Kennedy, Reagan, Loved for All the Wrong Reasons: Robert Dallek

December 09, 2011, 3:36 AM EST

By Robert Dallek

Nov. 30 (Bloomberg) -- The historian Richard Hofstadter said that the U.S. is the only country in history that believes it was born perfect and strives for improvement. The idea that we are a nation without flaws or that we can permanently eliminate our very human failings is, of course, delusional.

But America’s current political divide has produced equally ludicrous notions of outsized defects. The contemporary conservative idea that government is the source of all the country’s woes is reductionist and worse. The Tea Party crowd seems incapable of understanding that New Deal and Great Society programs humanized the U.S. industrial system and saved free enterprise from its worst excesses.

On the other side, the Occupiers have decried the greatest concentration of wealth since the 19th-century Gilded Age, but they have been too quick to strike out at symbols of the national malaise without advancing a coherent agenda for righting social and economic wrongs.

The country is unquestionably struggling with large economic problems that jeopardize its domestic tranquility and future prosperity. But anti-government rhetoric and anti-Wall Street complaints hardly provide credible answers. The opposing sides see nothing ahead but doom and gloom unless they win command of the nation’s power centers and enact their programs of change.

More: http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-12-09/kennedy-reagan-loved-for-all-the-wrong-reasons-robert-dallek.html

Robert Dallek (born May 16, 1934) is an American historian specializing in American presidents. He is a recently retired Professor of History at Boston University and has previously taught at Columbia University, UCLA, and Oxford. He has won the Bancroft Prize and numerous other awards for scholarship and teaching.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Dallek

I think this is a pretty sensible overview. In fact, I think this is one of the most sensible analysis's of our current political situation that I've read in months. I don't think I could post something like this piece in GD without getting dozens of angry responses about the criticism of Occupy. What do you think that says about DU at large's sense of the political history of the last couple generations?

Jonathan Alter, Lou Cannon, and Robert Dallek discuss whether or not President Obama is rushing his legislation in an overly-ambitious first quarter. "Starting well is no guarantee of success," says Cannon.