Improperly outsourcing governance failure to the American people

From School shootings show our leaders, not Americans, are the moral failures by Glenn H. Reynolds.  

It’s a standard pattern. After a horror like the Uvalde, Texas, school shooting, pundits, journalists and politicians come forward to say that the event is evidence of some deep moral failure, a flaw in America’s soul. Predictably enough, of course, they then preach that salvation can only come by doing what they want.

But when the facts come in, it invariably turns out that the tragedy doesn’t stem from a spiritual failing in America but rather from the fact that some (most?) of our institutions are run by creeps, crooks and incompetents.

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Yet there too, we were told that the real problem was a moral failing on the part of the hundreds of millions of Americans who were not involved, rather than on the part of the shooter and those who enabled him.

Consequences, after all, are for ordinary Americans. The folks in charge are free to be failures, incompetents and worse with virtually no risk of accountability.

But then, as columnist Kurt Schlichter writes, “The new normal is failure.” “The clusterfark in Uvalde is just a symptom of a much bigger pathology. It is a symbol of the failure of every institution in our society,” he says. “And the solution is never to revamp the institutions and eject the parasites heading them. It’s always — always — to take power from us and give it to the people who screwed up in the first place.”

It seems like these killers — Parkland shooter Nikolas Cruz and Uvalde shooter Salvador Ramos, among many others — were known to be problems well before but weren’t properly dealt with. Then, once the shooting started, the police hid behind cars and let children die. 

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Just this week, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen admitted that she had been “wrong” on the threat posed by inflation. Last year she had said, “I think there’s a small risk, and I think it’s manageable.”

One of her top jobs is to control inflation. Everyone with a brain saw it coming in the wake of the Biden administration’s reckless spending. But she didn’t, or pretended that she didn’t, and now Americans are paying top prices for gas, groceries and all the necessities of life. Yellen hasn’t stepped down. She hasn’t even really apologized.

Our ruling class keeps failing, and somehow it’s supposed to be because of Americans’ moral failings. But if Americans have a moral failing, it’s in tolerating rule by the cast of clowns in charge of our institutions.

In the fifty year run of globalizing prosperity after World War II, it was easy for Americans to overlook that our constitutional republic always depends on ordinary citizens to step forward as part of governance.  Instead, ordinary Americans focused on family and earning good livings and left governing to an increasingly sheltered, unrepresentative and noxiously ineffective civic governance class who kept failing upwards on the wings of that prosperity.

The moral and effectiveness failings of academia, mainstream media, politicians and big state are firmly on display.  It is a call for Americans citizens to take back governance from the governing class Morlocks.