America On the Precipice by Richard North Patterson

V. The Atomization of American Thought

A. The Rising Contempt for Government

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V. The Atomization of American Thought

Another element in our democratic decline is the erosion of our social and intellectual cohesion. One may consider its elements as brethren - the four horsemen of America's authoritarian apocalypse.

Consider a country without a shared trust in its government; or in reliable sources of information; or in the specialized expertise required by a complex society; or in basic scientific learning. Such a commonweal cannot recognize rational governance; distinguish knowledge from ignorance; or choose between competence and charlatanism. This describes the America which made Donald Trump the most powerful man in the world.

A. The Rising Contempt for Government

Anyone stuck in line at the local department of motor vehicles experiences government at its worst - sluggish, inefficient and indifferent.

It has ever been thus: one familiar truism of life is that not every bureaucrat is conscientious or committed. What is different in contemporary America is our growing disdain for government itself, and a widening incomprehension of why and where we need it. For this, again, we can largely thank the Republican Party.

According to Pew Research, in 1958 about 75 percent of Americans trusted the federal government to do the right thing much more often than not. But now? In 2024, that figure fell to 35 percent for Democrats – trusting souls compared to Republicans, who sat at a stunning 11 percent. Particularly telling is that trust among Republicans was more closely linked to which party held power.

These are the real-life fruits of the GOP's rhetorical war on government. For four-plus decades, Republican candidates have cast the federal government as an irredeemably invidious beast manned by incompetent and malevolent meddlers.

Hence Ronald Reagan's cheerfully mindless dicta: "The most terrifying words in the English language are ' I'm from the government, and I'm here to help.’ " Underlying this jibe is the GOP's cynical and familiar class warfare in favor of the its donor class.

The GOP’s perpetual mantra is that the government is replete with unparticularized “waste, fraud, and abuse” – a decades old catch phrase almost as tiresome as the "thoughts and prayers" Republicans offer after the latest massacre by gunfire at an elementary school. No doubt there is waste to be found in the recesses of our government, and too often its processes are cumbersome. But it is grossly unfair to disparage the body of dedicated civil servants who make this country work.

Here, as elsewhere, the GOP doesn't care about fairness - let alone that the overwhelming preponderance of federal spending goes to things we all want and need: national defense, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Or that much of the rest goes to interest payments on a deficit largely created by the GOP.

Instead, this parody of federal governance serves their political purpose: portraying government as a vehicle for transferring money from honest taxpayers to moochers who, by implication, are often nonwhite. Hence the legendary “ welfare queen” Reagan trotted out for his 1976 presidential campaign:

“She has 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards and is collecting veterans' benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands. And she's collecting Social Security on her cards. She's got Medicaid, getting food stamps, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names. Her tax-free cash income alone is over $150,000.”

Heather Cox Richardson puts this caricature in historical perspective:

“[A]fter World War II… the vast majority of American's embraced the government that worked for everyone by regulating business, providing a basic social safety net, promoting infrastructure, and protecting civil rights. But those Republicans eager to avoid regulation and taxation reached back to Reconstruction to insist that a government that worked in the interest of all Americans was redistributing wealth from hard-working Americans to undeserving minorities and women. ”

This viewpoint was best epitomized, perhaps, by Mitt Romney's famed disquisition to a gaggle of well-heeled contributors:

“[T]here are the 47 percent… who believe they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to healthcare, the food, the housing, to you-name-it… And the government should give it to them… I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”

As we have seen, this caricature serves to rationalize the GOP's upward redistribution of wealth. Further, it gives the base another symbolic enemy: the crew of notionally non-white beneficiaries of unearned governmental largesse who must be punished without remorse. This racial stereotyping neatly stimulates contempt for government while diverting attention from the GOP’s programmatic indifference to their adherents’ own declining economic fortunes - and, in some cases, their own dependence on our social safety net.

In 2011a Cornell political scientist, Suzanne Mettler, surveyed the number of Americans receiving government benefits who denied receiving benefits. The results were astonishing: the deniers included a range of 50 to 65 percent of those who benefited from 529 tuition savings plans, the home mortgage deduction, student loans, or childcare tax credits; 40 to 50 percent of those who received Social Security, Pell grants, unemployment insurance, and veterans’ benefits; and 25 to 40 percent of those dependent on Medicare, Medicaid and food stamps.

