This analysis almost completely ignores asymmetric polarization and provides a both sides analysis of how "America has hollowed out its government." /1
wapo.st/virus-bureaucr…
wapo.st/virus-bureaucr…
The word "Republicans" isn't used until paragraph 59, although he introduces Reagan and Goldwater's "anti-government rhetoric" few paragraphs above that (paragraph 55). /2
That mention, late as it is, is immediately bothsided in the very next sentence: "But if Republicans have made this kind of rhetoric a staple of their message, Democratic politicians have engaged in some of the same kind of thing."/3
Balz also gives both sides treatment to "breakdowns that helped shake confidence in government’s competence." His examples include the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, &, for balance, "the crashing website for the Affordable Care Act in 2013."/4
Is it really fair to treat as symmetrical Bush's decision to launch a catastrophic pre-emptive war and his incompetent and deadly response to a natural disaster with a temporary crash of a website that was largely corrected within a few months?/5
Balz's bothsidesism extends even deeper, however, when he writes "lawmakers are now locked in age-old ideological battles at a time when fresh thinking will be needed to help workers who could face long periods of unemployment and businesses threatened by closure."/6
Balz doesn't look at the history of those "age-old ideological battles" to explore whether one side might have responded more effectively to crisis (like, say, during the Great Depression), or tell us how exactly "fresh thinking" is an appropriate response now. /7
There is some truth to the view that a branch of the Democratic Party since the 1970s, including many of its leading politicians, have joined in the suspicion of government & occasionally embraced "Washington is broken" discourse. I wrote about this./8
bostonreview.net/politics/lawre…
bostonreview.net/politics/lawre…
But the long-term trend is clear. The GOP has gone from criticizing government to denigrating governing itself. I wrote about this in a thread last year, in which I called for a moratorium on using "Americans" or "Washington" in these discussions./9
Barely mentioning this obvious trend--which GOP leaders have been completely up-front about for decades--or claiming that the botched ACA rollout is in the same category as the Iraq War or the Katrina response does not make the analysis more objective or fair. /10
