USA TODAY International Edition
Is the Reagan era finally at an end?
Government’s COVID- 19 failure led to Biden win
It was Inauguration Day and a young woman in Washington, D. C., looked up at snipers stationed on rooftops. “The whisper went round that they had received orders to shoot at any one crowding toward” the president- elect, wrote Julia Taft Bayne. Carl Schurz, a supporter of the new president, said he hoped that the departing president, a “man who had done more than any other to degrade and demoralize the National Government and to encourage the rebellion,” would now “retire to an unhonored obscurity.”
The year was 1861. The person to be inaugurated was Abraham Lincoln. The dishonored former president was James Buchanan, a defender of the centuries- old system of slavery and white supremacy that Lincoln and his vision of a more proactive federal government seemed to threaten.
Eight score years later, the nation will witness an equally tense and unusual inauguration ceremony. It comes 14 days after a violent mob spurred on by President Donald Trump’s words stormed the U. S. Capitol to prevent the peaceful transition of power.
Lincoln’s inauguration reverberates today not only because it took place under heightened security and in the context of a domestic insurrection carried out by people waving Confederate flags, but also because it signaled an inflection point in U. S. history. It was a moment when citizens began looking to the federal government to use its power to bring the nation’s founding ideals into line with social realities that contradicted those ideals.
Galvanizing hostility
Since then, there have been two other inaugurations that marked important shifts in how Americans thought about the role of the federal government. In 1933, Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office in an economic crisis of historic proportions, which the outgoing Republican administration had seemed unable and even unwilling to confront in any meaningful way. FDR’s ambitious New Deal drew on Americans’ faith in the federal government as a positive force in their lives.
In 1980, Ronald Reagan interpreted his landslide victory as proof that the nation had rejected FDR’s New Deal and its pro- government assumptions. Since the 1960s, Reagan had been arguing that the “liberal” vision of politics embraced by most Democrats and Republicans at the time was outmoded at best, and a slippery slope to totalitarianism at worst.
One of his oft- used laugh lines was, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘ I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’ ”
Reagan led many Americans to believe that the federal government had virtually no constructive role to play in domestic affairs, and that Washington was occupied by bureaucrats who did little more than waste “our tax money.”
Donald Trump and Ronald Reagan differ from each other in many ways, but their campaigns both galvanized hostility to the federal government. Reagan pilloried “Beltway elites” with a friendly smile as he spoke of a new “morning in America,” while Trump’s attacks on the Washington “swamp” and “American carnage” took on a more menacing and conspiratorial tone.
The effect has been much the same, though: to encourage too many ordinary American citizens to see federal incompetence, corruption and inaction as a norm — rather than as poor governance in need of reform.
21st century problems
After suffering through 10 months of a pandemic whose impacts could have been ameliorated by a competent federal response, more than 81 million people went to the polls in November and voiced their desire for an administration willing and able to respond effectively to challenges that we as individuals cannot solve on our own.
On top of the coronavirus, America today faces a host of problems that call out for creative policy solutions at the federal level — from the looming climate crisis, to decades of income inequality, to police brutality and mass incarceration, to crumbling infrastructure, to massive student debt and the inequities of our health care system.
The magnitude of these problems requires action at a commensurate scale. A government small enough that he could “drown it in the bathtub,” as Reagan acolyte Grover Norquist put it in 2001, is not up to the task of solving the 21st century problems we face.
Reagan didn’t invent anti- government cynicism. It has deep roots in American political culture stretching back to the nation’s founding. We should not expect that one Biden term, committed to a concerted response to the pandemic and the unevenly borne devastation it has wrought, will eliminate such cynicism.
Even so, just as anti- government sentiment runs deep in American political culture, so does the idea that “we the people” can invest the government with the appropriate powers to serve the general welfare. Utilizing government to improve the health and economic opportunities of poor, working and middle- class Americans has the potential to re- inaugurate the pragmatic and democratic, pro- government tradition that Lincoln and FDR espoused, but which has had too few unapologetic advocates since the the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s.