Why is it that powerful people typically wait until they have no power to take the right position and effectively admit they were wrong when they had more power to do something about it?
We see this happen so often that it’s barely noticeable anymore. There were the Iraq War proponents renouncing their past actions. There was Barack Obama marginalizing single-payer health care as president and then touting Medicare for All after he left office. There was James Carville telling Democrats to play dead and then recognizing the zeitgeist and saying they should actually go populist. There’s the Lincoln Project founder who, when he had power, helped install John Roberts and Sam Alito on the Supreme Court — and who now casts himself as a leader of the resistance. There was Dick Cheney creating the tyrannical executive power for someone like Donald Trump to use and then Cheney at the tail end of his life becoming a big critic of Trump.
Now comes Mitt Romney — who campaigned for president on tax cuts for the wealthy — publishing a New York Times op-ed arguing for higher taxes on the rich.
The obvious news of the op-ed is that we’ve reached a point in which even American politics’ very own Gordon Gekko — a private equity mogul turned Republican politician — is now admitting the tax system has been rigged for his fellow oligarchs.
And, hey, that’s good. I believe in the politics of addition. I believe in welcoming converts to good causes in the spirit of “better late than never.” I believe there should be space for people to change their views for the better. And I appreciate Romney offering at least some pro forma explanation about what allegedly changed his thinking (sidenote: I say “allegedly” because it’s not like Romney only just now learned that the tax system was rigged — he was literally a cofounder of Bain Capital!).
And yet these kinds of reversals (without explicit apologies, of course) often come off as both long overdue but also…
Auteur: David Sirota
