From the FINANCIAL TIMES:
…[Former president Bill] Clinton characterises the core problem as the dominance of “ideology” over “philosophy”. In his book there is nothing wrong with genuinely philosophical debates in American politics. “Everyone should have a political philosophy … it’s good to be a little bit liberal or a little bit conservative, or a lot liberal and a lot conservative. The problems with ideologies is that you’ve got all the answers in advance, so evidence is irrelevant, experience is irrelevant, how the competition is doing is irrelevant.”..
If you ask Americans, he says, they claim to like the idea of divided government; the White House and the Congress held by different parties, preventing each other from lurching too far to the left or right. In more or less normal times, that system is made for deals across the aisles. Apparently brittle, the governing culture is usually elastic; friendly to compromise. “There are only two things Americans should never see being made,” Clinton quotes Mark Twain as saying, “sausages and laws”. But both deliver the goods. Now all that is imperilled, not least because what Teddy Roosevelt called the bully pulpit has got a lot smaller. “When I was first old enough to vote, the president got between 30 and 45 seconds every night on the news. Now it’s less than eight seconds.”…
So what can be done about this latest edition of Know-Nothings? “You can’t convert the ideologues because they don’t care what the facts are. With the world as it is, you have to fight the fight you can win, and the fight you can win is economics.” He gets intense at this point. “There isn’t a single example of a successful country on the planet today – if you define success as lower rates of unemployment, higher rates of job growth, less income inequality and a health system that produces the same or better care at lower cost – that doesn’t have both a strong economy and effective government that find some way to work in harness with each other … If you don’t do that, if you don’t have a system by which the poor can work their way into it, then you lose the social cohesion necessary to hold the country together and that is a big problem…
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