Most Americans continue to be suspicious of government. That distrust is deeply etched in our culture and traditions. Our system of government was devised by people who distrusted government and intentionally created checks and balances, three separate branches, and almost insuperable odds against getting big things done. The period extending from 1933 to 1965 -- the New Deal and the Great Society -- was an historical aberration from that long tradition, animated by the unique crises of the Great Depression and World War II, and the social cohesion that flowed from them for another generation. Ronald Reagan merely picked up where Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover left off.
But Reagan's view of government as the problem is increasingly at odds with a nation whose system of health care relies on large for-profit entities designed to make money rather than improve health; whose economy is dependent on global capital and on global corporations and financial institutions with no particular loyalty to America; and much of whose fuel comes from unstable and dangerous areas of the world. Under these conditions, government is the only entity that can look out for our interests.We will not return to the New Deal or the Great Society, but nor will we continue to wallow in the increasingly obsolete Reagan view that we don't need a strong and competent government. Today's vote confirms our hope that we can have both strength and competence in Washington. It is an audacious hope, but we have no choice.
This is a pretty good summary of a theme I've been exploring from different angles. The small government mindset has deeply ingrained patterns of thinking on the cultural right, but they no longer make any sense. I understand the fantasy that animates the small-government types. I really do. I'm enough of a Romantic with anarchic tendencies to feel the loss of the de-centered, local, face-to-face community life that conservatives lament. But that de-centered world is gone--or rather it has to be retrieved, but in such a way that embraces a certain level of centralization.
My argument here for years is that social democracy allows that, if it's understood within the context of the principle of subsidiarity. Subsidiarity allows for as much local political and cultural freedom as possible while at the same time operating within a larger national, and eventually (let's face it) global, governmental framework. It's not either the either/or of classic liberalism versus classic socialism--and the New Deal is just a name we give to the way Americans figured out how to find the balance between them. The crisis of the'30s might have forced us to figure it out, but we shouldn't forget what we learned, and Reaganism represents that forgetting. It is a reversion to a 19th-century mindset that people might feel a certain comfort in, but which is no longer adapted to the real world in which we live.
So I agree and disagree with Reich when he says we "will not return to the New Deal or the Great Society." I agree to the extent that reversion is never a good idea, but disagree to the extent that the New Deal and Great Society represent something dynamic and adaptable in the American Soul. The New Deal and Great Societies are not some ends in themselves whose programs need to preserved at all costs. Those programs are provisional effects of that pragmatic, adaptable Whiggish strain within the American tradition to deal with the world as it is. Its solutions are by their very nature experimental and temporary, because they must be adjusted to adapt to the world as the world changes.
They must be continuously evaluated concerning whether they are working, whether they are worth the cost. But there's a difference between adjusting and dismantling, and Reaganism is born of a destructive, regressive impulse to dismantle what works and to live in a dysfunctional bunker fantasy. That values constellation simply no longer has any legitimacy.