Charles Krauthammer’s War Against the 1970s
Newsweek and The New Republic recently published “America the Ungovernable” and “Is America Ungovernable?“, respectively, making the case that perhaps the recent political, economic, and social turmoil in the country is not a product of bad leadership, but the nature of the nation. If two major news and political publications run with the story, it’s officially a trend.
Luckily, Charles Krauthammer is around to nip this mildly insulting talking point– we’re ungovernable as a people?– in the bud before it spreads like wildfire (to MSNBC). Simply put, Krauthammer is not buying the portrayal of the American people as an angry rabble of anarchists and contrarians because he was here when the media tried this to protect a weak Democrat the first time around.
In his Washington Post op-ed today, Krauthammer notes that putting the blame of an inefficient government on the people was all the rage in the late 1970s, when then-president Jimmy Carter was having trouble garnering bipartisan support for his policies:
“In the latter days of the Carter presidency, it became fashionable to say that the office had become unmanageable and was simply too big for one man. Some suggested a single, six-year presidential term. The president’s own White House counsel suggested abolishing the separation of powers and going to a more parliamentary system of unitary executive control. America had become ungovernable. Then came Ronald Reagan, and all that chatter disappeared.”
In the old days, Newsweek was trying to sell America as an irrational mob, also, he declares. But his ire is not limited to what he sees as a new wave of Carterism in the press, but to his fellow columnists elsewhere who have expressed some partisanship towards the President. He takes stabs at Tom Friedman‘s alleged desire to turn America into China and a flip-flop from New York Times‘ columnist Paul Krugman on the filibuster, which he claims Krugman was for before he was against it. “Just yesterday,” Krauthammer writes, “the same Paul Krugman was warning about ‘extremists’ trying ‘to eliminate the filibuster’ when Democrats used it systematically to block one Bush (43) judicial nomination after another.”
Such a multilateral attack to the left will likely push some buttons, though maybe not the people attacked in the article, but their counterparts on TV. At the very least, this would be worthy of a spot on Keith Olbermann‘s “Worst Persons” any other time of year when CPAC isn’t happening. Should Krugman et al choose to respond, however, someone should probably get the popcorn ready.
This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
