The One-Sided Campaign to Make Government Dysfunctional and Distrusted

Only the powerful benefit from a government that’s broken. And it’s easier to break it than to make it work.

This article is the fifth in an eight-part series. Read part one here, part two here, part three here, and part four here.

Conservatives are traditionally associated with ideas like trickle-down economics and tough fiscal choices and the human rights of corporations. But it’s not just those on the right who have built and benefited from America’s broken political and economic systems.

That’s why, in this quest to explore the evolution of my politics and worldview, I’ve thus far made little reference to political party. A lot of well-meaning liberals, wittingly or unwittingly, accept the myths of false choices, meritocracy, and unfettered free markets. A lot of well-meaning liberals share an inherent skepticism, even disdain, for both the notion of structural change and the ability of the government to help deliver it.

For a long time, I did, too. Even though I began my career as a progressive Democrat working on Capitol Hill for progressive Democrats, some part of me always assumed that government was an obstacle to be overcome — an inefficient impediment to innovation and individual liberty.

The reasons why I internalized such a worldview are neither secret nor surprising. For decades, Americans have been subjected to an unsubtle and relentless ideological campaign that celebrates the achievements of the individual and the private sector, disparages the notion of public action, and seeks to starve the government of resources, expertise, and the faith of those it governs. And this is the point where it becomes impossible to continue without delving into partisan politics, because the source of this anti-government crusade is the Republican party.

This campaign is more than rhetorical, but its success, like many stories that shape how we see the world, is rooted in rhetoric. For one example of how effective it’s been, consider how Americans talk about innovation and entrepreneurship. As University College London economist Mariana Mazzucato demonstrates, government-funded research and development have made possible many of the technological and entrepreneurial innovations we celebrate today, from smartphones to electric cars to GPS. Pointing to Silicon Valley’s self-aggrandizing narrative of scrappy change-the-world-on-our-own startups, Mazzucato tells WIRED’s João Medeiros, “History tells us that innovation is an outcome of a massive collective effort — not just from a narrow group of young white men in California. And if we want to solve the world’s biggest problems, we better understand that.”

That’s not how we understand it, of course. The iPhone has become a case study in individual ingenuity, business leadership, and risk taking. Google and Tesla have become shining examples of free markets allocating capital efficiently and allowing entrepreneurs to thrive. Yet many of the innovations we celebrate today — including those of Apple and Google and Tesla, along others — wouldn’t have happened without some level of government support.

For another example, take fracking, which is heralded by many on the right (and even some on the left) as proof that an unencumbered private sector can make the United States energy independent. The technology behind fracking, as Michael Lewis writes in The Fifth Risk, “was not the brainchild of private-sector research but the fruit of research paid for twenty years ago by the DOE [Department of Energy].” Meanwhile, Lewis adds, “every Tesla you see on the road came from a facility financed by the DOE.” This “narrative of innovation that omit[s] the role of the state,” Medeiros writes in WIRED, is not just inaccurate. It is “exactly what corporations had been deploying as they lobbied for lax regulation and low taxation.”

All of the stories we tell about innovation and entrepreneurship support the comforting notion that in the United States, success requires nothing more than a good idea and a strong work ethic. But they also prop up another narrative that has proven far more destructive.

When we lionize individual innovators while negating the public investments that made their innovations possible, we paint a misleading picture of how progress happens and how society should be structured to encourage more of it. The same thing happens when we write the government out of the story in countless other ways, from how public universities educate and train the workforce that powers big companies, to how environmental regulations free consumers to eat and drink without wondering whether what they’re eating and drinking will make them sick. We lose sight of the fact that government can actually play a positive and valuable role in society. Meanwhile, we never hesitate to point the finger at government when it errs. Sometimes the blame is deserved, but even when it is not, we only hear about what government did (or failed to do) when something goes wrong.

These arguments — that government is an enemy of innovation, that it’s incapable of working efficiently, that it’s always bureaucratic and bloated and broken — are not facts. They’re stories, just as the scam of false choices is a story. Sometimes these stories are true. Often they’re not. Yet we’re told them so much that eventually we stop questioning them. We internalize them. We start to repeat them ourselves. Before long, it is simply accepted as fact that the government cannot work, when, in reality, it never had a chance.

Government is not broken because it is inherently defective. Government is broken because it has been privatized, demonized, and defunded for four decades in a row. But that’s not the story we hear.

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The anti-government campaign that turned these stories into facts is inherently self-fulfilling and inherently one-sided. It’s much easier to obstruct government action than it is to make it succeed. (To some extent, it was designed that way.) That makes it easier to keep the government from functioning effectively. Making it dysfunctional, in turn, makes it unpopular and distrusted.

The more unpopular and the more distrusted government is, the easier it becomes to convince people that government is broken and needs to be defunded and dismantled. That conviction, in turn, create a social and political permission structure for cutting funding, eliminating regulations, and outsourcing the basic functions of government to private entities.

The longer this cycle continues, the more unpopular and under-resourced government becomes. The more it loses the funding and faith of the people, the less it’s able to do its job — such as, say, passing and enforcing laws and regulations that would break up anti-competitive monopolies or prevent environmental pollution or fight fraud in financial markets. The less effectively government functions, the more easily it can be manipulated by those who can afford to manipulate it, or those who prefer to ignore it.

