I like reading what Robert Reich has to say and I tend to agree with him more often than I disagree. Today, it’s a little bit of both. First there’s this:

Newt Gingrich is saying if Republicans win back control of Congress and reach a budget impasse with the President, they should shut down the government again. GOP pollster Dick Morris is echoing those sentiments, as is Rep. Lynn Westmoreland (R. Ga), and Alaska GOP Senate candidate Joe Miller.

Reich points out that this sort of temper tantrum didn’t really work too well for Gingrich and the Republicans the first time around, as Clinton was ultimately re-elected and Gingrich was featured in all sorts of Democratic campaign ads.

And yet the ultimate conclusion about Americans that he draws from the mid-1990s doesn’t really resonate with me at the moment, with all the anti-immigration, anti-Muslim, Obama birth certificate, American socialist, and Tea Party nonsense. He says:

Americans may be cynical about government but we’re proud of our system of governance. And we don’t want it to be used as a political pawn in partisan power games. That’s what Republicans forget time and again. They dislike government so much they don’t see the difference between government as a bureaucracy and democratic governance as a cherished system.

In some sense, it’s true that we’re all proud of our system of government. But that’s no great revelation; it really amounts to little more than the fact that we all like democracy and very much prefer it to monarchy, oligarchy, socialism, or fascism.

At the moment — and maybe it’s not just this moment; maybe I just started seeing it in the past few years — my sense is that there’s a sizable chunk of the populace who think they would greatly prefer that the government stop functioning rather than suffering any further indignities (like increased taxes, a government role in health care, the legality of gay marriage or stem cell research, the continuation of birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented workers, or other nefarious Democratic plots).

This is a chunk of the populace who believe — wrongly, of course — that democracy is the greatest of all the possible kinds of government … unless their preferences aren’t the ones that win the day. For this group, a shutdown turns out to be preferable to allowing the other side any sort of victory.

Gingrich plays to this sentiment because it seems to be very much in line with his own, one that considers politics to be purely a zero-sum game, one where cooperation is senseless because one side can win only at the expense of the other side.