IT'S ALREADY been dubbed "Substance Chic"--what politicians are sensing and pollsters are confirming is a rejuvenated concern among many Americans that their leaders demonstrate a more considered contemplation of the pressing and not-so-pressing issues of the day and possess a requisite store of personal solidity, stability and integrity. Deserving victims of the new trend, who could no longer maintain their positive image in a newly-acute public eye, range from politicians as diverse as Ronald Reagan and Gary Hart to various and sundry purveyors of salvation in the evangelical movement such as Jim Bakker, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. Looking back over the changes in the American zeitgeist over the past nine months, we can only hope that "Substance Chic" is more than just a passing fad.

It all began last October. Until that month, President Ronald Reagan had been flying high. After playing upon that summer's drug hysteria the way a Horowitz plays upon a Steinway--only to fail to come through with the money or resources to actually do something about substance abuse--the President reaped the benefits of a popular tax reform bill with which he had little to do and, in fact, the concept of which he long had opposed. Then, during the first week of October, the cargo plane of one Eugene Hasenfus, an American mercenary, was shot down inside Nicaragua trying to deliver supplies to the contras. The bid Ronald Reagan was making for an honored place in the history books went down with it.

In retrospect, all of the Reagan Administration's dirty laundry so far revealed in the various inquiries looking into the Iran-contra shenanigans should have come as little surprise. In fact, in the two weeks before the Hasenfus plane was shot down alone two Administration actions were made public which neatly capture all that is wrong and odious in the arms-for-hostages deal with Iran and the diversion of profits from that sale to the contras. First, there was the case of journalist Nicholas P. Daniloff '56, arrested in Moscow by the Soviet Union on trumped-up espionage charges in retaliation for the arrest of a real Soviet spy working out of the United Nations.

After once again piously reaffirming America's resolve not to succumb to terrorism by striking deals with hostage-takers, Reagan did just that. In what was sarcastically referred to as "The Swap That Wasn't a Swap," Daniloff was returned to the U.S. and the Soviet spy went home to Moscow--but it wasn't a trade, the President said. The two actions were not related.

Then it was revealed that over the summer the Administration devised and acted upon a secret plan to deceive the American media--by planting an apocryphal story in The Wall Street Journal--so as to convince Libyan military officers that an American invasion of their country was imminent and incite them to depose Col. Khadaffy. A laudable aspiration, perhaps, but one which the Administration sought to achieve through manipulative means wholly in contradiction with fundamental American values about honesty and forthrightness in government. Making matters more repulsive was a report a few weeks later which showed that the Administration doctored the evidence it did not invent implicating Khadaffy in the bombing of a West German disco the year before which led to the death of an American soldier and the U.S. bombing of Tripoli.

The only conclusion that can be reached from these two events and the whole Iran-contra mess is that when it is used in the putative defense of liberty, deception of the electorate, the younger sibling of extremism, is no vice to Ronald Reagan and his cronies. Thus Ollie North, who seems not only to have deceived his country but also his friends, is "a national hero" in Ronald Reagan's misty eyes. And what really gets the President's goat--"what is driving me up the walls," as he told Time Magazine in a remarkable interview at the end of November--"is that this [the Iran-contra affair] wasn't a failure until the press got a tip from that rag in Beirut and began to play it up."

Of course, rag or not, the Beirut paper went public with truthful information on the episode, something the President's Administration cannot boast having done. The current Senate hearings are of only a limited, investigatory scope, and the full repercussions of the Administration's dealings with the Nicaraguan contras and Iranian Shi'ites will not be known until Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh begins handing down indictments. What is clear is that the conclusions of the Tower Commission were wrong. The fault lie not with the President's "management-style" but with the President himself. Ollie North and his band of private and semi-private operatives were not acting as rogue agents but with, at best, an implicit understanding of what they were up to among officials at the highest level of government. If Reagan did not tell North in no uncertain terms to secret arms and supplies to the contras, he let it be known that such would not disturb him in the least. Nor has he indicated that he is disturbed by North's activities since they were revealed nearly 7 months ago.

Ronald Reagan has always run for office proclaiming himself to be a government outsider, but he took his absurd style of governing as a government outsider a bit too far when he allowed his aides to formulate and execute American foreign policy in the White House basement, bypassing the State Department as well as the Congress. At one point Albert Hakim, an Iranian financier and arms merchant, was sent to Iran by high administration officials to negotiate secret treaties on behalf of the U.S. with the ayatollahs.

The upshot of all this is that nearly three-quarters of the American people firmly believe their president, whom they have twice elected with overwhelming majorities, is lying to them when he claims ignorance of all the dirty dealing.

We find ourselves faced with a return to the cynicism and mistrust that we are told characterized the post-Vietnam era. The irony, of course, is that Reagan was elected to the presidency promising to overcome the often paralyzing effects of such a national state of mind and "get America moving again." But a renewed skepticism about public figures, be they political or religious leaders, need not be something to dread. In fact, it is something to be desired, a basic tenet of any truly democratic democratic theory.

In other words, the faith Americans placed in Ronald Reagan was never justified and should never be possessed by any one single democratic leader. Few things are more dangerous for democracy than a leader perceived to be so great that he is entrusted with commensurate powers, for such discretion inevitably is passed on to less worthy successors. When a leader as loved and trusted as Ronald Reagan betrays the American people, popular recrimination and disengagement from the public sphere can be expected. This would be the worst consequence of the Administration's brazen disregard for law--if Americans walked away from the experience jaded, thinking democracy and politics inherently flawed. But while Americans need to learn something from the Iran-contra scandal, their lesson need not be a harsh one.

In this 200th anniversary of the founding of the constitution, it must be repeated again and again that in the system of checks and balances devised by the Founding Fathers "the people" ultimately are sovereign. Elected officials rule at their pleasure and on their behalf. It was correctly assumed that the people would play a greater, if less explicit role in the governing of their lives than any of the three branches of government that magnificent document created. It was that obligation Americans neglected after they twice elected Ronald Reagan to the presidency. If any good is to come out of the whole Reagan-Iran-contra mess, it will be if individual Americans rediscover and reclaim that duty to themselves and to each other.