Eisenhower was right about Social Security, unemployment insurance, and most labor laws. But if Ike had lived long enough to see what a titanic boondoggle farm price supports have become, he would have ordered up another D-Day for the American heartland. Yet Tomasky seems to be trying to say that Republicans want to get rid of all these things. It’s a wonderful set of straw men he sets up, including the notion that voting against a bill that would grant another extension to unemployed workers who have been collecting for 100 weeks or more after voting three other times to extend the program is tantamount to wanting to scrap unemployment insurance altogether. Or wanting to reform Social Security is the same as trying to kill it.
And yet, this isn’t really what Boehner was talking about when he wondered aloud about where the America of his youth had gone. For liberals like Tomasky, it is very difficult to grasp the inexpressible sadness in Boehner’s words. The congressman is not referring to the grand plans of statesmen and social engineers, or the yardsticks of social progress that so enamor the left. Boehner was referring to a state of mind about America that is disappearing.
What else is America except a place that has lived in the dreams of men since we organized ourselves into nation-states? Each of us alone defines our own America, imbuing it with our own hopes, animating it with our own definitions of liberty, consecrating it by our embrace of its traditions and values. It is this feeling about America that Boehner believes is threatened. But is he right? Is his implication that the growth of government under the current administration — the largest expansion in history — can destroy what we “grew up with” as a vision of America in our minds?
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