Dan Ancona
Jamming the cycle of failure
One of the most imposing hurdles progressives have to overcome in making the case for their vision of the future has to do with trust in government. This problem has cropped up as a sort of rogue wave at the intersection of a number of trends in our political and cultural environment. Conservatives have driven this dynamic by openly trashing government whenever possible. But it wouldn't have happened as deeply without a whole series of boosts from a few other trends, including cynicism resulting from the rise of broadcast politics and the unchecked explosion of genuinely transfixing hypercapitalist consumer culture, on top of an increasingly regressive tax code combined with flat wages resulting in an ever tightening middle class squeeze.
The essence of the problem is this dynamic where conservative approaches to government fail, and with their well developed narrative-setting capabilities, they set these failures up as symbols of the impossibility of government. The Katrina response was the worst and most horrifying example of this yet: Bill O'Reilly wasted no time at all spinning it into an anti-government narrative. The worse and more spectacular the failure, the more haters they generate, the worse things get, and on and on.
Driving a wedge into this destructive cycle won't be easy, but Stan Greenberg and his firm have done some solid research into this area, and they have an article in this month's American Prospect. They lay out the problem starkly:
By failing so dramatically, conservatives have created a significant roadblock for Democrats: They have undermined people's faith in the very instrument that we as progressives want to use to solve problems....By 57 percent to 29 percent, Americans believe that government makes it harder for people to get ahead in life instead of helping people. Sixty-two percent in a Pew study said they believe elected officials don't care what people like them think, and the same number believe that whenever something is run by the government it is probably inefficient and wasteful. The Democracy Corps study found that an emphatic 83 percent say that if the government had more money, it would waste it rather than spend it well.
It's an entire universe of ugly data. They toss out some solutions, but they have serious issues of scope and appeal. This dog don't seem like it's going to hunt:
Resist the temptation to remain the protector and defender of the federal government. Instead, seize the mantle of change and accountability. Demand that government performs and produces results that improve people's everyday lives.
The rest of the suggestions are variations on the same theme - accountability, more accountability, ethics reform. These things are important, but it's hard to see to discern the path towards an inspiring new vision for the country. So here, respectfully, are a few countersuggestions:
Inspire people to defend government. Government is the extension of our democracy: we have to start telling stories that include in a positive role. It's fine to say the system is broken, but we always need to couple that with the possibility for a functioning government. We need to remind the country that our government is part of the story of American greatness: it's the mechanism by which we won the Civil War, enacted the New Deal, defeated the Nazis, grew a huge middle class, put a man on the moon, invested in the technologies that fed the Clinton Boom of the 90s, etc etc.
Build participatory politics. When the switch flips from "government is them" to "government is us," people's attitudes about it change a lot. We have to build a politics that is more fun than television. It's doable, but the hardest part is cutting through the initial wall of cynicism this dynamic has created. The best way to do that is good old fashioned person to person contact, whether it's over the net, sitting at a voter registration table, on the phone or neighbor to neighbor.
Do something about the middle class squeeze. This is a long term solution, but we have to get started. As long as wages remain flat and we're looking at a gilded age economy for the top 0.01%, investment in society is going to remain a tough sell even if people do regain some measure of trust in ourselves.
Dust off Galbraith's countervailing powers. Part of our story has to include balance between government, large corporations, labor and independent political movements. We've gotten this balance right before, and we can do it again.
The key is reigniting people's hope for the future. We have to run straight at Reagan's formulation of government being the problem that continues to bounce around the country's psyche so much today. Government can be a solution. We have a long process of rebuilding people's faith in democracy in government and in themselves in front of us. But government is the physical representation of democracy, and you can't be against one without being against both.
Posted at 10:01 AM, Jul 10, 2007 in Progressive Agenda | Permalink | Comments (2)
Comments
I do not doubt that your intentions are good -- that your heart is in the right place. However, I must, as a believer in the founding principles of the United States of America, rebuke your socialist ideology as being destructive to the concepts upon which which this nation was built.
