It’s an axiom of politics – all politics, really – that people get the government they deserve.

Kevin O’Brien at the Cleveland Plain Dealer thinks that people are finally starting to realize they deserve better:

For many a year now, officeholders of both major parties have worked hard to earn the distrust of ordinary Americans. It appears that they finally have succeeded.

If only ordinary Americans hadn’t been so inattentive. If only ordinary Americans hadn’t been so trusting. If only ordinary Americans hadn’t been so damnably nice, the country would be in a better position to manage its finances today.

But when have Americans not tried to look for the good in every situation? When have we not been slow to recognize the need to deal with forces, foreign or domestic, aligning against our best interests?

Somewhere along the way our media and current ruling class (PTR) got the idea that “unity” and “bipartisanship” and phony harmony was better than conflict in pursuit of our best interests.

Over the past year, this has gotten rocked on its heels:

This past year,

Hallelujah.

The people who are angry today are more in tune with this nation’s founders than ordinary Americans have been in decades.

“But wait! The founding fathers were smart!”

Er, yeah.  Smart enough to know that government needs to be taken out and beaten back down to size with baseball bats once in a while.

The United States has an intricate system of checks and balances, and a government structure based on a separation of powers, and a Bill of Rights that safeguards the rights of states and the rights of the people precisely because the greatest collection of political talent and philosophical insight ever assembled on this continent — and maybe anywhere on this planet — looked at the concept of government and said, “We need to make a really small cage for this thing, then be careful not to overfeed it.”

We seem to have lost the care-and- feeding instructions about a century ago. We let government out of its little cage and it has been consuming everything it can lay its paws on ever since. In the last 45 years, it has been on a real binge, and in the last year and a half, it has taken bigger bites than a lot of people thought possible.

What was the stupid old bumper sticker?  “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention?”

Well, outrage isn’t needed.  Just a whole bunch of the focused motivation that comes from a constructive response to anger.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Friday, April 9th, 2010 at 6:51 am and is filed under Conservatism, Culture War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.