Conveniently (but not coincidentally), that suits a number of constituencies perfectly fine. One is the people with the means to pay for private replacements of inefficient public services. Another is those whose businesses or bank accounts benefit from having a government that is incapable of enforcing laws or regulating industries or investigating white collar crime. (There’s some significant overlap between these two groups.) Louis Menand puts it simply in The New Yorker: “Politicians repeat it, and people nod their heads. Meanwhile, the rich get richer.”

Who, or what, do we have to thank for this self-destructive status quo? Let’s not “both-sides” this next part. Of two parties that make up America’s two-party system, in recent years only one party has even attempted to use the government to make our economic system fairer and more equitable. Only one party has consistently promoted fiscal responsibility during its time in the White House. Only one party has sought to expand access to the democratic process to bring new voices and perspectives into the system — voices and perspectives that might be willing to challenge the way things are — rather than suppress it to preserve an increasingly narrow and increasingly undemocratic hold on power.

Only one party has sought to make government work better, not defund it and starve it and throw sand in its gears until it stops working and loses the faith of those it is supposed to serve. As Menand writes, “The claim that government programs always backfire was Reagan’s campaign calling card — even though he did not eliminate a single major spending program during the eight years he was in office — and it has become one of the most dangerous canards in American politics.”

Without question, the modern Republican party is the source of the most egregious examples of bad-faith arguments about tough choices and condescending finger-wagging about economic trade-offs. It is the GOP, to pick but one recent example, whose leaders issue stern warnings about socialism and runaway spending when they’re out of power, and pass a $1.5 trillion-dollar tax cut as soon as they’re back in control. It is also Republicans who, having provided this massive handout to big companies and wealthy individuals, pivot almost instantaneously to proposing Social Security and Medicare cuts to pay for it. (“We’ve got to try to figure out how to spend less,” one GOP congressman told CNBC, presumably without any hint of irony or self-awareness, shortly after the tax cuts were signed into law.)

The Trump tax cuts may be an exceptionally shameless example of self-interest (and blatant corruption) masquerading as fiscal responsibility. The Republican response may be an exceptionally hypocritical example of the party’s platform of slashing taxes for the wealthy on one day and then on the next adopting the holier-than-thou persona of the adults in the room willing to make “tough choices” to cut assistance to seniors and take health care away from low-income families. But these efforts aren’t new. In ways big and small, they’ve been happening for decades, part of this generation-long ideological crusade to undermine the role and effectiveness of government in everyday life.

While this campaign did indeed emerge from the political right, it’s not as if hasn’t infected the worldview of some on the left, too. In Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, Anand Giridharadas describes the “political liberals who are philosophically committed to government, to the public solution of public problems, but who have absorbed, like secondhand smoke, the right’s contempt for public action.” That’s part of what makes these anti-government efforts so insidious. If anyone hears “public bad, private good” enough, they might start to absorb it — especially if the people repeating it over and over have built a system that’s serving them pretty well.

Last November, before Mike Bloomberg announced his campaign for president, New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie observed that “Bloomberg’s potential entry into the race — and Tom Steyer’s ongoing presence — shows that they’re not just giving an opinion. They want assurance that the Democratic nominee won’t be too disruptive. They want a restoration of the pre-Trump status quo, not a revolution. They want a veto of sorts, a formal way to say that Democrats can only go so far with their plans and policies.” (In case it isn’t clear, the “they” here is “America’s billionaires.”)

Republicans may have led the charge to defund government, to stop it from functioning effectively, to make the very concept of “government” toxic. But many on the left have been complicit in perpetuating the stories that define government as the problem, not the potential solution. Many on the left have been willing to adopt and embrace the dogma of tough choices and trade-offs. Many on the left have allowed our collective understanding of the possible to be narrowed to the parameters defined by the GOP’s ideological campaign.

Many on the left have made the same reckless bargain as those on the right, assuming that they can get the short-term political boost that comes from demonizing and voting to defund government, all while expecting that it will somehow still function when they need it (such as, to pick one example, in a global pandemic). Many on the left have conceded that anything that might upset the political and economic status quo is radical and misguided. Many on the left have taken for granted, like I did, that they can fix what’s wrong with the system without disrupting its core pillars, or without making any of our own allies uncomfortable.

Whether it’s the idea that Americans have to choose between growing the economy and growing the social safety net, or the idea that government is innately dysfunctional and inefficient, our broken political and economic systems are propped up and sustained through stories like this. These stories are misleading or incomplete at best, and self-serving and corrupt at worst. They’re stories told through the lens of meritocracy and free markets and innovation and entrepreneurship. Stories that train us to see government as an obstacle to progress, rather than a force for it.

The ultimate responsibility for this decades-long shrinking of our thinking lies largely at the feet of the Republican party. But it wouldn’t have lasted this long without buy-in from voters, institutions, and elites of every political persuasion.

This article, which was originally published on Medium, is the fifth in an eight-part series. Read part six here.