Simplistic slogans won't save us

Peter Goldmark, a former budget director of New York State and former publisher of the International Herald Tribune, headed the climate program at the Environmental Defense Fund.

We're in a lot of economic trouble.

A lot of us feel it at the family level. But that's because the whole country is in trouble economically, and it's that country-level trouble we have to fix.

The challenges facing us are difficult - but not half as difficult as they will be if we go on doing nothing. At gut level, we all know this, so why are we doing so spectacularly little about them?

The first reason is that we've lost confidence in our democratic process and in the way Americans have historically solved big problems: through broadly understood, commonsense solutions laced with practical compromise. A lot of us feel that big money and "big influence" have hijacked large chunks of the governing process and that elected officials are often just feeding us pap cooked up by special interests rather than realism and truth.

The degree to which we've lost confidence in ourselves and in our institutions is unprecedented in my memory - and very worrisome. And this in turn has generated the second reason we're doing so little to help ourselves: our growing addiction to the drug of simplistic ideology.

By that I mean irrelevant statements, and just plain idiocy wrapped up in chocolaty little packages that appeal to people who are afraid or angry or lost - or all three.

We've seen some of that before, of course. But what we see today is more dangerous and destructive. There's a powerful group in our political spectrum that doesn't really want our governmental institutions to work. For the ship of state to have aboard a reckless faction that wants to see it run aground is new - and extremely perilous.

These conditions create fertile ground for some really silly or dangerous ideas, such as: The president "is slowly . . . erecting a socialist dictatorship" (from right-wing blogger Scotty Starnes). And, the Federal Reserve "is involved in a full-time counterfeiting operation to sustain monopolistic financial cartels" (from Ron Paul, the new chair of the House subcommittee that oversees the Fed). And, from the left, the idea that it would be a capital crime to trim back Social Security, Medicare or public employee pension systems - when we can clearly afford none of the three as they are structured today.

The trouble with living by slogans rather than by tough-minded problem-solving is that it leads to much bigger problems. The residents of New York State and Nassau County are facing a big, nasty taste of that in terms of possible cuts and layoffs.

I travel widely abroad for my work and today I frequently run into scorn or contempt for my country. Remember what we used to be admired for? Not our factories or our banks - there are other countries with bigger factories and more responsible banks. Not our military; history past and present is filled with empires and armies that have been well-equipped and well-managed.

No. What we Americans used to be admired for was our governmental institutions and our protection of individual liberties. And that's what some groups seem to be seeking to tear down. Internationally, our friends watch that with sadness. Our enemies seek to test and wound us in our distress.

We aren't going to solve our big problems - starting with the economic ones, such as reducing the deficit and rebalancing our spending toward investment and away from consumption - without making our governmental institutions work for us. Destroying them will get us nowhere. Better to roll up our sleeves and get to work than to blame the tools at our disposal.

It'll be a long, uphill road back. But that road is better than most of the downhill roads now staring at us.