Friday, February 19, 2010
Krauthammer: Excuses for Obama's Failure to Lead
In the latter days of the Carter presidency, it became fashionable to say that the office had become unmanageable and was simply too big for one man. Some suggested a single, six-year presidential term. The president's own White House counsel suggested abolishing the separation of powers and going to a more parliamentary system of unitary executive control. America had become ungovernable.
Then came Ronald Reagan, and all that chatter disappeared...
Read the rest. Referring to American's "ungovernability," he concludes:
...That's not a structural defect. That's a textbook demonstration of popular will expressing itself -- despite the special interests -- through the existing structures. In other words, the system worked.
In other words, it's not a bug, it's a feature. Exactly right. America was made to be ungovernable, or, perhaps more exactly, unrulable. We are unruly. We have been from the start and we should always remain so. If your big ideas are so big that you can't implement them, that the push back makes it impossible to legislate in a two party state, then you need to come up with smaller ideas. Lord save us from some collegian's latest big idea. Well, the Lord may not do it, but the Constitution has a tendency to step in to the rescue.
Indeed.
There is more to this in the way the New Left has empowered groups and promoted multiculturalism, making the US even more ungovernable.
It used to be that the WASP or WP, later the white christian, nature of the polity were more likely to be able to reach compromise.
So it is true that the US has become less governable. As the polity has less in common, and not only that, but much of the New Left and their identity groups are downright hostile to the WASP, etc. Not to mention the downright hostility of some of these groups to America, and Western Civilization and European peoples.
We live in interesting times.