MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE
by Michael Wolraich
Order today at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop
MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE by Michael Wolraich Order today at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop |
My colleague at Democracy in America imputes from Mitt Romney’s surge into the lead among presidential contenders the beginning of the end of the Tea Party’s influence in the GOP. Now, the latest WSJ-NBC opinion poll contains clues that the movement’s broader appeal may also be waning. As my chart shows, after a brief reversal, Americans are once again getting comfortable with more government in their lives.
Since the early 1990s this poll has been asking respondents whether government should do more or already does too many things, helpfully boiling down a complicated and nuanced relationship with the state to a couple of numbers. Americans in growing numbers over the 1990s and 2000s embraced more government. I believe (but cannot prove) this mainly reflected three things: the stagnation of middle-class incomes that Americans, wrongly, blame on globalisation and China, 9/11, which suggested a more intrusive state was the price of personal safety, and the financial crisis, which they blamed on capitalism run amok.