“I watched the House debate and vote on C-Span last night and found it clarifying (in the moments of prolonged silence when nothing was happening I switched to the yammer-fests on cable news and couldn’t stand it for more than a minute).”
George Packer : The New Yorker
Packer adds this among his many other acute observations.
“The implied or explicit premise of every Republican I heard is that any involvement of government in our lives is an arrogant abrogation of freedom. The kinds of arguments only a few hard-liners made against Medicare forty-five years ago are today the overwhelming—the smothering—ideology of just about every Republican official.”
Those of you whose political awareness originated in the past 30 years (since Reagan, in other words) perhaps cannot fully comprehend how the context has changed. Politics has always been charged, but railing against government — as so many politicians do — has fundamentally changed the nature of the debate. It used to be the argument was what and how government should act. The discussion now sees to be about whether government should exist.