House divided: aux américains de se regarder dans le miroir

Réflexion de David Gergen, ancien conseiller de Présidents américains, collaborateur à CNN et professeur de Harvard.

"But perhaps we give too little attention to the basic notion that our politicians are also a reflection of the public they represent. As the old saying goes, we get the president we deserve -- and usually the Congress, too. In truth, our fractured politics are due in no small part to a fractured country -- one in which consensus and moderation are disappearing. With apologies to President Truman: the buck stops here.

Those of us who are older -- born somewhere close to midcentury -- grew up in an America where there was a general consensus that the United States was a great nation, that you could be a success if you worked hard and played by the rules, that government had a positive role to play when trouble hit, and that politics must stop at the water's edge as we united against dangerous enemies. But with Vietnam, the tumult of the '60s and '70s, Watergate and more, our sense of common purpose began collapsing.
Listen for a moment to three of the smartest observers in the country who have weighed in this week on the collapse. In this week's New York Magazine, columnist Frank Rich argues that by the late 1960s, "the bipartisan national consensus over the central role of government -- which had held firm through the Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson administrations -- was kaput. The Reagan revolution was in the wings."
We also began to lose faith in ourselves and our values. In an interview with the Financial Times early this week, Professor Michael Porter of the Harvard Business School chimed in with pained observations about what is happening to American competitiveness: "This is shocking for the U.S. If you go back 100 years, you find that the U.S. was a huge pioneer in public education. ... The U.S. was a real pioneer in creating a national, very deep university system. ... The U.S. was a pioneer in the interstate highway system. ... We stepped to the plate in the past and made very, very bold investments in the fundamental environment for competitiveness. But right now, we can't seem to agree on any of these things."
Or listen to William Galston, who was instrumental in helping President Clinton bridge the divides in politics. In the New Republic, he argues that the middle is shrinking in politics. In 1992, he points out, Gallup found that 43% of respondents identified themselves as moderates, 37% as conservatives, and 17% as liberals. In 2009, conservatives and liberals were each up 4% and moderates were down by 7%."

http://www.cnn.com/2011/09/28/opinion/gergen-broken-government/index.html?hpt=op_t1