Blockade by opposition destroys politics

The ongoing political debate over the United States' public debt illustrates how a political system perishes when all the opposition does is block [government policy], Lluís Bassets writes in his blog Del Alfiler al Elefante: "We can see in this and many other cases how politics, which used to be the art of government, has become the art of stagnation, when the only objective is to prevent the government from acting, to stop decisions being made. ... Blocking and paralysing are the verbs that are conjugated most often here, and the greatest art is gambling with the right of veto. Opposition no longer means permanently offering citizens an alternative programme and showing that a change of government would be possible at any time, but instead throwing as many stones as possible in the government's path. The first and most important rule of this form of modern politics is to start discrediting the winner the very day after the elections and to prove that he is incapable of governing and that all his decisions will be revoked as soon as he is in opposition again."

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