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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region Forumsfrom Bill Moyers' website: What best describes Washington? Gridlock? No. Tacit consensus...
http://billmoyers.com/2014/02/21/andrew-bacevich-on-washingtons-tacit-consensus/What words best describe present-day Washington politics? The commonplace answer, endlessly repeated by politicians themselves and media observers alike, is this: dysfunction, gridlock, partisanship and incivility. Yet heres a far more accurate term: tacit consensus. Where Republicans and Democrats disagree, however loudly, matters less than where their views align. Differences entertain. Yet like-mindedness, even if unacknowledged, determines both action and inaction.
In the Bill-W.-Obama era, a neoliberal consensus defines American politics. In his classic text, The American Political Tradition, the historian Richard Hofstadter identified the parameters of that consensus. It emphasizes, he wrote, the rights of property, the philosophy of economic individualism, [and] the value of competition. It assumes the natural evolution of self-interest and self-assertion into a beneficent social order. Grab and get ultimately works for the larger benefit of all. That, at least, is the idea.
<...>
Are the troops in Afghanistan fighting for our freedom? If so, the package of things they fight for includes the prerogative of dispatching US forces to wherever it pleases Washington to send them, along with no-fault divorce, abortion on demand, gay marriage, and an economic system that manifestly privileges the interests of the affluent at the expense of those hard-pressed to make ends meet. To pretend otherwise, indulging in some sanitized or cliché-laced definition of freedom, is to engage in willful self-deception.
To imply that all Americans subscribe to this neoliberal consensus would be misleading, of course. A loosely-organized antiwar movement objects, however ineffectually, to Washingtons penchant for military adventurism. Moral traditionalists protest against the casting off of social conventions, again without discernible impact on policy. Risking the charge of engaging in class warfare, groups such as the Occupy Wall Street movement raise a ruckus about the yawning gap between the rich and everyone else. Again, the effects of their efforts appear negligible.
In the Bill-W.-Obama era, a neoliberal consensus defines American politics. In his classic text, The American Political Tradition, the historian Richard Hofstadter identified the parameters of that consensus. It emphasizes, he wrote, the rights of property, the philosophy of economic individualism, [and] the value of competition. It assumes the natural evolution of self-interest and self-assertion into a beneficent social order. Grab and get ultimately works for the larger benefit of all. That, at least, is the idea.
<...>
Are the troops in Afghanistan fighting for our freedom? If so, the package of things they fight for includes the prerogative of dispatching US forces to wherever it pleases Washington to send them, along with no-fault divorce, abortion on demand, gay marriage, and an economic system that manifestly privileges the interests of the affluent at the expense of those hard-pressed to make ends meet. To pretend otherwise, indulging in some sanitized or cliché-laced definition of freedom, is to engage in willful self-deception.
To imply that all Americans subscribe to this neoliberal consensus would be misleading, of course. A loosely-organized antiwar movement objects, however ineffectually, to Washingtons penchant for military adventurism. Moral traditionalists protest against the casting off of social conventions, again without discernible impact on policy. Risking the charge of engaging in class warfare, groups such as the Occupy Wall Street movement raise a ruckus about the yawning gap between the rich and everyone else. Again, the effects of their efforts appear negligible.
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from Bill Moyers' website: What best describes Washington? Gridlock? No. Tacit consensus... (Original Post)
HomerRamone
Mar 2014
OP
pinboy3niner
(53,339 posts)1. You should put Moyers in the title. nt
HomerRamone
(1,112 posts)2. he didn't write it nt