The End of the 40-Year War on Government

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With the Trump era gradually receding from the traumatized American scene, it’s becoming—again, gradually—possible to imagine a politics of serious and sustained liberal renewal. Realizing that aim, however, requires taking full stock of the big lies and self-serving political mythmaking that stoked the ascension of Donald Trump to the presidency in the first place. And a good starting point, as New Republic contributor Timothy Noah argues, is the right-wing tradition of bashing government for its own sake—an ignoble legacy of Ronald Reagan, who was inaugurated for his first term exactly 40 years prior to Joe Biden’s formal elevation to the presidency this week.

As it happens, the day of Reagan’s inauguration was also Noah’s first day as a fledgling TNR staff writer—a suitable place to witness Reagan’s glib announcement from the Capitol dais that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”

That de facto mission statement for the Reagan years was, like much of the rhetoric from the White House, a bald untruth: Government expanded on Reagan’s watch, and the federal deficit—the other reliable bogey in the speeches of right-wing leaders posturing as fiscal hawks—exploded. But the cynical insurgent theorists of New Right backlash politics were nonetheless poised to cash in on the political dividends of the rampant demonization of government. “Even though Reagan’s disparagement of government failed to shrink its size,” Noah writes,

it did plenty of long-term damage. The tax cuts enacted to wage war on big government accelerated the trend toward income inequality without doing much to create economic growth. (A recent study by two economists at the London School of Economics reached the same conclusion about tax cuts enacted over the past five decades in other countries belonging to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.) Growth in income inequality, in turn, fueled tribal disaffection among the white working class, which the GOP successfully exploited in presidential politics.

And in the wonkier reaches of federal policy, the rhetoric of government-bashing enabled a decades-long assault from the right on all manner of nondefense discretionary spending—basically starving out public-sector social outlays to finance the continued explosion of military spending. The same boilerplate sloganeering also produced a ruinous federal deregulatory binge, formalized in benign-sounding initiatives like the “cost-benefit” analyses mandated by the new Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs—basically a fig leaf for industry capture of the regulatory process that continued on course through the gleefully polluting, cronyist regulatory reign of the Trump regime.

But the good news for the incoming Biden administration, Noah writes, is that the chaos and incompetence of the Trump era have created an opening for a new Democratic embrace of public-sector governance. (Indeed, in one of his first acts in office, Biden dispatched the dreadful OIRA cost-benefit mandate, in a distinctly pro-regulatory executive order.)

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More broadly, of course, Biden has to rapidly galvanize government operations for the benefit of the pandemic-battered, grossly unequal American economy. In so doing, he’ll also have to help the Democratic Party overcome its own Stockholm-syndrome embrace of neo-Reaganite rhetoric about government, from Bill Clinton’s infamous State of the Union pronouncement in 1996 that “the era of big government is over” to Biden’s old boss, Barack Obama’s more professorial dictum in his own 2013 State of the Union address that “it is not a bigger government that we need, but a smarter government.” Biden, whose own public career largely follows the trajectory of the Reagan war on government, is enough of a political animal to shy off the rhetoric of government expansion for its own sake. But as Noah notes, he deftly couched his inaugural address’s appeal to the atrophied spirit of national unity in terms of forthright public-sector activism:

In calling for unity Wednesday, Biden was in effect saying, enough—not only with treasonous insurrection but also with the identification of government as the enemy. He didn’t say, “I’m for big government, and I’m going to make it bigger.” But he did say this: “We can right wrongs. We can put people to work in good jobs. We can teach our children in safe schools. We can overcome the deadly virus. We can reward work and rebuild the middle class and make health care secure for all. We can deliver racial justice, and we can make America once again the leading force for good in the world.”

It’s a quietly ambitious start to an administration that will no doubt face more than its share of concerted government-bashing from a truculent, and increasingly violent, conservative movement. But it at least holds forth the promise of lifting the nation out of the nihilistic death spiral sparked by today’s Trumpified right. You could even say that it’s morning in America.

—Chris Lehmann, editor

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