July 18, 2007
Fear of Flying
People are starting to worry about the low ratings for Congress and the Executive. Bush is around 34%, and the Congress has fallen to 14%. The military is the only official institution to have substantial support, above 60%. As Don Surber points out: "And we dare mock the fledgling Iraqi democracy."
Why? Probably because the political class isn't attacking the military. Yet. But they've rather thoroughly managed to attack each other. Worse, they've encouraged their respective bases to demand total submission. Not only won't this happen, antagonizing the fringe, but the act of pandering to the fringe turns off the vast middle.
The result: Consider if airlines ran, year after year, advertisements attacking the safety and sanity of their competition. Gruesome photos of the other guy's aircraft littering a hillside, with "Don't Fly United" over a background of body bags. Etc. People would do anything not to fly.
So it is with modern US politics. The politics of personal destruction has become total war, and the political class has finally achieved mutual destruction. Perhaps it's time for the two parties to sit down for a bit.
Looking at the current Nolan chart, above, there's room for other ideologies -- either mild authoritarian (e.g. Bloomberg) or mild libertarian (Bill Gates?) seems wide open. As the two parties flee the center, even a pure centrist has a chance.
But it's getting increasingly obvious that the left-right statist axis is no longer meeting the country's needs.
Posted by Kevin Murphy at July 18, 2007 10:32 PM | TrackBack