We Can All Do Better (14 page)

The next hundred days saw feverish executive and legislative activity, including proclamation of a bank holiday; federal super
vision of investment securities; abandonment of the gold standard; the Glass–Steagall Act, which created federal deposit insurance and separated commercial banking from investment banks; establishment of the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Tennessee Valley Authority; drastic economies in government (“Too often in recent history,” he told Congress six days after his inauguration, “liberal governments have been wrecked on rocks of loose fiscal policy”); the Agricultural Adjustment Act, which increased farmers' buying power; a program for refinancing mortgages; and direct government employment through the National Industrial Recovery Act.

But it wasn't these measures alone that Roosevelt gave the nation. After a decade characterized by excess and the blind pursuit of self-interest, he reasserted the moral standard that we are each our brother's keeper. He reminded us that the heritage of Americans was not only freedom but a government that would inspire us to—in Abraham Lincoln's words—“Do together what we cannot do as well for ourselves.” He was invoking a bipartisan tradition that recognized that there was, along with the sphere of private life and a private economy, an equally important public sphere, in which each of us assumed obligations to all of us.

We hear so often these days about government being the problem. “Would you rather spend your own money or have the government spend it for you?” is the knee-jerk question. If we just got rid of government, some politicians say, our economy would roar back to life. The exact opposite is true. Our history tells us that government action frequently lays the foundation for economic growth. In our current economic circumstances, as I've argued, government is critical to a solution.

Lincoln was the first progressive. He understood that individual freedom was not the only foundation on which America was built. Our government was set up in part “to promote the general welfare,”
as the Preamble to the Constitution puts it. Lincoln proposed the Homestead Act, which gave public land to individuals who would settle on it. He granted public land and financing under the Pacific Railway Act for the construction of a transcontinental railroad, and he championed education by establishing land-grant colleges across the country. He knew that lone individuals could not get a college education if there were no colleges. He knew that the West would not be fully developed if there were no railroads. It took a government acting on behalf of all the citizens to accomplish those kinds of things. And in turn, this promotion of the general welfare benefited individuals. Throughout our history, the development of national infrastructure—and that includes education as well as highways and railroads—has enriched individuals. But when a government promotes individual wealth at the expense of the general welfare, the rich get richer and very little reaches the rest of us.

Lincoln's successor in the wise use of government to promote the general welfare was another Republican, Theodore Roosevelt, who was horrified by the concentration of power and wealth in the hands of financiers and industrialists at the end of the nineteenth century. Like Lincoln, he saw government as the tool of our collective dreams. He broke up the Trusts, passed pure food and drug laws, and secured millions of acres for national parks. Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, didn't agree with Roosevelt on specifics but shared the principle of using public power to set the rules of commerce, give average people a chance to better their condition, and make public investments for the benefit of all. Both of these presidents recognized that the public sphere was essential for the private sphere to prosper and for its fruits to be shared by the greatest number of Americans. They were presidents for all the people. They felt a moral responsibility for the nation's welfare and believed that citizens working together could make our democracy the envy of
the world. Their ethos was simple: Care about your fellow citizens, not just about yourself, your family, your friends, but also about your country and even those strangers in your midst whom you may never know.

When General Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican, became president in 1953, he continued in the footsteps of Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Wilson, and FDR by establishing the Interstate Highway System, passing the National Defense Education Act, and accepting the New Deal as a permanent part of America. As the former commander of U.S. forces in Europe during World War II, he had an appreciation not only for the industrial might of America's private sector, which had helped us win the war, but also for the spirit of Americans on the field of battle who had risked their lives both for their comrades and for all of us, because they believed that America's form of government was worth dying for. He understood that individuals acting alone could not build a society or win a war; public institutions had to have the power to act on behalf of the citizenry against the invincible forces—hurricanes, drought, wildfires, pandemics, market crashes—that threaten us all. His vice president, Richard Nixon, would continue in the liberal Republican tradition that government should not be dismantled but used to make America stronger. Far from attempting to repeal Social Security or Medicare, President Nixon worked with a Democratic Congress to advance the public's interest. His proposals for catastrophic health insurance, affirmative action, and welfare reform, while less generous than the Democratic alternatives, amounted to a broad governmental commitment to the lives of ordinary Americans. Explaining to ABC's Howard K. Smith, in early 1971, his plan to propose a budget that would wind up in the red, he declared, “I am now a Keynesian in economics,” by which he meant that government could and should help stabilize our economy.
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The bipartisan consensus that government exists in part to promote the general welfare was demonstrated in 1964 when Democrat Lyndon Johnson won 61 percent of the vote against Republican Senator Barry Goldwater. The scale of the defeat did not deter Goldwater's true believers, who had vanquished the liberal Republican Nelson Rockefeller in the primaries and wanted, among other things, to repeal Social Security and end the TVA. They only redoubled their efforts to capture the government, repeating consistently the same sullen refrain: “The government is the problem. . . . The government is the problem. . . .” When Ronald Reagan declared, in his 1981 inaugural address, that “government is not the solution,” it was the antithesis of FDR's inaugural address forty-eight years earlier. Although his vice-presidential selection of George H. W. Bush was a bone tossed to the pragmatic wing of the party, Reagan's electoral success brought to Washington many ideological Republicans who did not believe in the legacy of Lincoln, the Roosevelts, or even Eisenhower. They emphasized pursuit of self-interest as a way to secure the general interest. Under their narrow definition of common responsibilities, any government investment in the health, education, or welfare of individual Americans was seen as government trampling on individual liberties. Taxes were a form of robbery, and transfer payments, such as Social Security or Medicare, were a form of highway robbery. Nature was there to exploit. Government programs were paternalistic. If you were poor or unemployed or both, it was undoubtedly your own fault, and government should do nothing to help you. They preached a self-centered view of individual responsibility.

