Kennedy, Reagan, Loved for All the Wrong Reasons: Robert Dallek
The historian Richard Hofstadter said that the U.S. is the only country in history that believes it was born perfect and strives for improvement. The idea that we are a nation without flaws or that we can permanently eliminate our very human failings is, of course, delusional.
But America’s current political divide has produced equally ludicrous notions of outsized defects. The contemporary conservative idea that government is the source of all the country’s woes is reductionist and worse. The Tea Party crowd seems incapable of understanding that New Deal and Great Society programs humanized the U.S. industrial system and saved free enterprise from its worst excesses.
On the other side, the Occupiers have decried the greatest concentration of wealth since the 19th-century Gilded Age, but they have been too quick to strike out at symbols of the national malaise without advancing a coherent agenda for righting social and economic wrongs.
The country is unquestionably struggling with large economic problems that jeopardize its domestic tranquility and future prosperity. But anti-government rhetoric and anti-Wall Street complaints hardly provide credible answers. The opposing sides see nothing ahead but doom and gloom unless they win command of the nation’s power centers and enact their programs of change.
much more:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-11-30/kennedy-reagan-loved-for-all-the-wrong-reasons-robert-dallek.html
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