{"content":[{"text":"The future of democracy in America - Defence Viewpoints from UK Defence Forum \n Wednesday, 10 October 2012 00:01","bbox":{"left":0.071899,"top":0.013031,"width":0.723903,"height":0.035087}},{"text":"entry of married women into the workforce, which supported overall family income � while at \n the same time increasing childcare costs and strains on family life. Adding enormously to the \n strain has been the rise of job insecurity even for those in good work, with unionized labour \n being replaced by short-term contracts without benefits.<br /><br />This strikes at the very heart \n of the American Dream, by which people who are sober, respectable and work hard are \n guaranteed a good job and a better future for their children. It has been this history of middle \n class prosperity which in the past allowed America to overcome previous episodes of political \n extremism and return to moderation.<br /><br />It has also been through the reality of the \n middle class American Dream � as well as the strength of US institutions and values � that \n successive waves of immigrants have been integrated into the American system. Without this \n steadily rising prosperity, both the integration of immigrants and the willingness of the existing \n population to accept them are likely to be radically reduced; and the white middle class \n economic anxieties reflected in the Tea Parties are indeed being strengthened by the relative \n demographic decline of the White population.<br /><br />The Tea Parties also draw their \n strength from certain ideological traditions in America which stretch back for centuries � some \n of them even to the 17th Century England and Scotland from which the first American colonists \n were drawn. One explanation of the appeal of the Tea Parties is that they combine American \n civic nationalism, with its devotion to the Constitution and the institutions of US democracy, with \n elements of chauvinism and conservative religion.<br /><br />Finally, the Tea Parties are also a \n response to very real problems. As Edward Luce of the Financial Times brings out in his brilliant \n and terrifying new book Time to Start Thinking: America and the Spectre of Decline, the \n institutions of government in Washington are increasingly dysfunctional and make any strategy \n of promoting economic development almost impossible, while the US taxation system is a \n nightmare which is beginning to inflict serious damage on the US economy. However, as Luce \n also indicates, the Tea Parties' diagnoses of the reasons for these problems are largely \n mistaken, and their proposed cures often verge on the insane.<br /><br />Neither the Christian \n rightist movement of the 1970s, the \"Republican Revolution\" of the 1990s, nor the Tea Parties \n have recent years have succeeded in making their own candidate the Republican nominee for \n president, let alone winning the presidency. In the end, the party has always chosen a \n candidate with a chance of appealing to centrist voters. At the same time, it is all too apparent \n how each right-wing populist wave, as it recedes, leaves the Republican Party several notches \n to the right from where it had been previously. This has been demonstrated by the way that the \n essentially moderate Mitt Romney (author of a health care reform in Massachusetts which went \n somewhat further than Obama's) has been dragged towards radical positions.<br /><br />An \n old-style Republican (though still more radical than Eisenhower), David Brooks, wrote as follows \n of the Tea Party role in encouraging the Republicans to reject compromise with the Obama \n administration in the debate over raising the US debt ceiling in July 2011, which almost led to a \n national default:<br /><br />\"If the Republican Party were a normal party, it would take \n advantage of this amazing moment. It is being offered the deal of the century: trillions of dollars \n in spending cuts in exchange for a few hundred billion dollars of revenue increases... But we \n can have no confidence that the Republicans will seize this opportunity. That's because the \n Republican Party may no longer be a normal party. Over the past few years, it has been \n infected by a faction that is more of a psychological protest than a practical, governing \n alternative. The members of this movement do not accept the logic of compromise, no matter \n how sweet the terms. ..The members of this movement do not accept the legitimacy of scholars \n and intellectual authorities. A thousand impartial experts may tell them that a default on the debt","bbox":{"left":0.071899,"top":0.087836,"width":0.854784,"height":0.824573}},{"text":"2 / 8","bbox":{"left":0.885489,"top":0.952395,"width":0.026152000000000064,"height":0.015203999999999995}}],"images_bbox":[],"images_bbox_not_text_overlap":[]}