![]() “I think what we’ve got going on here in America is the perfect storm of not-good things,” he said. Joe Teasdale, a 59-year-old assistant engineer at a Wisconsin casino, summed up the view in his response to the AP. Rather than seeing our challenges as evil or even bad, we can chalk them up to mere fate. If we can’t count on Washington to control the malevolent forces that dwarf us all, what - or who - can we count on?Ī rhetorical question like that can send us into pretty fatalistic territory. On the other, they’ve lost confidence in the idea that there’s anything more powerful than government. Why the impasse? On the one hand, Americans have lost confidence in the power of government to solve our largest problems. Whenever populists stand up and blame the elites who run the show, however, they’re slammed as dangerous demagogues who aren’t “solutions-oriented.” ![]() And pundits and officeholders can get a lot of airtime blaming America’s misfortunes on an attitude problem, calling us - or those who disagree with them - little more than “a nation of whiners.” It’s easy to mistake our shaken confidence for the kind of “malaise” that Jimmy Carter was mocked for bemoaning.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |