Michael Lissack represent and discuss and make general rules generally applicable. Whatever function isn’t explicitly assigned to government is reserved to the individual. The presumption is that the private sector and individual rights come first and that government is their servant. Right. In response to crisis, government by executive decree is the prevailing practice; the role of legislatures and courts is primarily to go along and give their blessing. The presumption in favor of the individual and private sector is in eclipse. Now the going-in assumption in public affairs is that society will bear any burden, pay any price, support any friend, and oppose any foe to assure the survival of democracy. The media’s continual manipulation of ordinary events into the crisis de jour calls for we the people to continually condone and acquiesce to this governmental approach. Except there is no crisis. Just a media event. The process of making public policy in a blaze of urgent, televised glory, then quietly unmaking and twisting it to ends different from the ones orig- inally conceived is what media politics is all about. Public support for emer- gency policies evaporate the minute they’re in place and the crisis passes, but officials acting in emergency mode can’t make meaningful public policies. In such circumstances the central action of governing-the framing and making of choices among competing values-isn’t undertaken. There’s action but no decision or responsibility. Public policy is established as a response to media-highlighted crisis conditions. At the moment of its creation, the pol- icy is clearly defined and usually broadly supported. The moment passes, and the policy’s purpose and occasion disappear. Then the crisis passes; the seeming threat to society’s survival that energized the president, press, and legislators to act quickly is no longer present; the source of its popular political backing disappears. Thus, crisis-oriented public policy is always more or less stillborn. The act of creating it guarantees that almost as soon as it comes into existence, it finds itself bereft of the public purposes and political support that occasioned its creation. After a bill becomes law, the legislation’s identity changes. The bill hav- ing been passed, there was no more crisis; the law’s main purpose had been achieved. Yet the legislation was on the books and a bureaucracy was in place
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