Anti/pro government spectrum

I think Eric is really on to something here. It’s not the “conservative/liberal” spectrum that is at the heart of our dangerous civil discourse right now, it’s the anti-government/pro-government divide. His whole post is worthy of deep pondering, but here’s a taste:

No Child Left Behind is actually an anti-government policy. Remember, it only addresses public schools, it insists that public schools devote themselves to passing tests to justify their existence, and I would argue that it actually sets them up to fail as real centers for education in the process. NCLB has disempowered local governments and only focusses on punishments for non-performance rather than solutions for struggling schools. Over and over again, Reagan, Clinton, and Bush policies evidenced a distrust of government and an abdication of its role to the private sector or market forces.

and

With the pro/anti-government axis clearly in mind, many contradictions or oddities of the current political climate become more comprehensible. Why is health care worth stopping? Not because it can’t work, but because it might work. In fact, obstruction becomes constructive, because by not funding portions of the health care bill or tying legislatures in knots government will appear more broken, which serves the anti-government forces. In fact, what appear to be incredibly irresponsible or incomprehensible strategies even to some conservatives, like tea-party opposition to raising the federal debt ceiling, actually make perfect strategic sense if your goal is to break government and make sure that people believe it can’t be effective. Similarly, dogged opposition to taxes, even at times of great deficits, ensures that government will not have the funds to be effective.