On the United States (and Government)

I was going to put more in here, but it was getting long, and I've been picking it up and putting it down for a week and a half now, so I guess it's time to post it.

A couple of weeks ago, I made a melodramatic post on Facebook about the United States falling from greatness. It provoked an interesting discussion about whether the United States was actually falling from greatness and about my political views in general. I wrote some things there that I’ve wanted to write for a long time, and they deserve further exploration.

I’ll start by clarifying my original statement -- the United States of America is no longer a great nation. When I said this, I did not mean that the United States is no longer a world power, or that the United States is spiraling into oblivion and we’re all going to die. What I meant was that we can no longer claim to be exceptional. Whether we ever were exceptional is a debate for another day, but many Americans certainly believe that our nation is exceptional. To claim otherwise is considered at the very least unpatriotic. I don’t think that acknowledging reality is unpatriotic; I think it’s healthier to examine the problems with our country than to hide behind the flag.

I didn’t rush into making this gloomy pronouncement (I’ve been thinking about it for several months), and I don’t think the country is beyond saving. What finally broke me down is that no one seems interested in saving the country (or the world, for that matter); no one seems interested in building a better future. A large part of the country is paralyzed or apathetic. How many people even care what is going on in Washington? Unemployment has been hovering around 9% for two years now. The polls say that this bothers people, but I don’t see them taking to the streets, and I don’t see them voting for politicians who want to create jobs.

Of course, there is a large part of the country that is misled and misrepresented. As wealth becomes more and more concentrated in a small group of elite individuals, the interests of rich people and large corporations gain an ever-larger say in our government. Corporate interests clothe themselves in populism and convince the middle class to support the policies that screw the middle class. The Tea Party is composed primarily of people who are scared or pissed off, just like I am. The difference is that they were listening to different propaganda than I was. My propaganda told me that good government can make the world a better place (more on good government later). Their propaganda told them that bad government was making the world a worse place. Both of these statements are true, but they inspire different conclusions and different actions.

The Tea Party determined that if bad government is hurting society, then less government would be a good thing. What they didn’t consider is the cost of hacking the guts out of the government. I agree that there’s a lot of waste in our government, but I don’t think it’s as much as the current furor suggests. I think that in our haste to cut big numbers, we’re going to cut some programs that do a lot of good. The states are in dire straits financially, and many of them have cut Medicaid eligibility to draconian levels. In spite of this, the federal government stands poised to reduce its share of Medicaid payments. I believe in Medicaid. After my grandpa had a stroke in 2000, we couldn’t have afforded the nursing home he lived in or the medical care he needed. After we sold his house and his car, Medicaid was the only thing that paid those bills. I don’t know what would have happened to my family without Medicaid, but I believe that programs like that need to exist. This is just one example of programs that are in danger because we’re so wrapped up in cutting the size of our government.

I don’t think that big government is necessarily a bad thing. Our history is full of great projects that were planned, executed, or at least paid for by the government. They include infrastructure projects like the Erie Canal, the railroads (paid for by government land), the dams and levees that turned the Mississippi Valley into agricultural land, the ports that allow us to trade with the world, the highway system, the bridges and tunnels across our rivers, and even the sewers. The scientific discoveries made possible by federal funding are far too numerous to name, but government research paved the way for everything from vaccines to the Internet.

Personally, I'd like to see real tax reform, not just “tax reform” as a euphemism for deeper cuts to our already historically low tax rate. I'd like to see a realistic plan to make Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security sustainable without cutting benefits. I'd like to see universal health care, because I think it is morally right, but also because I think it is the only way to constrain our ballooning healthcare costs. I'd like to see a real investment in our transportation infrastructure, our electrical grid, and our communications networks, because our infrastructure was once the envy of the world, and is no longer. I want to see cities -- beautiful, clean cities that leverage modern technology and city planning to minimize traffic congestion and maximize productivity and livability. I want to see poverty and hunger eradicated, something that we could easily do if not for the economic forces that keep us from reaching our agricultural potential. I want to see our education system improved in a meaningful way, which doesn't necessarily mean more college graduates, but high school graduates who are prepared for the work force. I'd like to see a smaller military, and I would support a constitutional amendment requiring selective service to be activated in time of war. Basically I'm saying that we shouldn't go to war without a draft. Maybe if we took wars seriously, we would consider them seriously before committing to them.

While I'm on the topic of amendments, I think Obamacare's mandate is unconstitutional, but it is necessary for other provisions of the program (such as preventing discrimination against individuals with pre-existing conditions). I think that Roe v. Wade is a mockery of the judicial process. Fortunately, we have a process to change the Constitution. That process exists because the founding fathers were smart people and they knew that one document could not possibly stand the test of time. The amendment process is almost never used for practical purposes. Instead, it is used so a group can make a stand about a principle without facing the ramifications of an actual law being enacted. Some examples include the flag-burning amendment, assorted gay marriage amendments, and the latest, a balanced budget amendment. I suspect that the architects of these bills know how disastrous or unpopular they would be. Rather than enact a law, they just propose an amendment, which looks like a stronger stand than a law, but comes with the protection of being incredibly unlikely to pass and then be ratified. I'm tired of the government punting on the big choices.

I should point out that my political philosophy changes constantly, and that this post doesn't begin to encompass all of it, even as it exists right now. I fear that our belief in our own exceptionalism has sealed our fate. This nation became what it is because we worked our asses off to get here. We didn’t accept what we had as good enough, and we didn’t muddle through. We innovated, we pushed, we shoved, we changed things. Sometimes the changes were improvements. Sometimes the changes had unintended consequences that we had to rectify later (see The Gilded Age). I think we are currently experiencing the latter situation. Over the twentieth century, we revamped our government into a larger, more modern form. We have not perfected the formulas and policies that allow us to have modern government institutions like Social Security, Medicare, and other social welfare programs. We also went through a transformation of the economy from a regional or national thing to something that spans the world. We haven’t finished refining our policies to reflect this reality, and the failings of those policies is what caused the current recession. Rather than throw up our hands and give up on modern government, we need to keep trying. We need to keep pushing and experimenting to streamline our government, not by cutting out important parts of it, but by fixing the things that don’t work. Not everything that is popular is smart, and not everything that is smart is popular. Our leaders need to remember this.