In her chronicle of how Americans became so divided in their political and partisan views, Nancy Gibbs’s Harvard speech, reproduced at Time, has some curious lacunae. She doesn’t, for example, mention that the proportion of immigrants living here has doubled since 1990, the period she’s considering, and is now as high as it’s been in more than a century. Good or bad I don’t think we should be surprised that the social fabric is becoming frayed.
I’m also a bit skeptical of her premise. How would you go about distinguishing between divisions that have arisen over the last generation and those that pre-existed and are only now being revealed by all-seeing social media and the collapse of gatekeeper media? Some of the evidence she presents (the number of uncontested elections) points to tremendous agreement rather than disagreement. Maybe the number of uncontested elections reveals the tremendous disconnect between the political powers-that-be and the people they serve.
However, the one observation I can make is that the stakes are enormously higher than they’ve ever been. Never have so many people made so much money from business as usual at the federal government.
So, follow the money. Who benefits from division?
“Never have so many people made so much money from business as usual at the federal government.”
Write that on the blackboard 100 times. Then refer to it every time during the upcoming budget standoff when Nancy and Chuck tell us it’s surely death, disease and suffering of all sorts for millions should we dare change a thing.
But they are politicians. Dr Taylor ran a distraught piece over at OTB lamenting the destruction of the State Department. Descriptions of Tillerson such as incompetent and stupid filled the pages. Good for a laugh and the observation “spoken like a college professor.” I doubt Dr Taylors real live managerial acumen extends much beyond submitting a requisition and watching money magically appear. And to think these government agencies are chock full of academics, lawyers and the like. Is it any wonder governments track record, let’s take, oh, State for example, is less than sparkling.
How about a thought experiment. Federal, state and local government controls a large fraction of the national output. Get a yellow pad of paper out and list the goods and services you can think and the ratio produced by the private sector vs government. Can the slaughter rule be invoked? Which brings us full circle to Dave’s observation in his last two paragraphs. Government has just become a big poker game. Taxes feed the pot. People hope their reps and senators are the better players.
Another fine mess.
WRT the complaints about the State Department, Tillerson, etc. I don’t think that many academics or present State Department employees really know what big company CEOs do. They don’t just sit around giving orders. They’re politicians who conduct negotiations and in today’s global economy at least some of those negotiations are overseas.
Today there are more Americans who hold passports than there were Americans when I was a young kid. The days of foreign service officers as aristocrats with unique experience of conditions in other countries went out with spats.