If anyone tries to tell you that all of our problems began with the growth of the regulation state in the 1970s, you might respond by pointing out the graph above, the end of the Bretton Woods era, the U. S.’s greatly increasing the proportion of GDP devoted to entitlements, the amount we squandered on waging the war in Vietnam, the OPEC oil embargo, Nixon’s wage and price controls, and major changes in how the Democratic Party nominated presidential candidates, just to name a few.
There was a lot going on in the early 1970s. A truer and greater insight into what has actually happened might be derived by reflecting on how those developments were interrelated.
Reflecting on how policies interrelate is the missing ingredient in moderate politics. Even when we had less polarity, at best moderates engaged in horse trading, which simply drifts toward polarity as each side trades off things that are important to their base for other things that they can convince their base voters are more important than the things they gave up.
But for good policy, what is needed is an examination of which proposals from each side can be stitched together into coherent policy. For that though, we need the people who used to be referred to as statesmen, or better yet, elder statesmen. Now even our elder politicians are partisans.