Theft at the Public Till
potholes streets, and their sidewalks thronging with beggars, can tell that something is going wrong. The catalog of major shifts includes the pill, soaring divorce rates, cus- tody battles, poor single-parent households headed by women, right-to-life and pro-choice struggles, two-career families, surrogacy, women's rights, gay rights, battered wives and murdered families, the disappearance of tradi- tional patterns of sexual differentiation, in-vitro fertilization, casual attitudes toward sex, and the emergence of an unparalleled level of violence among young American men. Millions of Americans yearn for yesteryear, when the natural order of things was self-evident. Father worked, mother stayed home with the children, divorce was sanctioned, sex was unmentionable, a teen-age girl who became pregnant hid from society, criminals were sent to prison, literature and movies were censored, and drugs were unknown. That world is gone forever, not because pointy-headed, left-wing, granola-eating, atheist intellectuals have captured control of the government, but because most blue-collar and middle-class, church-going, hard-working Americans want that world to be gone forever. In a changing world our government, its institutions, its mechanics, its rules and regulations have not kept pace. Let's begin by looking at the most recent changes:
1. Failing institutions.
Traditionally, institutions such as unions, political parties, and insur- ance firms have acted as our safety nets, but there is a growing sense that these institutions no longer meet the needs of individuals, that they are grad- ually fading in their influence over important decisions. A lot has happened to American politics since 1960, when the public’s esteem for Washington stood so much higher. There were the expansive promises of the Johnson and Nixon years, and the subsequent disappointments; the Watergate Scandal and the disillusionment it spawned; the growth of a Washington press corps that became more independent and more aggressive, often adversarial; the professionalization of the Washington political class, which filled up with
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