In today’s NY Times, David Brooks writes,
Only 17 percent of Americans trust the government to do the right thing most or all of the time… So the members of my dream Obama administration understand that they cannot impose an ideological program the country does not accept. New presidents in 1932 and 1964 could presuppose a basic level of trust in government. ..But today, as Bill Galston of the Brookings Institution observes, the new president is going to have to build that trust deliberately and step by step.
Brooks disengenuosly fails to acknowledge that it’s not that Americans don’t trust government in general. They don’t trust our current government. If Americans had a problem with government as an institution, they wouldn’t have been voting in record numbers. David, in case you didn’t notice, the election results across the board indicate that it’s Republicans they don’t trust.
This is the same tack Brooks took after the Katrina disaster:
liberals who think this disaster is going to set off a progressive revival need to explain how a comprehensive governmental failure is going to restore America’s faith in big government.
The intellectual dishonesty of this argument is stunning: Republican extremists believe government shouldn’t do anything because government has proven to be ineffectual, incompetent and untrustworthy. And hopefully no one will notice that it’s these extremists who made government ineffectual, incompetent and untrustworthy.
Brooks, and many other right-wing extremists (if you don’t believe he’s a fascist in sheep’s clothing, go back to his older columns before Republicans became so unpopular) claim that Obama didn’t garner enough votes to have a mandate for his policies. In 2000, Bush lost the popular vote. In 2004 he barely won it. We didn’t see Brooks writing then that Bush shouldn’t implement his policies because he didn’t have a “mandate”.
In Brooks-speak, to “implement an ideological program the country does not accept”, means to change course from the extreme right-wing policies of the last eight years. As Paul Krugman points out today,
Mr. Obama ran on a platform of guaranteed health care and tax breaks for the middle class, paid for with higher taxes on the affluent…. That’s a real mandate.
If the country was not ready to accept Obama’s completely transparent platform, he wouldn’t have been elected. It’s extremist Republicans like Brooks who can’t “accept” Obama’s platform. What a relief these hypocrites are out of power and, more important, have finally lost all credibility with the majority of Americans.
