Awful presidential campaign ignores the biggest issues

The United States faces dire threats or massive impediments in three major areas the federal government can directly address, plus a fourth with which federal officials can assist at the margins or indirectly. The first involves severe military and diplomatic challenges. The second consists of the combination of a near-calamitous debt outlook with the imminent insolvency of Social Security and Medicare. The third, which adds considerably to the second, is a federal bureaucracy that is simultaneously overweening, invasive, unaccountable, unresponsive, and sclerotic. The fourth is a culture degraded by social pathologies, dangerously misplaced tribalism, civic ignorance, and pockets of extreme poverty. Most of those degradations are best handled at the state, local, and civil society levels, but federal leadership can, in some ways, lend a hand.

Except in small subsets of these issues, political realities do not allow for the passage of immediate, sweeping measures to fix them. Most will require a two-step process: First, an achievable short-term bandage to buy time for bigger fixes by stopping things from getting worse and at least start moving in the right direction. Next, larger and more permanent reforms, some of them resulting from a “special commission” process akin to ones that worked in the past for Social Security and military base closures but admittedly failed on other subjects.

While strongly Reaganite conservative solutions will indeed be the best prescription for the larger, long-term reforms, most of the salutary but short-term bandages, fortunately, lend themselves to broadly centrist, coalition-worthy approaches. They will require, however, an attitude of openness to all non-radicals of goodwill who work with respect and integrity — no cheap shots or demagoguery, no bait-and-switch tactics, and no hidden agendas….

The culture

What is not in control at all today, as anyone with an ounce of observational ability can see, is the anger, divisiveness, and misplaced tribalism both in this nation’s politics and in its broader culture. Worse, other pathologies — drug addiction, broken homes, atomized loneliness, and poverty-related hopelessness — plague the culture as well. There are ways a president and his policies can help with some of this, but sometimes, direct presidential or governmental action is counterproductive.

Sometimes, indeed, the worst instinct of all is to have the national government or national leader rush in with a plan, an order, or a law. When every problem is nationalized and, well, governmentalized, then every problem ends up being politicized, too. And, when politicized, it easily becomes divisive and fraught with larger downstream effects than it can bear. In other words, if every problem is treated as a matter to be solved by the force and authority of a national government, then every problem becomes a power struggle. That’s a recipe for turmoil….. [The full column is at this link.]