‘Middletown’ USA- ill-equipped for the 21st century

hotair allahpundit

Excerpts:

• “Something seems to be going terribly wrong.”
• The winning strategy is no longer to be more moderate than your opponent, to offer a bigger tent. Instead, it is to be more zealous and committed to your party’s ideology…
• The individual pursuit of rational self-interest by parties and politicians, which in political and economic theory is supposed to generate the best outcome, has instead led to a cycle in which extremism, partisanship and stalemate all beget more of the same.
• America today increasingly looks like the society that the political scientist Mancur Olson wrote about in his 1982 classic ‘The Rise and Decline of Nations.’ 
• “As you might have guessed, I’m arguing that there is a politically underrepresented ‘populist’ constituency in America. Demographically, they are noncollege-educated whites. Philosophically, they are generally Christian conservatives who are also skeptical of big business. They are pro-gun and pro-union. They are pro-life and pro-tariff. They believe in God and government…

Comment:

Prosperity will cure these ills, but what if prosperity is a bridge too far?  The outcome could be unthinkable.

But is prosperity a bridge too far?  Probably not, but this is sobering enough to think that it might be.

The polarization mentioned could be a result of the tribalism alluded to in an earlier post.  The insularity of the internet could be a driving force.  Too many people are being drawn into these churches and emerging as a tribe on a warpath.

Update:

Here's the Washington Post editorial which kicked off the whole discussion.  And a surprising quote that came at the very end of the piece:

Government can’t be the solution when it is the problem.

Didn't Ronald Reagan say that?  The end result of all this is that you can't depend upon the government to solve problems.  What do you depend upon?  Yourselves!