Huffington Magazine Issue 72 | Page 33

Voices ANDREW BURTON/GETTY IMAGES fast enough to keep us afloat. That era is now over. We have to make painful choices, but aren’t willing to confront them frankly. 3. OBAMACARE The U.S. was the only major industrial country without national heath care, and even though Obamacare relies on the typical American mix of private-sector profit and government regulation, it remains a bone in the throat of American politics. No entitlement program ever passed with so little bipartisan support (though Social Security was close). President Barack Obama assumed that a favorable Supreme Court ruling and his own reelection in 2012 would settle the issue. He was wrong. Whether he could have HOWARD FINEMAN done anything else to soothe the tea party fear and anger is doubtful, but he didn’t really try. 4. SCORECARDS The AFL-CIO invented a rating system for “pro-labor” voting records; Christian conservatives adopted it. But anti-tax activist Grover Norquist and Heritage Foundation President Jim DeMint amped up the volume. Republican members of Congress live in mortal fear of a bad rating and vote accordingly. 5. TWO CULTURES Americans used to inhabit a world of shared social mores, even if millions of people were coerced into accepting them. Now voters now live in two barely overlapping moral worlds: Secular Metropolitan America and Biblical Traditional America. And that separa- HUFFINGTON 10.27.13 Tea party activists, veterans and Republicans gather at the World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C., to express frustrations over closed national memorials due to the government shutdown.