Make politics about government again

Josh Barro at Business Insider

http://www.businessinsider.com/trump-politics-government-obamacare-policies-2017-10

"SNIP...........


In theory, we elect public officials to run the government.

The government does a lot of things, and public officials make a lot of choices about what it will do. Other choices they make affect how well the government does those things, and how much it costs. But these matters have become less and less central in American politics.

I see two diverging trends.

One is a fixation on small concerns that have little or nothing to do with official actions of governments, such as whose statues should be displayed in public and what NFL players do during the national anthem. The other is a fixation on concerns so large and amorphous they cannot obviously be addressed by public policy: for example, the more expansive versions of the ideas of white supremacy and structural oppression for the left; a sense of "losing our country" for the right.

Both trends have led to a politics that's not very much about government anymore — and a politics where politicians make promises about cultural matters outside their control, setting themselves up to disappoint the voters.

............SNIP"