The problems are many. Too many. Our eyes get fixed upon one among them, and our passions get devoted to fixing northwest michigan vacation home rentals that one. In that focus, however, we fail to see the thread that ties them all together.
There is a feeling today among too many Americans that we might not make it. Not that the end is near, or that doom is around the corner, but that a distinctly American feeling of inevitability, of greatness—culturally, economically, politically—is gone. That we have become Britain. Or Rome. Or Greece. A generation ago Ronald Reagan rallied the nation to deny a similar charge: Jimmy Carter's worry that our nation had fallen into a state of "malaise." I was one of those so rallied, and I still believe northwest michigan vacation home rentals that Reagan was right. But the feeling I am talking about today is different: not that we, as a people, have lost anything of our potential, but that we, as a republic, have. That our capacity for governing—the product, in part, of a Constitution we have revered for more than two centuries—has come to an end. That the thing that we were once most proud of—this, our republic—is the one thing that we have all learned to ignore. Government northwest michigan vacation home rentals is an embarrassment. It has lost the capacity to make the most essential decisions. And slowly it begins to dawn upon us: a ship that can't be steered is a ship that will sink.
We didn't always feel this way. There were times when we were genuinely proud—as a people, and as a republic—and when we proudly boasted to the world about the Framers' (flawed but still) ingenious design. No doubt, we still speak of the founding with reverence. But we seem to miss that the mess that is our government today grew out of the genius that the Framers crafted two centuries ago. That, however much we condemn what government has become, we forget it is the heir to something we still believe divine. northwest michigan vacation home rentals We inherited an extraordinary estate. On our watch, we have let it fall to ruin.
The clue that something is very wrong is the endless list of troubles that sit on our collective plate but that never get resolved: bloated and inefficient bureaucracies; an invisible climate policy; a tax code that would embarrass Dickens; health care policies that have little to do with health; regulations designed to protect northwest michigan vacation home rentals inefficiency; environmental policies that exempt the producers of the greatest environmental harms; food that is too expensive (since protected); food that is unsafe (since unregulated); a financial system that has already caused great harm, has been left unreformed, and is primed and certain to cause great harm again.
The problems are many. Too many. Our eyes get fixed upon one among them, and our passions northwest michigan vacation home rentals get devoted to fixing that one. In that focus, however, we fail to see the thread that ties them all together.
This book names that root. It aims to inspire "rootstrikers." The root—not the single cause of everything northwest michigan vacation home rentals that ails us, not the one reform that would make democracy northwest michigan vacation home rentals hum, but instead, the root, the thing that feeds the other ills, and the thing that we must kill first. The cure that would be generative—the single, if impossibly northwest michigan vacation home rentals difficult, intervention that would give us the chance to repair the rest.
For we have no choice but to try to repair the rest. Republicans and Democrats northwest michigan vacation home rentals alike insist we are on a collision course with history. Our government has made fiscal northwest michigan vacation home rentals promises it cannot keep. Yet we ignore them. Our planet spins furiously to a radically changed climate, certain to impose catastrophic costs on a huge portion of the world's population. We ignore this, too. Everything our government -touches—from health care to Social Security to the monopoly rights we call patents and copyright—it poisons. Yet our leaders seem oblivious to the thought that there's anything that needs fixing. They preen about, ignoring the elephant in the room. They act as if Ben Franklin would be proud.
Ben Franklin would weep. The republic that he helped birth is lost. The 89 percent of Americans who have no confidence in Congress (as reported by the latest Gallup poll) are not idiots. They are not even wrong. Yet they fail to recognize just why this government doesn't deserve our confidence. Most of us get distracted. Most of us ignore the root.
On the far Right was the "stand pat," first-term Republican William Howard Taft, who had served as Teddy Roosevelt's northwest michigan vacation home rentals secretary of war, but who had not carried forward the revolution on the Right that Roosevelt thought he had started.
On the far Left was the most successful socialist candidate for president in American history, Eugene Debs, who had run for president twice before, and who would run again, from prison, northwest michigan vacation home rentals in 1920 and win the largest popular vote that any socialist has ever received in a national American election.
