When Government Jumps the Shark

That’s the title of a must-read essay on the death/decline of progressivism by Walter Russell Mead. Here’s a snippet, but read it all:

Unfortunately, the process doesn’t stop here. When enough progressive programs have become both unsustainable and untouchable, we move to the final stage. It is bad enough when a government program becomes a shark; it is much, much worse when a social paradigm as a whole jumps past the shark stage. A cluster of unsustainable but untouchable policies and institutions sooner or later reaches the point when it no longer threatens the country with ruin at some indefinite point in the future: imminent ruin stares us direct in the face.