States of Chaos

I always get a bit confused when I seeliberals in the media being flabbergasted by how people like Scott Walker, Sam Brownback, Bobby Jindaland other Republican governors can decimate their state’s social services and infrastructure and still claim that everything is going well. By any reasonable measure of economic and social well-being, their states are disasters–anemic job growth, large deficits, large numbers of uninsured, etc. What such astonishment ignores, however, is the fact these guys are not getting elected in order to make sure that their states have goodschools,decenthealth care systems and generally humane social services. They may pay lip service to such things, but what they are really setting out to do is to fundamentally transform the relationship between citizens and the state. That’s why this awful story out of Louisiana isn’t really that surprising if you think about the aims of the modern Republican party the right way…