In Defense of Government
In which I make it very far into defending bureaucracy without having to spell it.
For as long as I can remember, and certainly even longer than that, Republicans have defined their politics by demonizing government. It’s too big, it controls too much. They want to privatize Social Security and Medicare, privatize the Post Office, privatize schools. They don’t want the government to be able to tell you want to do with your toxic waste or to limit the use of lead pipes. And while Republican attacks on diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility are primarily motivated by bigotry, the end result is that the government pulls back from enforcing equal opportunities while ensuring the freedom to discriminate.
And it’s not like the vagaries of government are terribly popular. American infrastructure projects typically cost quite a bit more and take quite a bit longer than infrastructure in other countries. Our health care is more expensive, and the red tape for assistance programs is often overly complicated and difficult to navigate. And when we do get something popular and helpful passed, like the Child Tax Credit, it’s passed with time limits and it's more likely to get overturned by Republicans than to continue reducing child poverty by 50%, to the lowest rate ever recorded. So on the one hand Republicans undermine trust in government programs by pulling the rug out from people who rely on them, and on the other hand they disparage those programs at every turn, imbuing them and the government that runs them with negative stigma.
The polling, of course, bears this out. As reported recently in the New York Times, 59 percent of adults, including 57 percent of Democrats and 63 percent of Republicans, believed the nation’s political system had been broken for decades. And last year, according to Pew Research, trust in government reached all-time historic lows.
Enter Elon Musk and Donald Trump, who spent the first few weeks of Trump’s second term doing everything possible to bring the engines of government bureaucracy to a screeching halt - first by attempting to freeze all government payments to services and projects already legislated and appropriated by Congress, and then by attempting to end foreign aid, dismantle the Department of Education, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and USAID, and get all career service officials to resign from the U.S. government through a deal of dubious legality and feasibility.
Through the auspices of the recently created “Department of Government Efficiency” or DOGE, the purported goal of Musk et al is to root out all the fraudulent and/or wasteful spending by the federal government. What’s really happening, however, is that the richest man in the world, who spent $200 million to buy the election result he wanted, is engaged in an unprecedented power grab for a feckless, corrupt, overly spray tanned bigot who could not careless about fraudulent and/or wasteful spending. We know why Donald Trump wants to do this - he wants to punish his political enemies, champion the long oppressed white man, and use the presidency to generate as much wealth for himself and his family as possible.
It’s a little harder to figure out what Elon Musk wants out of this. He is the richest man in the world. I can tell you that if I was worth $400 billion, I would not be spending my time playing around in the Treasury department’s payment system. Musk’s net worth is more than six times the budget of USAID, whose ability to provide things like vaccines and medical treatment to children around the world, for example, he’s completely gutted. His net worth is almost twice the amount of medical debt in the country, and is ten times the amount per year it would take to end world hunger according to the World Food Program. And even if he didn’t want to help with any of those problems, he could at least be out there reading a book on a tropical island or something.
It’s possible, as it turns out, that much money maybe can’t buy happiness? Musk may very well be motivated to fill the hole in his heart with revenge, against his trans daughter who hates him and the women who divorced or dumped him, against the liberals and leftists who decry his obscene wealth. And maybe he’s just so arrogant as to believe that he made all those billions of dollars himself, that it was his talent and ingenuity that made him the richest man in the world and not exploitation of the masses and strategically placed government subsidies and an incredible amount of luck.
Because that’s one of the most galling things about this - Musk himself is the beneficiary of government subsidies! Of course the subsidies that he receives are not quite the same as SNAP benefits, the child tax credit, or student loans. But both Tesla and SpaceX receive government subsidies for their work, to say nothing of the fact that Elon Musk’s companies were built by people who went to public schools, materials transported on public roads, and who enjoy clean air and clean water regulated by the federal government.
In his 2012 campaign, President Barack Obama received untold amounts of flack for saying “You didn’t build that,” to America’s business leaders. His point, buried as it was under deliberate and malicious misunderstanding, is that none of us get by alone. We do not build businesses alone, we do not write books alone, we do not raise kids alone. As it turns out, we live in society, with our wants and needs, our successes and failures inextricably intertwined with those around us.
Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and the rest of the Republicans following them sycophantically towards authoritarianism want us to believe that we’re better off alone, that we’re better off in a country where what’s mine is mine, and what I can take from you is also mine. They want us to build walls not just along our southern border, but around ourselves too. Damned is the public health miracle of trash collection, and the substantial accomplishment of letters and postcards and packages making their way from one end of the country to the other. Who needs well maintained roads and train tracks and air traffic controllers? Who needs a safety net for sudden illness or death or natural disaster?
It’s not, of course, that our government is perfect. Our government has done countless things that are downright horrifying, including sending bombs to Israel so they could kill tens if not hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. It’s not even that there is no waste or fraud in the federal government to be found and dealt with. Of course there is! Our country is big and thus so is our government - things necessarily fall through the cracks. But that’s not what this new administration really wants to deal with. They want the same thing they’ve always wanted - to destroy our trust in ourselves, and to destroy our trust in each other.
We do not have to make the case for government as is, for the means tested, red taped labyrinth it’s too easy to get lost in. But we do need to make the case for government as a project we take on together, a way to pool our resources to address problems that are too big for any one of us alone. And yes, that means highways and national security and cleaning up after floods and hurricanes and fires and earthquakes, but it also means health care and scientific research and education and feeding each other. These are areas where we need each other, where we need different perspectives and new ideas and the generative creativity that is more than the sum of the people working on it.
Government is how we help each other when we’re far apart. It’s never going to be perfect, and there will always be mistakes and people who want to use it for ill and people who are more afraid of fraud than of starving kids. But if we work together, if we talk to each other and listen to each other and believe in our capacity to do big things together, then we can and will make a difference.
To Save Democracy This Week:
Tell someone (your parents, your friends, your Instagram/Blue Sky/Facebook/Substack followers, your Senators…) about some sort of public good you’ve benefited from. For example, in grad school I was on Medicaid and had the relief of not bankrupting myself for health care. I went to public schools K-12 and a public university for college and got a great education from great teachers. And every week when I take the trash out a truck comes by and picks it up and takes it away from my neighborhood, where the proliferation of trash could be making lots of people sick.
Do you live in a red state? Do you know someone who lives in a red state? Watch this video from AOC about why it’s important to call your Representative and Senators even if they are Republicans and then send it to anyone it applies to.
Read We Could Be So Good by Cat Sebastian or Gwen and Art Are Not in Love by Lex Croucher, or The Pairing by Casey McQuiston. Then share it with a friend.
Eat a chocolate croissant.
Write a postcard to someone you haven’t seen in a while.