12 words that changed American history

Tom Carver
Sep 3, 2018 · 7 min read

Or How We Lost our Faith in Government

In January 1981, Ronald Reagan stood on the steps of the Capitol and launched an insurrection against Washington: “government” he said, “is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”

It was a prophetic moment in our history. His purposeful demolition of the government at his inauguration has since metastasized into a near universal skepticism about Washington’s value and purpose, corroding the social contract to the point where notions such as ‘Washington is a swamp’, ‘government is a conspiracy’, ‘government does nothing for me’ have become so commonplace as to pass unnoticed.

Government was once popular

It’s hard to understand now but up until the 1970s, Americans held an overwhelmingly positive view of their government. They looked to Washington for protection and support and they identified with it; together they had beaten back the scourges of the Great Depression, Nazism, and communism. Washington was regarded as working in the interests of the people, and attracted the best and brightest minds.

When the famous question ‘do you trust the federal government?’ was first asked by pollsters in 1958, 73% of the population answered that they trusted the government just about always or most of the time.

There was mainstream consensus between Republicans and Democrats about the government’s role. Even under Republican president Eisenhower, social security spending grew by 41%, and whole new departments such as Health, Education and Welfare were created. Eisenhower chartered the federal interstate system and championed the building of low-income housing.

Between 1945 and 1960, the highest marginal tax rate was over 80% — you’d imagine that high taxes would quickly breed dissatisfaction with government but in fact, the trust in government barometer closely correlates with the highest tax rate: the higher the taxes, the higher the government’s approval, it seems.

Cutting it down to size

But then came the system failures of Vietnam and Watergate, giving Reagan his historic opportunity. “It is my intention to curb the size and influence of the federal establishment,” he declared. The battle lines were drawn: the federal government was no longer the friend of the people, but the enemy.

Reagan came back to the idea again and again. In 1986 he declared, ‘the nine most terrifying words in the English language are I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help’.

The assault took on political, economic, and cultural dimensions. He used supply-side economics and tax cuts to curb the government’s economic power. He felled the top tax rate from 70% to 28%, and initiated deep cuts in welfare spending. It was a formula that the Right would use to devastating effect for the next 40 years: by reducing taxes, they could starve the government of funds, causing government services to shrink or fail and dissatisfaction with government to rise.

Reagan’s deregulation policies allowed the private sector to take over large parts of national life: pensions, education, jobs, national security, telecommunications, even welfare.

Welfare becomes a dirty word

He undermined the idea of welfare by introducing the image of the ‘welfare queen’ to the public imagination: “She used 80 names, 30 addresses, 15 telephone numbers to collect food stamps, Social Security, veterans’ benefits for four nonexistent deceased veteran husbands, as well as welfare. Her tax-free cash income alone has been running $150,000 a year.”

Americans were outraged, and it was quickly known that the woman he was referring to was black; from then on ‘welfare queens’ became synonymous with African-Americans. The message was clear: the federal government is no longer a friend of whites. The notion of the lazy black and the poor, hard-working white — so much part of the mythology of the old South — went viral. And the South rewarded Reagan with its support. In 1980, he won 61% of the white southern vote and increased it to 72% four years later.

The feedback loop

A regressive feedback loop was set in motion: the more the federal government was starved of funding and its services cut, the less valuable and worthwhile the government seemed to ordinary Americans, and the more they voted to cut it, believing that it was only out for itself.

Yet the notion that the federal government is somehow out of control is a myth: America has the 9th smallest federal spending per GDP of the 34 countries in the OECD, and compared to other developed nations, the American government hardly stands out in villainy. The German government systematically exterminated millions of its own people in the Holocaust, and precipitated the Second World War. This was then followed by the East German state imposing forty years of communist rule in half the country.

Yet today, 60% of the German people say that they fully trust their federal institutions.

Contrast that with America (which has enjoyed two centuries of democratic rule, has never known communism, or military rule, or even a coup, and possesses a constitution that’s the envy of the world) where only 35% of its citizens trusts the government to do the right thing. And 49% of Americans see their federal government as an immediate threat to their rights.

The arrival of big money

Reagan’s assault on government was helped by a number of factors. The 1970s saw the rise of the professional lobbyist. Many date the start to a now obscure document called the Lewis Powell memo written in 1971. In it, written for the US Chamber of Commerce, Lewis Powell laid out a playbook for how business can play politics through lobbying.

That same year, the courts ruled that political action committee (PACs) were legal, which provided business with a way to channel large amounts of money into the political process legally. In 1973, Richard Scaife, an extreme libertarian who’d grown up on a 9,000 acre estate in Pennsylvania, founded the Heritage Foundation, and Charles Koch, another billionaire, founded the Cato Institute. Both of these became powerful platforms for undermining the legitimacy of government. In his first administration, Reagan implemented 61% of the recommendations that Richard Scaife’s new Heritage Foundation had given him.

Taking full advantage of the new loopholes, a small club of rich conservatives created dozens of PACs such as FreedomWorks, the Center to Protect Patients’ rights, and Americans for Limited Government, for channeling millions of dollars to promote the notion of limited government.

Unaware that only a handful of hardliners were behind these campaigns, many Americans assumed that these views were widely held. When factories started closing across the rust belt, workers turned their ire not on the companies who initiated the layoffs, but on the government. It was the government which was blamed for moving jobs offshore, not the corporations.

The idea of a government job — once a source of great pride in working class families — became an article of derision, and those who led government, once regarded as colossi astride their bureaucracies, — men like George Marshall and Robert McNamara — were derided. Taxes were no longer seen as a valuable tool for funding welfare programs, but as a form of theft from hard-working individuals, while those on welfare were branded the illegitimate recipients of the stolen money.

The Young Turks from the South

The generation of GOP leaders who came of age politically under Reagan upped the ante. Most of them came from the South: Newt Gingrich, Tom deLay, and Jim DeMint. They took pride in blocking legislation and threatening to close the government. Surrogates like Grover Norquist demanded that the government be reduced ‘to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub’. The anti-government message was enthusiastically spread by conservative media like Fox News.

In 1994, Newt Gingrich, as the new speaker of the House, asked the incoming class of Republican representatives to make an extraordinary commitment: to sleep on the floors of their offices instead of renting apartments in Washington as new members of congress had done for generations. It was a symbolic gesture intended to show that they had no connection to the Washington establishment — and a sign of just how deeply the anti-government virus had taken hold.

Today, members of Congress continue to go through contortions to avoid being tainted by the notorious Washington ‘swamp’. They fly in on Tuesdays and out on Thursdays to minimize the time they have to spend in the city, and some still sleep on the floors and couches of their offices like refugees.

The idea that government is fundamentally dishonest and anti-business is now an article of faith in millions of American households — and still growing. In 2002, 39% of Americans said government ‘had too much power’. Today, that stands at 55%. The Trust in Government index remains stuck in the low 30s.

However, there are signs that the next generation feels very differently: OECD data shows that 15–29 year old Americans are considerably more positive towards the government than other age groups. Ironically, Reagan himself almost certainly did not intend for this revolution to become so extreme. Later on in that infamous inaugural speech of 1980, he explained: “it is not my intention to do away with government. It is rather to make it work — work with us, not over us; stand by our side, not ride on our back. Government can and must provide opportunity, not smother it; further productivity, not stifle it.”

If this debate had been about making the government work better instead of bringing it down, then America would have a modern state with efficient public services, and the levels of populist frustration would almost certainly be lower. Instead, we have Trump who is stoking the fears of everyone and treating Washington as a personal fiefdom to be raided.

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