Let us consider that two of the most prominent Framers of this nation and its governmental documents were Thomas Jefferson, who authored the Declaration of Independence, and James Madison, who was instrumental in the construction of the Constitution. Both of these past Presidents held firmly the belief that limited, constitutional government is crucial to the support of a free society, especially at the federal level. Beyond the enumerated powers of the federal government as they appear in the Constitution, they did not see the federal government having a large role in our lives. Unfortunately, this has obviously changed: the feds no longer focus solely on protecting our freedoms. Thanks to the damaging of our Constitution during the "Progressive Era" that swept the great American Imperialist Woodrow Wilson into power, we no longer even have a true bicameral legislature because of the Seventeenth Amendment, which has led to the insidious transfer of much power from the States to the Federal government.
Our government can be a force for good, but only when its sole purpose is to defend the rights of the individual as enumerated in the Bill of Rights. Obviously these are not our only rights, but as far as the federal government is concerned, these are the only rights that fall in its purview.
Perhaps it is time to admit that the "Democratic" Party is incorrectly named: it has, over time, transformed into a Socialist Party much like those of Europe. However, unlike the European Socialists, you all don the guise of "democracy" to push your agenda, which is, I might add, contrary to the founding principles of this nation. (Don't believe me? Try reading Jefferson, Madison, etc. If you don't think they would have vetoed most of the legislation within the last century, you've missed a lot.)
It is not enough to say that the Republicans are failing your 'great plans'. We live in a multi-party (albeit two-party) nation. Every program created must be within the bounds of the Constitution and able to withstand shifting policy goals, budgets, parties, etc. Simply screaming for your party to always win so that you can 'protect' us from people who once valued freedom above all else (like our Framers and what used to be the Republican Party until they started buying into Wilson's imperialist garbage) is infantile and intellectually lazy. This great nation was thriving before socialism began to corrupt our government, and it would do so without your agenda.
Let us never forget that this nation was not created as a socialist nanny state--our Founding Fathers were vehemently opposed to big government. This nation was founded as a beacon of freedom, and please realize that it was not just social freedom that our Framers cherished: it was economic freedom as well.
Every elected and appointed member of our federal government swears to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States. They need to remember that.
Your heart may be good, but you have no right to run my life and steal my money as you see fit.
Posted by: Maximus Eisen | July 10, 2007 03:33 PM
I think there are many things our Founders wouldn't have forseen about today's society besides a powerful centralized government, namely the position of blacks, the position of women, the rise of powerful businesses, the size of the country, and the extreme interconnection between all states in today's society (in 1800, a mail-carrying trip from Georgia to Maine lasted about 3 weeks). A powerful central government was not even feasible when travel times presented obstacles to our country being anything more than a collection of semi-autonomous states.
I believe that the Founders wanted economic freedom, but that did not necessarily mean freedom from taxes. The slogan was "no taxation without representation," not simply "no taxation." Does economic freedom not entail the enabling to make a decent living? In today's inequitable society, many people would not be able to make a living without help from the government, and many people cannot make a decent living because of societal factors (such as spacial mismatch, housing policies, housing discrimination, inequity in education, etc.) that the government has not yet been able to compensate for. You can't tell me with a straight face that everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed in our society; as F. Scott Fitzgerald put it in the Great Gatsby, "Whenever you feel like criticizing any one, just remember that all the people in the world haven't had the advantages that you've had."
I would also like to hear your definition of thriving, or who you think was thriving before Wilson. Certainly not immigrants, or women, or minorities, or children that were forced to work in mines and mills because their parents lacked viable options for economic advancement. When capitalism was the most unfettered (turn of the last century), the infant mortality rate was as high as 30% in some cities, the life expectancy was 48 for white males (and 32 for all other males), and most children did not receive an adequate education.
These "socialist" policies adopted to ensure that our country's citizens are able to enjoy the freedoms the founders intended have benefited us much more than harmed us. I respect that you want to thrive in society, but shouldn't we ensure that everyone else can, as well?
Posted by: Elizabeth Hartline Green | July 10, 2007 09:43 PM