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Salon Journalist Panics Over Political Crisis
[FEE.org] The most filiopietistic defenders of the social-democratic nation state have regarded Donald Trump as their black beast since he stepped into politics. So surely they are thrilled by his probable decline and fall?Not quite. In fact, there is a growing sense of panic on the part of old-time “progressives” that the political system, the policy consensus, and the moral credibility of big government itself are no longer sustainable propositions. The emergence of Trump has become their exhibit A. “How could this have happened?” they ask themselves. What is so fundamentally unstable about the system we’ve created that so many seem willing to try something, anything, else? His success, however temporary, has been to contribute to a growing sense of panic that public respect for government is at an all-time low. Perhaps, they worry, our elections have become nothing more than entertainment but otherwise completely ineffective methods of engineering consent. Without that consent, the stability of core institutions of command-and-control is no longer sustainable. It’s not just that Trump was nominated. It is too simple an explanation to say he was a singular event, that his success, however temporary, was his alone. No one can imagine that anything like this would have happened in the 1950s, for example, at the high point of the American political consensus. What has happened to the health of the public sector that has enabled these sorts of unthinkables to happen in the first place? It’s No Longer Working Keep the stakes in mind. The experiment with a central state that knows no limits to its power – controlling every interaction, permissioning or forbidding every choice – is little more than 100 years old. Nearly the whole of the bureaucratic, interventionist, regulatory, welfare-warfare state is a 20th-century creation. It was made by legislatures, judges, and ruling executives. What is made by law cannot be as sticky a part of the social structure as that which emerges from voluntary action. It can therefore be unmade. And much of what they built is under serious pressure: fast approaching bankruptcy (Social Security to Obamacare), a self-evident failure (public schooling and the Iraq war), and being outrun by more innovative structures in the private sector (P2P technologies and distributed power). Without this backdrop, consider the alarm of Andrew O’Hehir at Salon. The meaning of his piece depends on how you read it. He is describing disaster from his point of view. I read it and think: let it be so! More at the link Posted by: badanov 2016-10-25 |
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