I think most of our problems transcend politics, which is increasingly a reflection of an elite, insider culture that is completely at odds with the majority of the country that it oversees.This is not a new phenomena - nations and cultures have always been led by small and powerful elites who reward themselves generously and look out for their own first. And these elites usually come to live in a small insular world of their own kind, largely isolated from the lives of the average people around them. And as a result, they eventually evolve a world view dissociated from the realities of the real world around them. Today in America is no different.
So Hanson's argument that our current severe problems aren't really rooted in the politics of red and blue states, but rather in the unrealistic world views of our ruling elites, largely shared across the political spectrum, seems to me spot on.
How else to explain Democratic leaders who blithely commit trillions of dollars (not their dollars, of course) in the face of a truly monstrous national debt to programs that most citizens don't even want? How else to explain Republican leaders who are so woefully ignorant, or even disdainful, of scientific evidence that they continue to deny that climate change is occurring even in the midst of record-breaking heat waves? How else to explain a Congress that pretends to pass financial regulation reform when everyone can see that under pressure from the financial industry they removed almost all the real teeth from the bill first? How else to explain a series of administrations, Republican and Democratic alike, who keep us mired in two distant wars, neither of which are winnable?
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