Posted 8:55 PM by Blah blah

Politics just doesn't get it (Christian Science Monitor):

The Democrats were indeed a sorry sight, with their calcified issues - Social Security, prescription drugs - and tired scripts produced by battle-weary political consultants.

But lost in the commotion is that the Democrats are not alone. The Republican agenda is tired, too....

It's not just a Democratic agenda that is in trouble. We are witnessing the end of an entire political cosmology, the one that has defined politics in this country for the past century or more. It has been a Manichean struggle between the government on the one hand and the market on the other. Republicans have rooted for the corporations, while Democrats have been more inclined to use the state. Increasingly, reality does not fit the neat divide.

For one thing, the corporate marketplace and the government are fast becoming the same thing. Whatever one thinks about the prevailing version of the global economy, for example, it is a joint production of governments and corporations....

Increasingly, the problems that we face simply do not parse out upon a neat left/right, government/market grid. Take prescription drugs. Democrats want Medicare to ensure prescription drugs for seniors, while Republicans want private insurance companies to do it. That's the old script. But don't we need to ask a more basic question - namely, whether it is good for a society to become so drug dependent in the first place?...

Such developments are evidence of a fundamental shift that neither party wants to acknowledge. For the past century, the Holy Grail of American politics has been growth. Democrats have wanted to use government to spread the growth around, while Republicans have wanted to leave it be. But both have sought growth above all else. Yet increasingly, the particulars of growth are at odds with the gauzy abstraction. When growth means more huckstering to kids, more porn and pills, more noise and congestion and a thousand other things, then it's time for another look.

When reality no longer is in sync with the abstractions that supposedly describe it, it is a sign of a belief system in terminal decline. Republicans say let the market do it. Democrats say use the government to make sure everybody gets it. But more and more, the question is whether we ought to do it in the first place.