Okay, so here's my new analogy for the current political climate.
It's like you've got a ridiculously huge country that was formerly linked by a few major roads, lots of local streets and, in many places, dirt roads. Individuals had a hard time getting places by car, and so were dependent on train lines (how good or bad a job the trains actually did serving this need is not, for this discussion, material).
Then said country decided to build a big highway system. It cost a ton, but it connected the country and enabled both commercial and private transit on an unprecedented scale. Commerce boomed, industry boomed, personal freedom of travel boomed. As with anything, there were bad effects mixed with good -- certain shipping industries suffered, populations and land values shifted, some communities were disrupted (becasue they were in the way, or because people left for newly accessible locations), carbon emmissions were increased (though it was still not the major cause of such) and a lot of people now needed cars because they lived in communities accessible only by the highways. But for those interested in freedom of transportation, it was on balance pretty much win.
[Aside: This actually happened!]
Fast-forward fifty years. Someone notices that the highway system near him, due to the way it was engineered, takes a tortuous route to get to his favored shopping center. Hell, he thinks, if I could just drive straight there instead of having to stay on the paved roads, it would take only half the time. He begins railing to anyone who'll listen that the highways are an infringement on his constitutional freedom to travel, that we should all just have ATVs and make our ruggedly individual way where we want to go -- and we could all afford them, too, if we weren't paying for this bloated highway system.
A lot of do people listen, because who hasn't fantasized, sitting in traffic, about cutting across the divider and going wherever the hell you want?
Over the next 30 years, the growing anti-highway movement manages to continually restrict funding for the highways. The highways start to fall apart, which the anti-highway movement points to as further evidence of the failure of the highways -- why, they say, we can keep our local streets in better repair than this! (And to those whose local streets are in even worse repair, they say that this is because of all the money being wasted on the highways.)
When the highways are at last reduced to decrepit, hard-to-use eyesores rotting across the country, and people are free to tear up the countriside in private tanks that cost a fortune in rapidly-dwindling gasoline, they are pointed to one last time as the great failure of cenrtalized transportation management.
Whattaya think?