He starts off saying that he misses Ronald Reagan. But don't stop reading there!
"Forces that first assembled and ideas that first appeared during Reagan's presidency have now had two decades to develop -- to grow more powerful and more marginal simultaneously. That is one reason why Bush is so dangerous now. Policies that were but twinkles in the Reaganites' eyes -- a war on the mixed economy and the multilateral world order -- have reappeared fully grown in Bush's presidency.
"What Bush seems determined to extirpate are the basic forms of common security in America. His particular targets seem disproportionately the handiwork of years ending in "5." From 1965, there's Medicare, which he seeks to subordinate to the pay-as-you-can calculus of HMOs; from 1945, there's the United Nations and the whole structure of postwar alliances, which he seeks to subordinate to an imperial America freed from international laws and treaties; from 1935, there's Social Security, which he still seeks to privatize, and the Wagner Act, whose pro-labor tilt he seeks to obliterate in his tax policy.
"Underpinning these assaults is a decided preference for a more social (and international) Darwinistic order -- though in this uniquely Old Testament White House, Darwinism is the love whose name cannot be spoken."
