Filler

Like Billy, the Archdruid is reliably long-winded. So when I see his recent post is titled The Suicide of the American Left, I'm confident I can pick out a cherry or two and end up with something tasty.

An ever more intrusive and metastatic bureaucratic state funneling trillions to corrupt corporate interests, an economic policy made up primarily of dishonest statistics and money-printing operations, and a monomaniacally interventionist foreign policy: that’s the bipartisan political consensus in Washington DC these days ...

"An economic policy made up primarily of dishonest statistics and money-printing operations". I like that.

And this is good:

The one thing that can reliably bring a nation through a time of troubles of the sort we’re facing is a vision of a different future, one that appeals to enough people to inspire them to unite their energies with those of the nation’s official leadership, and put up with the difficulties of the transition. That’s what got the United States through its three previous existential crises: the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and the Great Depression. In each case, when an insupportable status quo finally shattered, enough of the nation united around a charismatic leader, and a vision of a future that was different from the present, to pull some semblance of a national community through the chaos.

We don’t have such a vision in American politics now. To an astonishing degree, in fact, American culture has lost the ability to imagine any future that isn’t simply an endless rehash of the present—other, that is, than the perennially popular fantasy of apocalyptic annihilation, with or without the salvation of a privileged minority via Rapture, Singularity, or what have you. That’s a remarkable change for a society that not so long ago was brimming with visionary tomorrows that differed radically from the existing order of things.

I quit reading, right there. I got what I needed. I would say only that we don't really need a vision, unless by "vision" you mean the ability to see the real economic problem and have a plan to solve that particular problem.