Government is not the problem

Biden's inaugural speech offers hope that we can finally retire the destructive slogan that Ronald Reagan created 40 years earlier to the day.

There’s broad agreement that Joe Biden put to rest yesterday the most unpopular presidency on record. Now lets hope he also put to rest the legacy of the most admired president of the past half-century.

I was a novice on Jan. 1, 1981, a recent New Republic intern who’d stumbled into a job as staff writer because the irreplaceable Steve Chapman had just moved over to the Chicago Tribune (where he just celebrated his 40th anniversary as columnist; congratulations, Steve!). I’d graduated from college seven months earlier and might as well have been wearing a propeller beanie. But listening with half an ear to Reagan’s inaugural speech on my first day on the job, I could tell it was important when Reagan said, “In the present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” Even a tenderfoot could readily grasp that this put the country on a destructive path.

I didn’t know how destructive. The proposition that government was the problem, which was never true, became so ingrained in American political culture that two subsequent Democratic presidents didn’t dare challenge it head-in. Indeed, President Bill Clinton reaffirmed it with his boneheaded assertion in 1996 that “the era of big government is over.”

The casual presumption that government’s very existence was the cause of America’s problems meant that any practical attempt to address them would be doomed. That was the first link in the chain that led to Donald Trump, a billionaire as bereft of government experience as he was of common decency, becoming president and eventually inciting a mob to commit deadly violence—five people died—in the Capitol on Jan. 6. Government-haters whose heads were filled with QAnon delusions about child molestation rings led by Hillary Clinton and underground vibrations orchestrated by the Deep State were quite literally shitting on the floor in the halls of Congress. It was a vision of hell painted by Hieronymus Bosch. And although Reagan would of course have deplored it, the easy contempt that Reagan encouraged for government—the imperfect but necessary tool that, in a democracy, is the only thing the people have to address big problems—set the stage for Trump’s election and all that followed.

Biden’s inaugural address wasn’t particularly eloquent, but it gave me some hope that Biden was repudiating not only Trump, but Reagan. That’s the subject of my latest New Republic column. Please read it.