Entertaining as they may be, none of these personal insults contribute anything to the debate, such as it is. They are just ad hominem attacks with no value as logical arguments. And they shed no useful light on how we arrived at this moment in our national politics, or how we might get beyond it.
Arguably, this government shutdown is one more spasm in the internecine political struggle that poses a genuine existential threat to the United States as we know it. The opposing philosophies have been at odds for a long time, perhaps since the founding of the country, but the struggle has intensified during the fast four decades and is crystallized in the well-know line from Ronald Reagan's first inaugural (1981):
-- government is not
the solution to our problem; government is the problem."
Judging by his record, Reagan didn't really believe that, but he knew it was the Kool-Aid the faithful wanted to drink, so he kept pouring. Meanwhile, his presidency tripled the national debt, enlarged the federal government, and took the United States from being the world's largest creditor nation to being the world's largest debtor nation. On second thought, maybe his government was the problem -- or at least the beginning of a problem tradition carried on by his successors.
In any case, the idea of government-as-problem has persisted and gathered strength. Partly that's an inherent result of having any government at all, since governments never function perfectly and almost everyone gets more annoyed by their bad experiences with their governments than they feel grateful for all the things that governments get right. Despite that near-universal, reflexive annoyance, most people aren't ready to abolish governments. But some are, or think they are, as activist Grover Norquist has so vividly expressed it:
"I don't want to abolish government.
"I simply want to reduce it to the size
"where I can drag it into the bathroom
"and drown it in the bathtub."
That is an expression of pure political nihilism: the belief that government has no objective meaning, purpose, or intrinsic value.
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