Week of September 27, 2010

In 1964, the slogan of the Republican presidential nominee, Barry Goldwater, was"A choice, not an echo." Forty-six years on, the Tea Party is a loud echo of his attempt to reconnect American politics with the tradition of limited government.

One of the great truisms of 20th century politics, attributed to the legendary House Speaker Tip O’Neill, is that all politics is local. If this year tells us anything, though, it’s that O’Neill’s adage may now be as much a part of history as he is.

In Europe, citizens feel entitled to work - it is even written in the German Constitution. There are long memories about what happens to a democracy when unemployment becomes too high. The rise of Hitler would probably not have happened if the ranks of the jobless and hopeless had not swelled to desperate heights.

In the United States, the right to work has to be earned by each individual. Despite the excesses of Wall Street, the outsourcing of jobs, the tyranny of the corporate bottom line, losing a job is more a matter of personal shame here than of collective failure. People tend to blame themselves more than their employer. This may seem strange, but it accounts for the absence of strike action in a work force that, Europeans would think, had every right to march and mount the barricades.

No one familiar with the Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930 should relish the prospect of a trade war with China -- but that seems to be where we're headed and probably should be where we are headed. Although the Smoot-Hawley tariff did not cause the Great Depression, it contributed to its severity by provoking widespread retaliation. Confronting China's export subsidies risks a similar tit-for-tat cycle at a time when the global economic recovery is weak. This is a risk, unfortunately, we need to take.