It's fucking amazing.
Who two? Every next comment was written by a different person.
Partisan arguments tend to go poorly on nice civil web forums, and I'd expect to attract the attention of the moderators if I were to start one.
Because people love it when their representative brings home the pork but they hate it when the other guy does it.
It's not possible for people in one district to elect a representative who could individually eliminate all wasteful government programs, but it is possible for them to send in somebody who will at least bring them back a proportionate share of the loot from the heist. Is that not rational behavior absent some coordination mechanism to get all the other districts to stop electing kleptocrats at the same time?
Maybe better would be to vote for someone willing to do that while also pushing for structural change to remove those incentives, but that's assuming there is any candidate running with that position.
The founders who wrote the First Amendment clearly disagreed with that.
The “freedom from religion” reading of the first amendment is, besides being atextual, utterly non-sensical. It reads the Framers to have banned, sub silentio, practices with respect to public religion that were utterly routine at the time the amendment was adopted.
As to whose culture and whose religion: it’s not clear to me the specifics matter so much as the existence of strong, broadly-shared social norms. My Bangladeshi immigrant family doesn’t share a culture or religion with Pat Buchanan, but there was frankly not a lot of daylight between their views on how people should live in society.
And you’re right in one respect: a society that emphasizes social norms will leave some people out. The social norms can be evolved, of course. Bangladesh, for example, is making progress in evolving the social norms surrounding participation of women in the economy. (In terms of labor force participation rate, Bangladesh today is where the USA was in 1950. On the other hand, we’ve had not one but two women as heads of state.) But a society that emphasizes individual self determination will be more inclusive and more responsive to social change. But these are trade offs in the structure of a society and people can reasonably disagree about what serves the best interests of the vast majority of the people.
It definitely is nice when it is the case, but I don't think it's necessary for America's future to be successful. Certainly, for the first 150 years of its existence, the United States had very widely varying cultures and ways of life throughout. The Puritans in the north lived differently than the Scotch-Irish, who lived differently than Germans in the midwest, who lived differently than the pioneers in the west.
The difference between now and then though was that back then all those people were free to live as they felt like, and if they didn't like it, they could pick up and leave to form new communities, like for example the Mormons did when faced with hostility of people from their origins. Now, however, the mass media and powerful federal government is dictating the one and proper set of moral and social norms, and the correct way to live. People aren't free anymore to do what they want if the feds don't like it, even if their state doesn't have an issue with. Even the states expanded their reach into determining how people should live. This wouldn't have been a problem if, like you suggest, the enforced way of life was broadly shared, but it clearly isn't.