Will the Olmert Debacle Result in a Reagan Revolution?

Jimmy Carter's main contribution as President was the apparently permanent banishment of inflation from the Western world via the counter-reaction to his disastrous Leftist policies he inspired. Inflation, like most public policy problems, was entirely a government creation.

Daniel Doron argues that the Olmert debacles have resulted in a key prerequisite to effective reform--the increasing realization that more often than not, government is the problem and not, as Leftists assert, society's salvation:

If, in the wake of the Second Lebanon War, there is a silver lining in the political cloud enveloping us, it is that people have learned not to blindly trust the government or its politicians.

The war finally revealed - and at what terrible cost - that our politicians are neither saints nor even caring "parents," whose chief concern is the welfare of their children, the citizens. Government was exposed for what it usually becomes, when left unchecked: an unstable and harmful institution, a coalition of convenience among quarrelsome self-serving cynics, some corrupt. They exploited our childlike trust in their ability to deliver on pre-election promises, instead wasting our hard-earned (and heavily-taxed) money to bolster their power and privilege, sometimes at the cost of our ruin.

SHOULD THIS sea change in public perception and expectations of government gain strength it might finally liberate us from years of indoctrination in our universities by post-modernist and neo-Marxist professors. They made our elites believe in ill-defined and ill-conceived utopian ideals, and inculcated them with intolerance for alternative views. Consciously and subliminally our elites were made to believe that government is the sole vehicle for messianic social transformation, for the attainment of "social justice" and the quick elimination of poverty.

Perhaps the deflation of such false expectations will make us wary when types like Ehud Olmert, Haim Ramon or Ronnie Bar-On, with their facilitators and spin-doctors, try to sell us peace plans or welfare programs whose consequences can prove as dangerous as their past records indicate.

Read the whole thing...