Inspiring a mistrust of government
Four decades ago, in his first Inaugural Address, Reagan uttered the immortal words, “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” Among all that he said that day, this is the phrase that is best remembered. The specific “problem” Reagan was talking about was the recession that started in early 1980, but that is not how most of us remember it.
Reagan spoke often about the problem of a large federal government. Since the 1960s he had been saying, “Washington doesn’t solve problems, it subsidizes them,” and during his own presidency he quipped, “the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help.”
When Reagan spoke of making government smaller, he was using a heavy amount of misdirection. In spite of his words, the size of the federal government swelled under Reagan and national debt grew by over 180% — two-and-a half times more than any other peacetime president. But Reagan’s steady and consistent chiding of the federal government appealed to a certain kind of voter, and so was born the modern Republican myth of “small government.”
Call it The Small Lie. Neither Reagan nor any Republican president since has done anything to decrease the size of the federal government, but they have consistently cited government as the problem and used that as a blanket excuse for targeting domestic spending that would benefit Americans through deregulation, tax cuts, and decreased spending on social programs.
In the GOP’s paradigm, the government is never seen as an institution that can help alleviate the actual problems of its citizens. Compare this to reality, though. There are only 10 states that send more money to the federal government than they get back. All the other states — red or blue — rely on “big government” to make ends meet.
And those ends matter. Federal spending helps fund schools, roads, Medicaid, emergency management, clean water, and community development along with providing grants for health, housing, environment, and dozens of programs that are important to Americans.
The federal government also makes sure our food is safe, warns us of hurricanes, administered Operation Warp Speed, and is the reason that the United States is as globally successful and influential as it is.
The perhaps unforeseen longrange impact of campaigning against our own government has not been to just shortchange our citizenry, dismantle some of our greatest accomplishments, or to exacerbate opportunity gaps — although it has surely done all of those — it is also to undermine the public’s trust in our government.
By cultivating this mistrust among their own voters, the GOP has self-selected voters inclined not to trust the government, even when the people they elect are the government. During Donald Trump’s first two years as president, when Republicans also controlled the House and the Senate, conservative politicians and pundits began spinning stories about the “Deep State” to explain why the real state — the one exclusively controlled by Republicans — was proving ineffective at accomplishing its laundry list of agenda items.
They use this mistrust to return themselves to office and then launch initiatives designed to favor a very small set of Americans at the cost of the rest. Tax cuts for the wealthy have not boosted the middle class; they have led to spiraling income and wealth gaps. Over 60 attempts were made to repeal Obamacare with no plan to replace it, even though Republican voters strongly favor the preexisting conditions protection.
“Government is the problem” was the cradle that gave us QA-non and the birthplace of The Big Lie, a lie that has done more to tarnish Republicans than Democrats (e.g., Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, Maricopa County Chairman Clint Hickman, Mitt Romney, and Representative Liz Cheney).
Reagan spent the first minute of that Inaugural Address talking about how important and ‘miraculous’ the peaceful transfer of power was to our nation’s democracy and praising Jimmy Carter for his help transitioning power to the incoming administration. Forty years later members of Reagan’s party stormed the Capitol to stop the same peaceful transfer.
Nurturing a mistrust of government does nothing to improve the lives of American citizens, and using that mistrust to get voters to willingly vote and act against their own interests cannot fail but to lead to secessionist and insurrectionist behavior.