Dogma Wins; We Lose

From Tara:

On his blog, columnist/commentator and former Labor Secretary Robert Reich bids farewell to his colleague, former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum, who recently announced his departure from the public radio program "Marketplace," explaining as he left that he could no longer represent the core of the Republican party.  Reich's blog post (copied at the Christian Science Monitor) includes Frum's explanation of his departure to Marketplace's host:

[A]lthough I consider myself a conservative and a Republican, and I think that the right-hand side of the spectrum has the better answers for the long-term growth of economy — low taxes, restrained government, less regulation — it’s pretty clear that facing the immediate crisis — very intense crisis — I’m just not representing the view of most people who call themselves Republicans and conservatives these days....

Reich then comments:

Why exactly was it necessary for David Frum to “represent” the views of conservative Republicans?

I don’t feel any obligation to represent liberal Democrats. 

... 

The American public doesn’t want or need to hear “representatives” from the so-called right or left. It wants insight into what’s best for America.  

Yet over and over again — on the radio, on TV, in print, in the blogosphere, and all over Washington — political ideology is substituting for thought.
... 

David’s particular break with Republicans has come over what to do about the continuing awful economy. Here’s what he told Kai Risdal: 

This is not a moment for government to be cutting back. … Right now we’re watching state governments try to balance all of their budgets at the same time in the middle of this crisis. We’ve seen half a million public sector jobs disappear. Now, if these were good times, I would applaud that. We need to see a thinner public sector — especially at the state and local level. But we’re seeing what happens when you do that as an anti-recession measure and you make the recession worse. And even though we’re in a technical recovery, incomes and employment — all of that remains lagging for people — I think that we’ve rediscovered in this crisis something that I think we all knew. Which is, there’s a reason why the people of the 1930s built some kind of minimum guarantee — unemployment insurance, health care coverage and things like that. And it’s not because they wanted to be nice. It’s because in a crisis when people lose their jobs, if there is no social safety net they loose [sic] 100 percent of their purchasing power. 

It so happens the vast majority of economists and economic policy experts agree with David on this — even though you wouldn’t know it if you watched or listened to broadcast debates between a so-called “liberal” and “conservative” economists.

Reich is exactly correct.  I want to hear "experts" share the best ideas from all sources and all sides.  I don't want to hear commentators parrot what they think their party's most vocal members want to hear--whether those vocal members are Tea Partiers, Occupiers, birthers, religious zealots, anti-war protesters, hippies, haters of Islam, you name 'em.