Not everybody is in despair over the prospect of a Biden–Trump rematch in this year’s presidential election. Here’s J. Peder Zane of RealClearPolitics to the contrary:
Biden vs. Trump appears to be a welcome diversion in a country whose government seems unequipped to face its biggest challenges and whose people are increasingly unwilling to take responsibility for their own problems. Eight months arguing about two angry old men—hearing our own side praise us to the hilt while blaming every woe on the other—is time we don’t have to spend confronting our own difficulties. Historic declines in life expectancy, jaw-dropping rates of obesity, and rising truancy among students are just a few of the ways we the people are running off the rails.
He goes on to list a number of other statistical indications of anomie, including increasing rates of gambling, addiction, depression, suicide, and crime, declining rates of marriage and childbearing, the armed forces’ recruitment problems, and people dropping out of the workforce. The list could have been longer. “The government cannot fix most of these problems,” he adds, “which may be why politicians largely ignore them. Such issues must be addressed at that most local of levels—the individual and the family.”
He may be right about this, but I think it is at least worth considering the possibility that, if the government can’t fix all these problems, it can make and has made them a lot worse than they would have been otherwise. And if
