As the roll out of ObamaCare looks more and more like a roll over a cliff, keep in mind that this is probably the best of times for the program. In time, the reality of the program will be impossible to deny. Quietly, so as not to offend the racial sensitivities of blacks, the program will be gutted and rolled back. It can’t work and it can’t last, because it will be an albatross on the political class. It’s like creating a food shortage and thinking it will be good politics to run on building better bread lines.

How is it possible that anyone is surprised that this is a gigantic flop?

No one alive today can recall a government project that came in on time, under budget or worked anything like it was promised. For as long as anyone has been a live, there have been jokes about $500 hammers and $1000 toilet seats. The image of the government worker asleep on the job has been a stock character for a century. Yet serious adults have been walking about for three years believing the government could pull off a monumentally complex IT project without a glitch.

It really is amazing.

Steve Sailer likes to bring up the fact that we seem to forget a lot of important things as a society. It is clear we are getting collectively dumber. People in Boston today lived through the Big Dig. As public works projects go, it was one of the greatest boondoggles in the nation’s history. For close to two decades, every local yokel with a shovel found someway to get his beak wet on the thing while slowing down completion. This old blog post does a nice job covering the finer points.

Yet, those very same people who saw that nonsense for close to two decades have total faith in government to handle health care. It is as if they have brain damage. Not only that, the same people,e preaching for government run health care will fly into a purple faced rage over the evil of corporation health care. They will often do it from the pages of corporate media platforms. It’s as if they are incapable of remember what they said five minutes ago or recognizing their own staggering hypocrisy.

It is not just government projects. People rhapsodizing about how well Tip O’Neil and Reagan got along and made government work. They say, “Tip and Reagan would not let the government shut down.” Anyone alive then should know that the two men went at one another hammer and tong for eight years. It was often vicious. They had quite a few government shutdowns in the process.Politics were probably worse then than now as Democrats regularly claimed Reagan was a nut hell bent on blowing up the world.

Of course, collective amnesia is a feature of politics. You see that with the treatment of Ted Cruz by the media. Not long ago, the moderate Democrat was wither a social conservative, but fiscal liberal, or a social liberal but pro-business. That was considered the moderate wing of the party and there were a lot of them. That’s Ted Cruz. Thirty years ago he would have been a moderate. Today he is a far right Republican.

Of course, that points to just how far Left the political class has moved over the last several decades. That march Left relies on a collective amnesia, so it is probably just a natural part of the Progressive ruling coalition. They control the media, so they get to decide what is forgotten, which is everything inconvenient to current efforts. Forgetting the past, however, just means repeating past mistakes over and over until something really bad happens, like a revolution or wide scale social unrest.

But history is not for the amnesiac.