And who here thinks that Marco Rubio or Mike Huckabee, either one, of all the people in this country, will be the Republican standard-bearer in 2016?
We need a return to normalcy.
What an idiot Beinart is....
Certainly I do not!
What’d anyone expect from the Atlantic ?
Money and material wealth isn’t the only yardstick of our country’s decline. The young people today never lived in the happier times that we knew. They have little clue what their life could have been, should have been. Dictators rely on brainwashing the young. Damn the commie educators.
What a wacko.
"Restoring" means that something is not normal and needs to be fixed.
So, the author thinks that what Ronald Reagan was and represented was not good, but what the progressive wants for our country is good?
Give me a flipping break!
What can one expect from a so-called “liberal Zionist” who is against Israeli “settlements”?
The Atlantic is a piece of crap, a leftist rag masquerading as a sophisticated journal.
That old- “If it’s not fair for EVERYBODY, it’s not fair for ANYBODY” meme is just tiring & fallacious.
Progressive politicians sometimes use the word too. But as believers in progress, they’reIn reality “Progressives” favor progress of, by, and for themselves, in positions of the government.more willing to acknowledgeeager to boast that the bright future they’re promising never existed before . . . and that they will be able to achieve this “progress” without side effects.
today’s Republicans are generally shrewd enough to avoid identifying exactly which previous age they wish to restore. But for African Americans, Latinos, women, and gays and lesbians, idealizing any previous age means idealizing one in which they enjoyed fewer rights and opportunities than they do today. Pledging to “restore” America appeals to many older, straight, Anglo, white, and male voters, because it’s a subtle way of saying Republicans will bring back the good old days. The GOP’s problem is that to win back the White House, it must make inroads among Americans who know the good old days weren’t all that good.What we want to restore is actual progress. Progress of, by, and for the people. As Jack Kemp used to put it, “hope, growth, and opportunity.” What we want is process, and we will trust to the results. “Liberals” demand results of others, and credit for good intentions for themselves. But it is painfully obvious that their intentions actually are not good.
Conservatives aren’t trying to restore an era. They are trying to restore an idea, one that never had anything to do with injustice, and everything to do with the best of liberty, individualism, greatness and prosperity.
Who has a clue about what Republicans are trying to restore? Certainly it isn’t the days when Democrats fought like rabid dogs to preserve racial injustice, and regrettably it isn’t the sanity of Reagan.
Democrats want misery, chaos and failure. That is easy to see.
“Creating “economic opportunity for everyone” is hard enough in a country of 316 million.”
No, it’s actually rather easy. For example, if Obama simply resigned, that would instantly create more economic opportunity for everyone, since he is currently depressing the economy by his very presence.
“Restoring it is a metaphysical impossibility. To restore something, it must have existed before. And never in its history has America offered “economic opportunity for everyone,” not even in the Edenic days of President Reagan.”
Opportunity is not a binary, it’s a sliding scale. Everyone, always, has some level of economic opportunity, so this argument is false on its face.
This is why illegals come here; this is why tens of millions of dowtrodden Europeans came a centry ago--because there's NO economic opportunity here. They all gave or give up their homelands looking for a permanent residence in the US in order to be oppressed.
The world used to look to the United States to step in and fix every problem, often requiring the kind of resources that could only be possible because economic opprtunity once existed here.
Wouldn't it be nice, for example, to climb out of this cesspool of racial hatred the Left has churned up for us and restore the comity of the Reagan years? Yes, it really was better then than now. How about restoring a housing loan industry that actually could make and refuse loans without government interference? What about restoring the control of curricula to local school boards? Or even prying little Johnny's lunch menu from the clutches of porky Washington elitists?
Need I continue into every arena the Left has merrily screwed up between Carter, Clintoon, and 0bama? A military concerned with military matters instead of social ones? An oil industry unconstrained by the welfare of obscure organisms that no one has ever heard of and that nobody can eat? The ability to purchase a firearm without a third degree reminiscent of Josef Stalin? A culture not too constipated to produce Airplane and Blazing Saddles? A time when Civics was taught in secondary schools instead of anal sex?
Like hell it was mythical.
The author make a common error, likely intentionally.
“Economic opportunity” is NOT “economic equality”.
Economic opportunity is very real, very likely, and the US has had it in the past. Economic equality, on the other hand, is bitter fantasy, and efforts to force it on people don’t just result in tearing down the successful, but also in greater *inequality*. It not only hurts the successful, but it hurts the unsuccessful.
Economic opportunity means, to start with, the *opportunity* to have a good education. Conservatives found that because public education is often terribly flawed, the best *opportunity* for a good education is with school vouchers, religious and home schooling, especially where public education is failing.
But though they are given the *opportunity* to learn, many students reject that opportunity, so condemn themselves to inequality in the future.
For those who took the opportunity to become educated, the law now says that they deserve the same *opportunity* to get employment, *if* they are willing to compete for that same opportunity. *If* they are at least competitive, they cannot be turned down because of who they are.
And that is a golden opportunity.
So there is economic opportunity in a nutshell. Inequality exists there naturally, either because of the unwillingness to do the work, or because someone is naturally incapable.
And natural inequality deserves to be respected. If someone does not work at school, or is too dumb to learn, they must be allowed to fail. If someone is willing to offer them charity so they do not starve, that is between them as individuals; it is not up to government to sanction sloth or stupidity.