NEWS
So Far, There is no New Normal
by Mordecai Plaut
Wherever one turns these days, the world is unstable and behaving in unexpected ways.
US society is polarized in extreme ways. There is almost no cooperation on any issue of significance aside from giving away money.
The American government bureaucracy, that is supposed to track and report on events in the US and around the world, is hollowed out with hundreds of professional positions going unfilled and with no effort made to fill them. It is easy to make jokes about big government bureaucracies, but the truth is that they serve a function of bringing a rational analysis of events to serve as a basis for a reasonable policy. This goal is not part of the aspirations of the current government, so it does not care to fill all of the empty jobs.
For hundreds of years it has been a shared belief of the West that the world should be governed by reason. Since there are many things about which reasonable men may disagree, this belief alone has not fully determined what to do. However it has served as a common basis for discussion and compromise.
However it seems that it is no longer shared by large parts of the political and social world.
This is not likely to end well.
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