Politics & Power Quote by Jon Huntsman, Jr.

Nostalgia does a lot of lifting here: Huntsman frames American greatness as something already squandered, then assigns the loss to a familiar villain list - government regulation and a credit system that won’t bankroll the little guy. It’s a classic conservative restoration story, but he smartens it by anchoring abstract freedom in a concrete choke point: the small business loan. That detail matters. It invites listeners to picture a neighbor with a solid plan and an empty storefront, not a CEO lobbying for deregulation.

The intent is twofold. First, it recasts inequality and economic anxiety as a crisis of agency. If people are stuck, it’s not because markets are rigged or wages are stagnant; it’s because the pathways for “personal responsibility” have been obstructed. Second, it turns responsibility into a political weapon: the citizen must be self-reliant, while the state must get out of the way. The moral high ground is claimed in advance.

The subtext is that cultural decline is really administrative overreach. “Over the generations” performs a quiet erasure of the messy parts of American ascent - exclusions, booms built on policy, the fact that regulation often arrived after catastrophes. By pairing regulation with “inability to get a loan,” Huntsman blurs two different forces (government and private finance) into one generalized barrier, conveniently keeping Wall Street out of the crosshairs while still tapping post-crisis resentment.

Contextually, this sits in the post-2008 ecosystem where politicians competed to translate frustration into a clean causal story. Huntsman’s is emotionally legible: you were responsible; something external blocked you; elect me and the blockage gets removed.