Our country is in a terrible state.
That’s pretty obvious.
Many of my friends think it is the culture and blame the Republicans and Democrats equally. I do not think this is so.
The problem, best I can tell, is that the Republican party has been captured by an insane ideology that repudiates the last hundred years of social advancement and wants to pull us back to the gilded age. But under that gilding was a terrible soul rot, with a few very rich, and many very poor.
And here’s another hard fact. The Democrats can be asses, and often are, but they are not the problem…
Seeking clarity about what is going on has been obscured by the press (writ large) who in an an attempt to be even handed, have in fact flattened all argument, and have sometimes, and particularly in this area made things seem equivalent when they are not.
And in doing so they’ve obscured what is going on.
Finally two scholars have come along, one identified with the Democratic party and the other with the Republican party who have turned an unblinking eye on the problem.
Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein write in their new book, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, “One of the two major parties, the Republican Party, has become an insurgent outlier — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition,”
Friends, we have a major problem.
For more, National Public Radio’s Morning Edition did a very good interview with them. Go here for the audio and a text version.
I fear for the republic.
And for our children.
And for theirs…
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