Oh for the Good Old Days, When Government Could Govern

I’m doing my best, trying to learn to live on the wrong side of the Urban-Rural Divide.

But some days…

Days like today.

Days when I’m just so heartily sick of the conservative water I’m swimming in. I mean, I’m a fish that’s aware that it’s wet. All I’m sayin’.

Today what I’m sick of is bad government. No, not our local government-which is indeed, objectively, factually bad-but I’m talking about government that’s bad by definition-the kind of government that’s bad because government is bad and everybody knows it. At least, everybody around here knows it. Around here, you learn that government is bad about the same time you learn the Lord’s Prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance. Kind of the same dif….

Where and when I grew up and lived most of my life before coming here, government was good. Government looked out for you, made sure you were safe, gave you great outdoors places to enjoy, took care of kids and old people, gave loans and subsidies to farmers and downtown businesses. Government kept the parks clean and mowed, put up signs to slow things down and keep things moving, paid for big expensive things like highways and bridges, ballparks with lights, swimming pools, even the fairgrounds that only got used a couple weeks a year. Government built dams and levees to keep the downtown from flooding every year. It kept the reservoirs open for people to fish and take their boats out and sail and waterski. Government helped out schools and hospitals, had a jail where bad guys had to go sit it out for awhile. The list goes on and on.

Government did all that, and it was good. Government did what Honest Abe said it should:

“The legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done, but cannot do for themselves, in their separate and individual capacities.”

There’s a lot that people can’t do in their “separate and individual capacities,” so government stepped up and did it for us. I liked it when government did that-when it kept the lights on and the roads smooth and brightly painted and cleared of ice and snow, when government made sure loners had a place to live and an occasional meal on the house, when old people didn’t have to be afraid their life savings might not last.

But ever since Reagan, government has been the problem, and it’s not supposed to make our lives better and safer and cleaner and all the rest because it’s bad when government does that and it’s good when we have to fend for ourselves. Fending for ourselves-they call it “privatization”-builds character. The whole country’s moral compass will suddenly start spinning out of control if government helps students learn to think or helps sick people get better. Character will go right down the creapper if government makes sure people who worked hard all their lives and had to spend everything they made to get by-and never quite did-have a steady income when they get to the stage in life where they just don’t have enough gas in the tank to keep on keeping on. I mean, there’s a time when there’s no point in trying to build character anymore, isn’t there?

Educational opportunity and a chance to own your own place and retirement security and food security and healthcare security-all those government-sponsored opportunities and securities-made life better. But now government-sponsored opportunity and security is about as bad as it gets (unless you’re a high-tech startup doing research for DARPA). We’re supposed to take care of all that ourselves now, in our “separate and individual capacities.” Government doing all of that is just so wrong that every now and then the people we elect to govern us have to threaten to shut the whole thing down just to remind us how bad government is and how evil we are if we ever think it would be nice if life was safer and more secure and we had more chances at outdated noncharacter building things like upward mobility, whatever that is.

When I went to law school I learned the same thing I’d learned in ninth-grade civics class: that government is what created our country-that government is why we have something called the “rule of law,” which we Americans have always thought was a better deal than the rule of whatever some rich and powerful guy thinks is a good idea depending on his mood.

Our rule of law version of government has a Constitution on top. The Constitution was created by and for us people-for our “general welfare,” which I guess means the stuff we can’t do for ourselves in our separate and individual capacities. And then the Constitution created other layers of government to make sure the rule of law applied everywhere. The first level down was the states, who took care of big stretches of land and the people who lived there. And then the states created all kinds of smaller, more local governments like towns and counties to get into all the nooks and crannies where people wanted to live-places like where I live now.

All the way down through the layers, government did what it’s supposed to do, and when it didn’t it was held accountable. Well, sort of. In law school I found out that government had long since figured out how to not be held accountable for what it did or didn’t do. The kings-the rich and powerful guys who got to do stuff depending on their mood-used to be treated that way. They called it “the divine right of kings.” Then, when the colonies got rid of their king they set things up do we could have “sovereign immunity,” which is why Trump and the Republicans think they can get away with whatever the hell, no problem. I was surprised to learn about that, for sure, but the law professor assured us it was a good idea. I mean, if we didn’t let government off the hook now and then, who would ever want to govern? Made sense to him. Me, I’m still trying to work it out.

So all along, from ninth-grade civics class through law school, I thought government was good, and that life was better when government governed, and that part of government governing was when people were held accountable for not governing or for doing a bad job of it. Law school set me straight on the accountability part, but I’m still stuck back in my middle school thinking that the whole rule of law thing actually works best when government is allowed to govern, because when it does good things can happen. I mean, that’s sort of what voting is for, isn’t it? In fact, when people in government don’t govern anymore and spend all their time doing whatever it is that people in government do when they don’t govern-namely, try to make themselves into somebody who’s above the rule of law like the kings were-well, in my world that sounds bad.

But these days all my neighbors are sure I’m wrong about that. All of that stuff I used to think about government-and still do, as a matter of fact-is bad now.

