Glenn Reynolds: Who's to blame for Hillary and Donald?

[Valin]

USA Today:

Glenn Reynolds

8/2/16

 

We’re moving into a general election with two very unpopular candidates at the top of the tickets: Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Substantial majorities of Americans dislike them both. Gallup last week found them with precisely equal, and awful, approval ratings: 37% favorable, 58% unfavorable. Each says the other is a corrupt tool. They’re both probably right.

 

How did we get to this situation? It boils down to failure at every level, from the political class, to the media, to the voters themselves. The consequences, I’m afraid, may turn out to be severe.

 

(Snip)

 

The problem is that today’s elites aren’t really the better sorts of people. As Richard Fernandez notes, today we have a principal-agent problem. Those happen when the agent (a lawyer, say, or a public official, or a journalist) cuts deals for himself instead of for the benefit of the people he’s representing. Our elites seem to be doing that now — looking after themselves, rather than after the country, with traditional limits on self-dealing having vanished.

 

We need to fix that. And maybe we need to work on voters, too.

 

Fixing these problems will be difficult. The consequences of not fixing it are likely to be unpleasant. Will we get around to it? Perhaps eventually. As Winston Churchill said, “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing — after they've tried everything else.” We’re getting close.