Honest Inquiry

David Brooks contributes to the case for obsoleting Left/Right labels. 

When democracy was an infant there was much discussion about the ability of an electorate to self-govern.  Would the voters have sufficient ‘virtue’, in the vernacular of the times, to govern themselves?  Would democracy replace tyrants, or become a new tyranny of the majority?  It depended on the virtue of the electorate.  

Mr. Brooks approaches the call to virtue from an even larger view:

Centuries ago, historians came up with a classic theory to explain the rise and decline of nations. The theory was that great nations start out tough-minded and energetic. Toughness and energy lead to wealth and power. Wealth and power lead to affluence and luxury. Affluence and luxury lead to decadence, corruption and decline.

He puts the contemporary problem nicely:

Our current cultural politics are organized by the obsolete culture war, which has put secular liberals on one side and religious conservatives on the other. But the slide in economic morality afflicted Red and Blue America equally.

If there is to be a movement to restore economic values, it will have to cut across the current taxonomies. Its goal will be to make the U.S. again a producer economy, not a consumer economy. It will champion a return to financial self-restraint, large and small.

It will have to take on what you might call the lobbyist ethos — the righteous conviction held by everybody from AARP to the agribusinesses that their groups are entitled to every possible appropriation, regardless of the larger public cost. It will have to take on the self-indulgent popular demand for low taxes and high spending.

Here here.  Let’s never mind left/right, blue/red.  Perhaps we start by asking of ourselves, what can we afford?