Column: 'Buy American' might sound good, but it's bipartisan folly (via latimesopinion )
You hear it all the time, including from me: Our politics are too partisan, too polarized, too divided. Why can’t both parties work together for the common good? But it’s worth pointing out that sometimes bipartisan consensus is awful.
The worst form of elite agreement is usually the product of politicians pandering to populist sentiment. When both parties serve as vessels for popular passions, they ignore experts and the lessons of history and suspend their own critical faculties. This assertion bothers a lot of populists because they confuse populism with democracy. But the two things are in fact very different. Democracy is about disagreement and debate, about making public arguments about unpopular truths. Populism is inherently anti-intellectual, elevating emotions and gut feelings, denying the existence of inconvenient facts. “The people of Nebraska are for free silver and I am for free silver,” the great American populist William Jennings Bryan declared.
Biden suggested that he could pay for sweeping infrastructure programs and keep entitlements solvent simply by finally making the wealthiest and biggest corporations begin to pay their fair share. HeIt was nonsense — popular nonsense. Sure, workers have paid into these programs all their lives, but they
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