Danny Hartzell is on the move. Harzell is just another guy who got laid off, found another part-time, low-paid job, got laid off again, and is desperate. In his case he has a family to support. One of his kids has bone cancer and -- now -- no health insurance.
George Packer is New Yorker writer and no stranger to tragedy and infamy. Among other things, he wrote "Assassin's Gate," the definitive analysis of how we got (finagled) into the Iraq War. This week he has a lead editorial comment in the New York about the agony Danny Hartzell in which, like many of us, Packer winds up in a state of disgust at our current Congress.
He's the second person this week to using the phrase "raving mad" about Congressional Republicans. It's the madness is evident when someone says, "I know I'm right."
The sociologist Max Weber, in his 1919 essay “Politics as a Vocation,” drew a distinction between “the ethic of responsibility” and “the ethic of ultimate ends”—between those who act from a sense of practical consequence and those who act from higher conviction, regardless of consequences. These ethics are tragically opposed, but the true calling of politics requires a union of the two. On its own, the ethic of responsibility can become a devotion to technically correct procedure, while the ethic of ultimate ends can become fanaticism. Weber’s terms perfectly capture the toxic dynamic between the President, who takes responsibility as an end in itself, and the Republicans in Congress, who are destructively consumed with their own dogma. Neither side can be said to possess what Weber calls a “leader’s personality.” Responsibility without conviction is weak, but it is sane. Conviction without responsibility, in the current incarnation of the Republican Party, is raving mad.
When Danny Hartzell was laid off from his temporary, part-time job, it coincided with the moment when Florida's lawless tea-party governor had made it impossible for Danny Hartzell and others to collect any benefits. Hartzell was obliged to move his family to Georgia where he had some helpful friends and the possibility of medical care for his child.
Georgia, of course, has not escaped the madness of the "ultimate ends" politicians.
Representative Austin Scott, from the Hartzells’ new state of Georgia, is the president of the House Republicans’ freshman class. Last week, Scott, addressing the possibility that the United States might default on its debt, offered this blithe assessment: “I certainly think you will see some short-term volatility. In the end, the sun is going to come up tomorrow.” It was Lenin who first said, “The worse, the better,” a mantra adopted by elements of the New Left in the nineteen-sixties. This nihilistic idea animates a large number of Republican officeholders. The battle over the debt ceiling is a contest between grown-up sobriety and juvenile righteousness, which doesn’t leave much choice.
Nor does it leave much hope. President Obama, responsibly acceding to the reality of divided government, is now the leading champion of fiscal austerity, and his proposals contain very little in the way of job creation.
"Grown-up sobriety" certainly applies to Barack Obama, but the country needs much more from him. Rhetoric aside, he has failed to stand up for responsible fathers like Danny Hartzell. He has shown himself, in fact, to be considerably weaker in response to the challenges created by a group of mad politicians than Hartzell has. But no one in office is fighting the people hurt most, not even a president who once promised intelligent, responsive action.
More important, he no longer uses his office’s most powerful tool, rhetorical suasion, to keep the country focussed on the continued need for government activism. His opponents’ approach to job creation is that of a cargo cult—just keep repeating “tax cuts”—even though the economic evidence of the past three decades refutes such magical thinking. What does either side have to offer the tens of millions of Americans who have settled into a semi-permanent state of economic depression? Virtually nothing. But if responsibility were fused with conviction—if politics were a vocation in Washington today—the Hartzells would be represented at the negotiating table. ...New Yorker