The Ideological Roots of Our Country's Decline

The Story of the People Against the Government 

In last week’s post, I said that the United States is declining because we have lost the sense of community and shared destiny that must underly the willingness to pay the taxes needed to maintain our public facilities. We have come to see the taxes that we pay not as an investment in those facilities but purely as a burden that should be minimized. How did this come about?

It came about because the radical right in our country has seized on one of the strands in our political tradition and used it as the basis of an anti-tax campaign that has endured for decades. That strand begins with the story of the American Revolution as we usually tell it.

The American Revolution as we usually understand it was a rebellion by a people against a government and particularly against that government's power to levy taxes. We remember the Boston Tea Party and the “embattled farmers” of Paul Revere’s famous ride. We remember "No taxation without representation." Our revolutionary story is not a story of class conflict or of resistance to class oppression or even of social change. It is a story of people freeing themselves from a burdensome government. 

Of course, the American society of the eighteenth century had class differences and injustices, but they do not play a large role in our story as we tell it. The reason is that they did not weight heavily on the Americans of the eighteenth century. The natural resources of the continent seemed limitless, and the labor force was small.  Wages were necessarily high, and people could escape from the injustices of the seaboard cities by moving to the frontier to carve out their own destinies. So, class conflict did not become an important part of our national story.

The Archetypes of Our National Consciousness

Instead, the people who moved to the frontier became the archetypes of our national consciousness. People like Daniel Boone, Davey Crockett and Jim Bridger are the heroes of our national story. We remember “Sweet Betsy from Pike” and her fellow pioneers enduring - as the song tells us - “starvation and colera, hard work and slaughter” as they traveled west. Such people did not need much government in the story as we tell it. Each American was the architect of his/her own destiny.

The Depression Changed the Narrative

The Great Depression upended this narrative. Amid the suffering of that the Depression caused, our government under the New Deal took on broad responsibilities for the welfare of the people including most famously Social Security for retired Americans. Later, we added civil rights enforcement and Medicare. However, The New Deal always had opposition from the very wealthy because it required government regulation of commerce and higher taxes to pay for the new services. 

Opposition to the New Deal and the Radical Right

Over the decades since, the opposition to the principles of the New Deal has become the radical right. The radical right has fed us the idea that government is necessarily bloated, inefficient and oppressive and that it should be minimized. As Grover Norquist famously said, "I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub."

Under pressure from the radical right, we have lowered taxes over and over again without considering how the government programs we depend on will be paid for. We have to some degree papered over the gap between the cost of the programs we want and the taxes we have been willing to pay by relying on government borrowing. That has worked fairly well for the federal government but not at the state and local levels. They have become more and more dependent of federal funding. Even the federal government is now running into problems caused by rising interest rates on the federal debt.

Our Public Services and Our Country Are Decaying

As a result, all of the public services on which we depend are decaying, and our country is decaying with them. We can reverse the decay only by reviving the ideology of solidarity that is another strand of our political tradition. We must remember Benjamin Franklin’s comment after the signing of the Declaration of Independence. “We must all hang together or we will certainly all hang separately.” We must remind ourselves that government is not only a burden. It is also the means by which we achieve our collective goals. We must remind ourselves that the development of our country has always depended on the contributions of government, How would the Midwest have developed in the nineteenth century without the Erie Canal? Where would our universities be without the Land-Grant University program? Where would our modern middle class be if the GI Bill had never been passed?