In the middle were two "Progressives": the immensely popular former president Teddy Roosevelt, who had imposed upon himself a two-term limit, but then found the ideals of reform that he had launched languishing within the Republican Party; and New Jersey's governor and former Princeton University president Woodrow Wilson, who promised the political northwest michigan vacation home rentals machine–-bound northwest michigan vacation home rentals Democratic Party the kind of reform that Roosevelt had begun within the Republican Party.
These two self-described Progressives were very different. Roosevelt was a big-government reformer. Wilson, at least before the First World War, was a small-government, pro-federalist reformer. Each saw the same overwhelming threat to America's democracy—the capture of government by powerful special interests—even if each envisioned a very different remedy for that capture. Roosevelt wanted a government large enough to match the concentrated economic power that was then growing in America; Wilson, following Louis Brandeis, wanted northwest michigan vacation home rentals stronger laws limiting the size of the concentrated economic power then growing in America.
Presidential reelection campaigns are not supposed to be bloody political battles. But Taft had proven himself to be a particularly inept politician (he was later a much better chief justice of the Supreme Court), northwest michigan vacation home rentals and after Roosevelt's northwest michigan vacation home rentals term ended, business interests had reasserted their dominant northwest michigan vacation home rentals control of the Republican Party. Yet even though dissent was growing across the political spectrum, few seemed to doubt that the president would be reelected. Certainly Roosevelt felt certain enough of that to delay any suggestion that he would enter the race to challenge his own hand-picked successor.
A Wisconsin Republican changed all that. In January 1911, Senator Robert La Follette and his followers launched the National Progressive Republican League. Soon after, La Follette announced his own campaign for the presidency. Declaring that "popular government in America has been thwarted . . . by the special interests," the League advocated five core reforms, all of which attacked problems of process, not substance. The first four demanded changes to strengthen popular control of government (the election of senators, direct primaries, direct election of delegates to presidential conventions, and the spread of the state initiative process). The last reform demanded "a thoroughgoing corrupt practices act."
La Follette's campaign northwest michigan vacation home rentals initially drew excitement and important support. It faltered, however, when he seemed to suffer a mental northwest michigan vacation home rentals breakdown during a speech at a press dinner in Philadelphia. But the campaign outed, and increasingly embarrassed, the "stand pat" Republicans. As Roosevelt would charge in April 1912:
The Republican party is now facing a great crisis. It is to decide whether it will be, as in the days of Lincoln, the party of the plain people, the party of progress, the party of social and industrial justice; or whether it will be the party of privilege and of special interests, the heir to those who were Lincoln's most bitter opponents, the party that represents the great interests within and without Wall Street which desire through their control over the servants of the public to be kept immune from punishment when they do wrong and to be given privileges to which they are not entitled.
The term progressive is a confused and much misunderstood moniker for perhaps the most important political movement at the turn of the last century. We confuse it today with liberals, but back then there were progressives of every political stripe in America—on the Left and on the Right, and with dimensional spins in the middle (the Prohibitionists, for example). Yet one common thread that united these different strands of reform was the recognition that democratic government in America had been captured. Journalists and writers at the turn of the twentieth century taught America "that business corrupts politics," as Richard McCormick northwest michigan vacation home rentals put it. Corruption of the grossest forms—the sort that would make convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff wince—was increasingly seen to be the norm throughout too much of American government. Democracy, as in rule of the people, was a joke. As historian George Thayer wrote, describing the "golden age of boodle" (1876–-1926): "Never has the American political process been so corrupt. No office was too high to purchase, no man too pure to bribe, no principle too sacred to destroy, no law too fundamental to break."
Or again, Teddy Roosevelt (1910): "Exactly as the special interests of cotton and slavery threatened our political integrity before the Civil War, so now the great special business interests too often control and corrupt the men and methods of government for their own profit."
To respond to this "corruption," Progressives launched a series of reforms to reclaim government. Many of these reforms were hopeless disasters (the ballot initiative and elected judges), and some were both disasters and evil (Prohibition and eugenics, to name just two). But mistakes notwithstanding, the Progressive Era represents an unprecedented northwest michigan vacation home rentals moment of experimentation and engagement, all motivated by a common recognition that the idea of popular sovereignty in America h
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