What we need in Congress, in the White House, and in the Supreme Court are leaders. True leaders have three qualities: vision, moral courage, and the ability to get things done in groups. The first two qualities help with the third.
Perhaps the most ludicrous aspect of our current political system–and by and large this has only rarely not been a problem through our history, so this is nothing new–is that we do not ask of our elected representatives what their long term vision is. What do they want for their grandchildren? How do they expect to get there?
What we see is short sighted political grandstanding. Shots lobbed at others through the press, then responded to in the same way. Nobody anywhere is sitting down, it seems, developing a vision consistent with political freedom and economic viability, and then executing it with moral courage.
By and large, our “leaders” are a bunch of clucking chickens going wherever their seed gets thrown. They’ll do “whatever it takes”, to get reelected.
All of us, as individuals, need to ask ourselves what we want for our grandchildren, and we need particularly to ask the same of anyone who wants to speak on our behalf, and control in part the enormous sums taken from us in taxes, and borrowed from our grandchildren on our behalf.
It seems to me one of the most salient cultural facts of Europe, today, is that fewer and fewer people are choosing to reproduce. As Mark Steyn has noted, this will over time lead inevitably to a shift in the direction of nearly univesal Islamic hegemony on their continent. More subtly, though, it allows Keynes “in the long run we are all dead” philosophy to intrude, such that people don’t CARE as much about the future, and instead focus on the here and now, and what pleasure they can get from this life, now.