It really isn’t difficult to explain the political paralysis that continues to worsen.
People care about their own opinions more than the truth. They also exhibit a kind of hypocritical behavior. The biggest culprit in our current predicament is the childishness, ignorance and growing incoherence of the public at large.
Anybody who says you can’t have it both ways clearly hasn’t been paying attention. The two major parties’ ideologies aren’t dissimilar anymore.
With the economy mired in a recession, some say the government is spending too much money on it.
We are in a country that simultaneously demands and rejects action on unemployment, deficits, health care and a whole host of other major problems.
Sixty percent of Americans want stricter regulations of financial institutions but are quick to say the country suffers from too much regulation.
That kind of illogic—or, if you prefer, susceptibility to rhetorical manipulation—is what locks the status quo in place.
At the root of this kind of self-contradiction is our historical, nationally characterological ambivalence about government.
We want Washington and the states to fix our problems NOW. At the same time, we want government to shrink, spend less, and reduce our taxes. We dislike government in the abstract.
Sixty seven percent of people favor balancing the budget even when the country is in a recession or a war, which is madness.
At the same time, people love government when it comes to opposing the kind of spending cuts that would reduce projected deficits, let alone eliminate them.
Much of the public wants to cancel any further stimulus, and a strong majority doesn’t want another round of it. But 80-plus percent of people want to extend unemployment benefits and to spend more money on roads and bridges. There’s another term for that stuff: more stimulus spending. Just throw more billions at any problem – which is ridiculous since there is little accountability on how that money is actually spent or whose pockets it lands in.
The usual way to describe such inconsistent demands from voters is to say that the public is an angry, populist mood.
But sadly, a lot more people are watching American Idol than are watching C-Span, and our collective illogic is mostly negligent rather than militant. The more compelling explanation is that the American public lives in Candyland, where government can tackle the big problems and get out of the way at the same time.
In this respect, the whole country is becoming more and more like California, where ignorance is bliss and the state’s bonds dropped to an A- rating (the same level as Libya’s), thanks to a referendum system that allows the people to be even more irresponsible than their elected representatives.
Middle-class Americans really don’t want to hear about sacrifices or tradeoffs—except as flattering descriptions about how ready we, as a people, are, or used to be, to accept them.
We like the idea of hard choices in theory. When was the last time we made one in reality? Oh yeah, they shut down the country and destroyed the economy and spending at a record rate.
The politicians thriving at the moment are the ones who embody this live-for-thetoday mentality, those best able to call for the impossible with a straight face.
No sensible person who has spent five minutes looking at the budgets coming down the pipes knows this spending can keep up without destroying the country entirely. And both parties are equally guilty at this point.
Our inability to address long-term challenges makes a strong case that the United States now faces an era of historical decline. To change this story line, we need to stop blaming the rascals we elect to office and start looking to ourselves.