Bad government.

Bad, bad government.

Like it’s an untrained dog.

What I’ve learned from my “government is bad so don’t even think about it” neighbors is that any time the government at the top tries to do super-big stuff, that’s just the worst, as bad bad dog as it gets. It’s especially the worst when government wants to raise money to govern, and even more especially the worst when raising money means equalizing things out a bit so the people at the top don’t get to keep everything while the people at the bottom have to spend everything they make and it’s still not enough. We used to call that “fairness.” Now it’s called “economic equality” or just “equity.” But no matter what you call it, it’s still bad, like government.

Let’s see… fairness in governing is bad, and that’s a good thing.

No wonder I’m confused.

And out of touch.

I mean, I still think it’s amazing when the rule of law can include rules about how to make sure we really are a country where “all men are created equal.” You know, things like everybody gets to go to school, everybody gets to earn enough to make a living, everybody gets to walk down the street and go into shops and restaurants and ride the bus without fear of getting lynched, when everybody gets to breathe clean air and see clean scenery and not worry about what we’re going to do when the average temperature rises by a couple degrees and the Earth burns up… that sort of thing. Also, when everybody gets to vote and pitch in and make sure government is governing.

Seems like a plan, but it’s evil. Probably the United Nations is behind it.

These days government isn’t just the problem, it’s just flat-out evil that the Constitution put the federal government on the top of the heap-I mean, what were the Founding Fathers thinking?!-and then the federal government gets it into its collective head to well, um, govern. Everybody around here knows that’s the wrong way to go about having a country, that it’s way better if the states just get to run things and all have their own rules of law about who’s free and who’s not, who can vote and who can’t, who can have an abortion and who can’t, who can drive at night without being afraid of getting pulled over and choked to death by the police… oh and make sure people read the right books and learn history the right way. All of that is vital and necessary and important to citizenship, but the states are up to it-at least, that’s what the “government is bad” people think. To me, it sounds like the states do a lot of bad governing, but what do I know.

It’s a special problem around here that our state government is also especially bad because it’s in the wrong political party’s hands. I’d talk about that, but at that point there’s just too much nuance for this article to handle. So back to my main point: I liked it when it was okay for government to be the good guys, when you could look at the flag and listen to patriotic songs and feel happy and good and proud. Now, you see a flag and it’s like seeing gang colors and you think you must have crossed a boundary you didn’t know was there and right at the moment you wish you’d never been born. And if the flag has the same design but different colors-like a black and white American flag-or if it’s both different colors and upside-down-you know you’re really screwed. Add a MAGA flag or a “Let’s Go Brandon” flag and put them in the back of a pickup and it’s one hundred percent certain you’re in a place where “freedom” means the people around you are armed, exercise their right of open-carry, and own a trunkful of military-grade weapons.

Not that it makes me nervous or anything….

All because government is bad. All because the people with the bucks to buy giant yachts and bomb silos to get through the apocalypse with all the comforts of home, who have the kind of money that government used to spend on making life better for everybody, are only interested in spending all that money to finance the campaigns of people in government who think government is so bad they shouldn’t even be there pretending to govern but if they weren’t then some yokel who thought government should govern would be in their place so better them than him.

All the while, I keep wondering, what did government ever do? How did government become the problem when it used to just kind of go along keeping things running okay and sometimes-oftentimes, really-even made life better than it used to be? Okay, sure I get it that government did some pretty crappy stuff to people it officially decided weren’t worth being nice to. That was bad government-bad, bad government-for sure. But for awhile government was actually trying to fix that. Now that government is bad, it doesn’t even get to try to fix what it did bad in the past. It’s just so bad that it needs to sit in the corner and stop its whining. In fact, it seems that one of the reasons government is bad is that it used to try not to be bad and tried to fix the bad things it had done. But then government trying to do better and fix bad things became a bad thing, too. Government tried so hard to do better that it got carried away, and that was bad.

Come to think of it, that must have been when government became the problem. Instead of correcting and adjusting, government went way overboard and tried to fix too fast too many bad things it had done. And then it wanted citizens to help pay for it in the same way they helped pay for the interstate highways-like that’s any big deal. The government got itself all puffed up about how smart it was and how it knew what it had done wrong and wanted to make it better, and then it wanted us to pay for it.

The nerve.

So I guess it was all that trying to make it better that made government so bad. We would all have been better off if government had just stayed in the corner and thought about how bad it had was and then kept its thoughts to itself.

Okay, maybe, but I still liked life better when government got to govern. Seems like a decent thing to do. I also still think it’s okay for government to try to make things better when it governed badly-even if, according to my law professor and my Republican neighbors it’s better if it doesn’t try, and the rule of law just lets the people at the top act like kings if they’re in the mood.

Seems to me that, even when everybody couldn’t agree about what was better, life was still better for everybody when it was okay for government to at least try… to govern, I mean.

I miss those days somedays.

Like today.

Originally published at http://iconoclast.blog on August 12, 2023.