Joe Klein of Time magazine has written on U.S. politics for over 40 years, and has long been a good barometer of sensible liberal thought. That makes his recent lament about the direction of the Democratic party worth reading:
The Democrats should worry about their attachment to big government, which, in America, has come to mean more unaccountable bureaucracy, like the Department of Veterans Affairs; more inefficiency, like the weird tangle of federal job-training programs, each more irrelevant than the last; and more perverse incentives, like welfare programs that ask for nothing — no personal responsibility — in return from their recipients. Big government is the way I was treated at the post office this afternoon.
So we have this strange election: Republicans race toward know-nothing nativism, and Democrats stumble toward socialism. Both are reactionary, discredited ideas. I want my country back!