David Brooks is Right

David Brooks is absolutely correct here:

I’ll be writing a lot about the presidential election over the next 16 months, but at the outset I would just like to remark that I’m opining on this whole campaign under protest. I’m registering a protest because for someone of my Hamiltonian/National Greatness perspective, the two parties contesting this election are unusually pathetic. Their programs are unusually unimaginative. Their policies are unusually incommensurate to the problem at hand.

This election is about how to avert national decline. All other issues flow from that anxiety.

The election is happening during a downturn in the economic cycle, but the core issue is the accumulation of deeper structural problems that this recession has exposed — unsustainable levels of debt, an inability to generate middle-class incomes, a dysfunctional political system, the steady growth of special-interest sinecures and the gradual loss of national vitality.

Certainly many of these issues can be traced to the various causes of wage inequality, among them skill-bias technical change, and they aren't the government's "fault" in the way the massive deficits from the Bush Tax Cuts are the government's "fault." Moreover, life now is much better than it was a few decades ago in many ways - we have cell phones, open communication, and longer life expectancy. But we could do better - much better.

And that's why Brooks is right. Both Bush and Obama had opportunities to be transformative in '01 and '09, and both rejected those - Bush asked us to go shopping, and Obama failed to capture the national imagination as he struggled with the recession and passing a healthcare bill, in addition to a dismal record of whistleblowers and civil liberties. Obama got away with these things because he was shrewd enough to know that he wouldn't get burned for them - and he hasn't. Our government is more and more inaccessible to the people, even as data and information comes at us via a multitude of forms and ways - Twitter and Facebook among them.

The thing about living beyond our means is that its easy to say but EXTREMELY hard to stop, because voters stop caring about deficits the moment their social security check or medicare payment is at risk. We absolutely must do some belt tightening - I am no Keynesian, and stimulus on top of stimulus won't correct the underlying issues of gluttony that weaken us. But we must fix entitlements, the tax code, and the ridiculous idea that the US can or should hold up the world. Our desire to do everything is causing us to fail in our own self-investment, and those chickens will come home to roost in coming decades.