Is the United States government broken? It is a big topic of discussion among the pundits, and a regular source of journalistic fodder. Many people are claiming that the government can't seem to get its act together and work out bipartisan solutions to the many problems facing our country, and that our political system is broken. CNN, in fact, is currently running a series of articles analyzing this very claim.
America's political system, however, is not broken. It is operating just as it should. There cannot, and should not, be consensus in Congress where there is no consensus among the people.
David Gergen, in his article, "Is America becoming a house divided against itself?" has stated only the symptoms of America's current situation. For example, he quotes a NY Times columnist who laments "that by the late 1960s, 'the bipartisan national consensus over the central role of government -- which had held firm through the Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson administrations -- was kaput. The Reagan revolution was in the wings.'" Interesting that he would choose that spate of Presidents. Roosevelt was himself a revolutionary President, injecting a dose of socialism into America, and those Presidents listed pretty much followed that lead. Even Eisenhower was far enough Left that Truman approached him as a potential running mate in 1948. And even at that, America had to stumble through the egocentric Presidency of Nixon and the largely inept Presidencies of Ford and Carter before rising up in 1980 to elect Reagan.
Yet that columnist's comment probably best suggests the course that America has taken and which brought us to where we are. Up until the time of Roosevelt, government was understood to be limited. It was not thought that government "solved" social problems or "controlled" the economy. However, only a few years prior to Roosevelt, the Good Socialist Ship Utopia had been launched by Marx and Lenin under the banner of Socialist Ideology. It was widely accepted then as today by those who deem themselves the intellectual Elite. With the '29 crash came an opportunity for change, and Roosevelt responded throughout the 1930's Great Depression, as government officials jumped from the dock of traditional America to the SS Utopia, with tremendous extensions of government power into areas previously unimagined.
Arguably, those "socialist injections" merely prolonged and aggravated the depression, and possibly contributed to the worldwide conditions which enabled the rise of Hitler's Fascist Socialism and WWII, since America did not really recover until after the war. Yet, whether those ideas worked or not, the Elites and their liberal cohort have since been bent on a course of government expansion toward the socialist model.
By the 1960's, the public educators and the jurists had also jumped from the dock to the SS Utopia. Since then, they have fired the boilers and are ready to steam to the promised land of the Worker's Paradise. They have no use for the "regressive," old-fashioned ideas of the traditional American; they want to outlaw those ideas and legislate a new society, an amoral, government-dependent people led by enlightened elite. The American traditionalist, still on the dock, holds to the ideas of the founders; a culture seeking to rely on moral, independent people, rooted in the Judeo-Christian ethic, employing public servants to complete the minimal tasks of government.
And where is the moderate? Trying to bridge the gap between ship and dock, with one foot on each, hoping to compromise irreconcilable differences. Mr. Gergen wonders why there are fewer moderates every year, but the answer is simple - their legs just aren't long enough anymore. The liberals are on the move, the conservatives are holding fast, and society is forcing a choice. There are no bipartisan solutions; the laws and policies which make socialism work and those which make a republic work are mutually exclusive. Muddled moderates simply make matters worse with their indecision. It is not a broken government - it is a broken culture. And Congress can't move on the issues before it until the American public makes up its mind.
No comments:
Post a Comment