The Solution
Pie In The Sky?—An Offer You Can’t Refuse
Part 3 of 7
 

Philosophical differences explain political positions. Republicans are not hardhearted; they sincerely believe that an overweight welfare state needs trimming. Their entitlement cuts are not real cuts, just small reductions in the anticipated rate of growth of welfare programs. Republicans needed those projected savings for real reductions in taxes, reductions promised in their Contract. They trust that tax cuts will stimulate economic growth and raise the average standard of living, an event sure to solve some national problems.

Democrats fight a holding action against visions of expanding cracks in their social programs, government edifices built during the decades of the New Deal and the Great Society. They are the party of the poor and the working class, incapable of explaining their defeats in light of their numerically superior constituency. They are also the party without a single new idea, one jinxed with resignations and desertions.

Most of the political leadership misinterpret public mood. They see it as fractionalized anger, as dozens of hungry special interest groups, none of them mild-mannered vegetarians, snarling over legislative pork. They see themselves walking a sagging tightrope, getting closer and closer to some combination of claws and fangs ready to eat them alive. Day after day they see specific directed anger but miss the defining underlying anxiety.

Most of the middle class, the voting majority, is distressed by an out-of-control inefficient government seemingly impotent to make meaningful improvements in their lives. They are troubled by an uncertain future, by inadequate savings, by working harder and achieving less, by doing without but never getting ahead. They are tormented in an economy where the financial cream goes to a wealthy elite, skim milk to the wage-slaves who feed the cows and run the dairy.

America staggers under a heavy load of confrontational politics, one special interest group against another, have-nots against the haves, young against the elderly. The poor resent government programs and institutions that limit genuine opportunity for their prosperity. A minimum-wage younger generation resents transferring a portion of their earnings to an older generation with a pension, a paid-for house, two cars, a boat, and a vacation condo. Numerous subcultures, created and maintained by a single philosophical error, constantly battle each other over transient issues.

People are angry. They usually focus that anger on immediate individual concerns making it appear fractionated. There is, however, one common connecting thread—the feeling of hopelessness, of being powerless in a political system running on raw power.

Three things mark the public’s reaction to their plight. One is a general distrust of government where insiders buy and sell public policy. The second is a readiness to challenge traditional political parties. When their insiders consistently lose they look for a new team. Finally, there is the search for a hero, a leader, a national patriarch with a message of hope.

Party affiliation is a minor detail for disgruntled voters. Most are. Feeling politically homeless, they enlist in third-party movements. Unfortunately, the usual attraction is a magnetic personality or rhetoric about feel-good legislation, laws ineffective for solving serious national problems, laws that make only trivial changes in their lives.