... For more than 40 years, candidates on both sides of the aisle have sold variants of the same cynical snake oil to the American public: “Washington is broken, and only an outsider can fix it.”

Politicians rely on this canard because it works. Voters buy into the promise of outsiders without recognizing the reality: The dysfunction in Washington is more a consequence of a political system run by inexperienced amateurs than of one manipulated by corrupt insiders.

Since a 40-year bipartisan lie about the urgent need for political “outsiders” is a lot to unpack, we need to start at the beginning: the years after World War II, which set the stage for today’s demonization of all things “Washington.”

After witnessing the horrific destruction visited upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki, most Americans grew cautious about who controlled the power of the atomic bomb. They wanted experienced men with cool heads and steady hands for presidents. And until baby boomers began swaying elections in the mid-1970s, this is what we got. (In 1976, the boomers, who were under 30 at the time, made up the largest share of the electorate for the first time — 29.4 percent of those who voted.)

In the 20 years between 1952 and 1972, Americans elected presidents who had substantial national political experience or distinguished military service records. John F. Kennedy was viewed as a novice compared to Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson. Yet before running for president, Kennedy had already served four years in the U.S. Naval Reserve, six years in the U.S. House of Representatives and another eight years in the U.S. Senate. In our current environment, he would be maligned for being a career politician.

But then came the disillusioning one-two punch of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal. Crucially, neither of these events happened quickly. For more than eight years (between the Battle of la Drang in fall 1965 and Nixon’s resignation in summer 1974), the country endured one horrific revelation after another, from the thousands of troops reported dead overseas to the violent protests at home to the ugly details of government coverups, first about U.S. involvement in Vietnam and then about the many shady dealings of Nixon’s political team.

These revelations were exacerbated by the ever growing credibility gap fueled by the government’s overly rosy picture of the situation in Vietnam, as well as lies about the political scandals back home.

The boomers, who were coming of age at that time, developed a dark view of politics. As NPR’s Don Gonyea explained in a 2011 report, “the baby boomers remain very much a swing segment of the electorate. But there has been one constant for the members of this iconic generation, going back to the time of Watergate and Vietnam. They expressed a deep lack of trust in government back then — and that lack of trust persists today.”

Importantly, Johnson and Nixon, the presidents whose failures fueled this cynicism and distrust, were of opposite political parties, and each had scored landslide reelection victories (each won more than 60 percent of the popular vote and more than 90 percent of the electoral vote). The electorate had trusted each, and each failed voters. Because they represented opposing parties, their political and moral failings couldn’t be viewed through a partisan lens. Instead, they only made sense as the result of their long political service.

Up-and-coming politicians in both parties played and preyed on this discontent, which over time grew to include a paranoid assumption that all politicians were corrupt and politics was never about public service, but rapacious self-interest. .../