Reagan followed this agenda by cutting taxes, which the ideologues thought would create pressure for defunding government programs. But Reagan did not throw out the other constitutional purpose—“to provide for the common defense.” The combination of tax cuts and sizable increases in defense spending resulted in a
whopping budget deficit. Although the political tone of the administration was ideological, Reagan himself seemed pragmatic, and the people around him, such as Chief of Staff (later Treasury Secretary) James Baker, wanted to govern more than they wanted to dismantle the New Deal or turn the clock back on the welfare state.

As it turned out, Reagan did not shut down government; there was more stability than revolution during those years. Reagan accepted catastrophic health insurance for the elderly. When his 1981 tax cut proved a fiscal nightmare, he agreed to the largest tax increase in our peacetime history. While his actions to promote the common good have largely been forgotten by the general public, his anti-government rhetoric has not, and he is repeatedly invoked as a Tea Party icon. But the real Reagan would flunk the “no new taxes” litmus test required of today's Republican candidates.

When George H. W. Bush was elected, the pragmatic Republicans were back in charge. While his administration might not have been a second Eisenhower administration, as some liberal Republicans had hoped, it was an administration of reasonable people who were willing to compromise in order to get something done. Our next president, Bill Clinton, a brilliant, gifted politician, had been shaped by the Reagan years, when the ruling rhetoric was about government being the problem. During those years, he had been an active member of the Democratic Leadership Council, a group whose purpose was to develop centrist policies that would allow Democrats to win in an age of anti-government sentiment. He passed a significant deficit reduction package in his first year, but when Republicans won control of Congress in 1994, instead of asserting the moral principles of the Democratic Party holding that the American enterprise was at its best when we took responsibility not only for ourselves and our families but also for our neighbors, our country, and the planet, Clinton decided it was better to appropriate so-called Republican issues such
as crime and welfare, move to the center, and appeal to the electorate with less-than-ambitious symbolic proposals couched in phrases from focus groups. Maybe that path was his only political chance, but he went too far when, in his 1996 State of the Union address, he said, “The era of big government is over,” and commentators agreed that he sounded just like Reagan. Clinton was re-elected, but the unwanted side effect was the muffling of the Democrats' moral vision, while conservative Republicans kept hammering away against Big Government in the moral language of right and wrong.

When George W. Bush won in 2000, the Republican communication juggernaut had already provided him with the new vocabulary. Freedom from government, the primacy of the individual, financial success as the ideal—these were the values that had been repeated over and over by the Republican machine, permeating the media, for nearly forty years. All Bush had to do was mouth the words and then, after he won, turn the government over to the ideologues. He did both. There were no Jim Bakers in the Bush II White House. For every Karen Hughes and Condoleezza Rice, there were ten Karl Roves with grand designs for dismantling the government, embodied most starkly by the attempt to “privatize” Social Security. Science was out, ideology was in. Global warming was not a problem. Evolution and creationism were equally valid academic subjects. Stem-cell research was immoral. A helping hand was the business of church charities rather than government. Still, even George Bush evinced some bipartisanship in foreign and domestic policy. His war in Afghanistan had support in both parties. His education bill, No Child Left Behind, had Democrats Ted Kennedy and George Miller as partners. His bill to include a drug benefit in Medicare was a significant expansion of government, even as it rewarded pharmaceutical companies by denying Medicare the right to negotiate lower drug prices for recipients.

Today we're in a different world. Virtually no Republican can adopt the positions of past Republican presidents and survive the political firestorm from the Tea Party. The right-wing orthodoxy of the Tea Party is unforgiving, uncompromising, and relentless. It is a radicalism that has always resided in the Republican Party but formerly characterized only a fraction of its members. Now it's the prevailing view. Indeed, the congressional Republicans are more nihilistic than Reaganesque. They seem to want only to obstruct.

For those who argue that only the private sector is important, I'd say, “Look around.” Without government, there's no economic prosperity. There are measures that benefit everyone: airports, airline safety, roads, bridges, schools, sewers, dams, mass transit, power grids, ports, water systems, food safety, weather forecasts, law enforcement, disease monitoring, drug safety—and many more. These are public goods. Without them, the private sector would wither. Moreover, a kind of selflessness obtains among people in government. I'm not talking here about elected officials—presidents, senators, representatives, governors—but the dedicated employees who run city water systems or make sure the subways run or oversee the dams that provide us with electricity and irrigation. The very best professional expertise informs the government's judgments on environmental quality and food, drug, and airline safety. We are able to trust in the integrity of those decisions, because they are being made for all of us—and, indeed, most government employees assiduously attempt to serve the public welfare.

As in any organization, government has its share of incompetents and superfluous employees, and their unions often seem to be more interested in job security than in a job well done. But when presidents disparage civil servants, as Ronald Reagan once did, they disparage all of us. Thousands of extraordinary individuals serve in the FBI, the SEC, the CIA, the State Department, the Food and
Drug Administration, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, among others, who could be making a multiple of what they earn in their government jobs if they were in the private sector. If a business that has witnessed their competence lures them away with a higher-paying job, the government team loses another good player to the private sector, which is already bursting with talent. Altruistic public employees often find themselves having to choose between their public service and their family's economic welfare. If too many of them move on, and too few talented young people make the decision to serve, this disparity in competence between the public and private will grow, power will concentrate in even fewer hands, and all of us will suffer.