America's Future: A Wager on Reckoning

Read these two sentences and see which one you find yourself nodding to before you've even finished. The government's gotten fat and lazy, and it's high time somebody made it earn its keep again. The richest country on earth ought to be ashamed that so many of its own can't afford to get sick. If it was the first, I already know how you vote. If it was the second, same trick, different jersey. And if you nodded at both — well, that puts you in the company of much of the country, whether they'd say so out loud or not. That's the whole trouble with this "twitch of the eyebrow" thing we've got going on. We've sorted ourselves into two teams so thoroughly we've forgotten how many of us are standing closer together than either team lets on. Ask ten Americans where the country is headed and you'll get eleven opinions, most of them shouted. That, more than any policy or president, is the honest state of the union ... a nation of people standing very close together and facing very different…