhile, the New York Times fought the Pentagon in the Supreme Court, and Woodward and Bernstein interviewed Deep Throat in a parking garage. Thanks to their efforts, William Greider argued at the time, “information, not dirty money, is the vital core of the contemporary governing process.” This idea could be raised to a very high principle. Dr. King had preached: “We shall overcome because there is something in this universe which justifies William Cullen Bryant in saying truth crushed to earth shall rise again.”

A whole slew of liberal “public interest lobbies” arose, whose role was feed hitherto secret information to the public through the nonpartisan and professional press. David Vogel writes that in the early 1970’s, nearly 100,000 households gave “at least $70 a year to three or more of the following: Common Cause, Public Citizen, ACLU, public television and public radio, and environmental lobbying groups”–institutions that attempted to check power with data. Senator Abraham Ribikoff observed, “instead of the big lobbies of the major corporations dominating the hearings process, you have had practically every committee in Congress according ‘equal time’ to public interest people.”

Today, I sense a revival of the Brandeis theory of power-through-transparency. It is a reaction to the indefensible secrecy-mania of the Bush years, and it embraces the Internet as a powerful new tool for disclosure. But the previous waves of transparency proved disappointing, and we should bear their lessons in mind.

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(Madison, WI): I am swearing off this blog for Thanksgiving Day and the day after, as I have every year since 2003. I am thankful for many things, including the opportunity to write on this space. Back on Monday.

I am pleased that this year’s election has prompted a lot of thinking about how to keep young people engaged. “Beyond the Vote” was the theme of the National Conference on Citizenship. There have been good news articles on the topic, e.g., this one in the Atlanta Journal Constitution. And now The American Prospect has asked a bunch of experts, plus me, to opine on what the Obama Administration should do to keep young people excited. Here are all the suggestions. Mine is this:

Barack Obama won an unprecedented 66 percent of the under-30 vote. Ronald Reagan set the previous record with 59 percent in 1984. The Reagan cohort has remained conservative ever since. Obama now has an opportunity to achieve a lasting realignment.

On the campaign trail, he electrified youth by asking them to work on public problems: “I will ask for your service and your active citizenship when I am president of the United States. This will not be a call issued in one speech or program; this will be a cause of my presidency.”

“Active citizenship” means more than helping the needy (which defined the liberalism of the Clinton era). It means talking with diverse people about challenges, analyzing and debating, and then working together to solve problems. Youth are hungry for this kind of work.

During the campaign, Obama gave youth many ways to plug in, from “friending” him on Facebook to taking a semester off to organize. Now that the election is over, he needs to offer a similar range of opportunities to cement their engagement. An issue like climate change requires a full spectrum of participation, from pledging not to drive once a week, to advocating legislation, to weatherizing homes as an Americorps volunteer, to becoming an EPA scientist. At a time when jobs are scarce and the public sector is weak and archaic, citizens’ work should be the hallmark. Then, there will be Obama Democrats in 2060 the way there are New Deal Democrats today.

I’m actually doing some fairly serious, data-driven research on generations’ roles in political realignments. It’s interesting stuff but I’m far from being able to report anything here.

(Des Moines) After meetings this morning, I’ll be on airplanes almost all day. No time to post anything substantive, but there’s a nice feature article about CIRCLE on the Tufts University home page right now.

(Des Moines, IA) I’m here to talk to teachers, students, and nonprofit leaders about service-learning: the intentional combination of community service with academic work. This is a big deal–24% of schools offer it. But the prevalence has declined, according to a new study by the Corporation for National and Community Service–down from 32 percent in 1999.

It’s my sense that the movement for service-learning has reached a crisis point. It isn’t included in federal education law; it isn’t a priority in an era of concern about reading and math; the federal funding has been cut (in real terms) since 2001; and the quality of programs is so uneven that outsiders could be reasonably skeptical about its value. On the other hand, the best programs are superb; they fit the outlook of the incoming administration; and there is strong support for service-learning in the Kennedy-Hatch Serve-America bill that both Senators McCain and Obama promised to sign. That bill would direct most resources to poor districts, which today are much less likely to offer service-learning. So we could be poised for improvements in quality, quantity, and eqaulity. Or else service-learning could falter if Kennedy-Hatch isn’t fully funded and the grassroots movement continues to shrink.