Donald Trump’s crippling of basic government functions should prompt the citizenry to remember why they value government. After this hurricane season—and already after the floods in Texas—there will be little support for a weakened FEMA or a failing National Weather Service. Cutbacks of Medicaid will do palpable harm to tens of millions of people, many in red states. Conservatives into hunting and fishing do not back the evisceration of the Bureau of Land Management or the sell-off of public lands. Air travelers, whether Democratic or Republican, don’t support a ruined air traffic control system.
But just as democracy was badly hollowed out even before Trump, so too was the public sector. Ever since Jimmy Carter, Democratic presidents and the corporate wing of the party have joined Republicans in attacking government and sponsoring various forms of privatization and deregulation. Carter bragged about his efforts “to get the Federal Government off the backs of private industry by removing needless, burdensome regulation which benefits no one and harms us all.” In his 1996 State of the Union address, Bill Clinton declared, “The era of big government is over.”
If and when progressives get a chance to reclaim and rebuild the public realm, we need to create a genuinely public one.
IN THE AFTERMATH OF THE STOCK MARKET COLLAPSE of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed, Franklin Roosevelt successfully pursued two core functions: providing services directly, and housebreaking capitalism. That model undergirded the postwar boom, because the New Deal system constrained the predatory and extractive aspects of capitalism and promoted a relatively benign form. There were no hedge funds, no private equity, no share buybacks, and market manipulation and insider trading were punished. There was serious enforcement of the antitrust laws. Government’s guarantee of the right to unionize allowed labor to create a serious counterweight to capital. As a consequence, financial markets largely performed their textbook role of supplying capital to the productive parts of the economy, rather than just feathering their own nests.