Restoring the logic of government [November 2008 CCT]

I imagine Thanksgiving will assume a civic dimension this year it hasn’t had in some time. At many tables there will be thanks for an amazing election that gives us hope that we now have a shot at government of the people, by the people, for the people.

“For the people”–remember that? To read letters and columns by churlish Republicans and conservatives you would think expecting the government to act in our behalf, look out for us—yes, take care of us—were something childish and shameful.

But wasn’t that one of our earliest civics lessons, that the whole idea of government—the logic, the raison d’etre— is people agreeing to take care of one another?

In the scenario sketched by the likes of Locke, Rousseau and the Declaration of Independence, a bunch of folks get together in the State of Nature (picture the State of Alaska not so long ago):

Let’s face it, this every-man- for-himself stuff sucks. We need things like roads, pizza, better protection from large predators, schools, music, division of labor, art, schools . Hey, maybe even a universal health care system.

You mean civilization?

Yeah, that’s it. How do we get that?

How about government?

Government? You mean where one guy gets to enslave everyone else and make them spend their lives building large pointed objects in the desert?

No, not that kind, the kind where we sign a social contract to cooperate in getting the benefits of civilization, because the State of Nature is just not all it’s cracked up to be.

Thus is born government for the people—it’s why we go to the trouble. In a big country it may be cumbersome, it may be inefficient, but it’s all ours. And our welfare is its only legitimate reason to exist.

Obama has been accused of wanting to “spread the wealth”, as if every real American will understand that that’s a bad thing, a charge against which Obama will have to defend himself. But as we are seeing more clearly in the present financial crisis, capitalism can reward, along with good things like creativity and initiative, greedy, wolfish behavior.] “Spreading the wealth” —social security, graduated income tax, minimum wage; national parks—is one of the ways we fight that wolf of capitalism. It’s just part of the basic logic of government.

A corollary of the social contract is that all human beings are equally worth caring about. That there are no inherently lazy or unworthy people. That we are all motivated to do well and if we end up with the short end of the stick— unemployed, foreclosed, homeless, too poor to buy a house in the first place, without health care, and other basics of a decent life— government is not doing the job we created it to do.

All of this logic of government was loudly, publically reaffirmed from the bully pulpit of the president as a response to the Great Depression, in which the failure of our government to fulfill its basic function was so clear.

But we seem in recent decades to have lost connection with this basic logic of government, buying into the argument that government exists mainly to cramp our style, to tax and police us, while enabling corrupt politicians and large corporations to have their way with us. The Democratic Party’s traditional, proud distinction from the Republicans has been its belief in government as big as needed to act for the people. But it has lost track of its historic role.

The feeling of hope in the air is that we have elected a president who seems to get all this. It is being said that in the current crisis Obama has the same opportunity FDR had to clarify and pursue the logic of government for the people.

A Thanksgiving toast, then: To Obama, our man in the White House: May he be the president so many hope he will be, the president we deserve. And to a return to the basic logic of government for the people.

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