In short, our collective incomprehension of what government does is entering the surreal. That is the gateway to demolishing the governance we need.

Granted, the GOP's anti-Washington spin doctors have had some recent help from reality - most strikingly during the Republican presidency facilitated by the Supreme Court in 2000.

The Iraq war was a deadly fount of disinformation and distrust. A more complex example is the bailout of 2008, wherein our financial mandarins skillfully used monetary and fiscal policy toward off a potential depression - while rescuing the reckless drivers on Wall Street who crashed our economy into the ditch.

As we have seen, this crisis was precipitated by the GOP's dismemberment of financial regulation, unleashing our biggest financial institutions to indulge in irresponsible speculation. But our electorate at large is unschooled in macro-economics. Unwitting, they depend on government to protect them from seemingly abstract forces, yet too seldom appreciate that their chosen candidates are progressively stripping away that protection.

This brings us to the heart of things. The irrational Republican hatred of government has given us the most dangerous and incompetent president in American history - a narcissistic authoritarian whose craving for the world's center stage is exceeded only by his manifest unfitness for power.

The crux of our distemper is this: if GOP base voters deem government to be unnecessary or even inimical, their party’s nominee need not be qualified to run it. All they require are candidates who promise to wield a wrecking ball.

For that, any garden-variety buffoon like Herman Cain is preferable to a Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In this alternative universe a reality TV tycoon whose shtick was firing people personifies the ideal.

Trump marks where the GOP’s powers-that-be lost control –they had stoked anti-government sentiment until Frankenstein escaped the lab. But party insiders adapted rather neatly. As George Packer wrote:

“Trump came to power as a refutation of the Republican establishment. But the conservative political class and the new leader soon reached an understanding… Republican politicians and donors who want the government to do as little as possible for the common good could live happily with a regime the barely knew how to govern at all.”

This crippling aversion to government increasingly undermines our ability to address our most urgent problems. It is perfectly reasonable for voters to believe that government slights ordinary people - it often does, not least because of the GOP establishment’s true priorities. For beneath the GOP’s pseudo-populism, its leaders are steadily diminishing our government’s core competence in providing services by starving critical agencies like FEMA and the National Weather Service. In turn, the damage inflicted on their ability to benefit the public reinforces the stereotype of federal inutility - enabling Trump to defenestrate whatever agencies he targets from one day to the next.

This sublime indifference to effective governance is a super-highway to the third world. Little wonder that, in crucial ways, the government during Trump’s previous term was ill-prepared for COVID-19.

Amidst this, our president denied the reality of the virus until, confronted with swiftly escalating suffering and death, he started commending quack remedies like a 19th century carnival barker. The great achievement for which his administration could fairly claim credit – scientists who developed vaccines with impressive celerity - is something he now shrinks from mentioning. Among his base, it seems, life-saving vaccines are as suspect as government itself.

This disconnect is emblematic. Five years after the pandemic first struck, many Americans now blame the government for reacting by doing too much. No doubt the dislocation caused by public health measures was severe. Yet it is also true that they saved many thousands of lives.

In retrospect it seems that what many of us are blaming - albeit subconsciously - is the inescapable miasma wrought by the disease itself. But it is senseless to react by turning our back on government and science – the very path Republicans seem to be following.

Ironically, the inflation which followed the pandemic was critical in returning Trump to power. It scarcely matters whether it was caused by the supply chain problems, Trump’s ineptitude in handling Covid, Biden’s stimulus program, or all of the above: it is axiomatic that voters blame their pocketbook issues on whoever is president. So, once again, we turned to the incompetent who worsened a deadly pandemic.

Why? One reason is the increasing brevity of our collective memory. But another represents the elevation of celebrity over true accomplishment which is emblematic of our time: the seemingly indestructible myth that Trump's supposed commercial genius as misrepresented on reality TV - his only ‘credential,’ after all – uniquely qualifies him as the President who can fix everything. For no man better exemplifies the vapidity of that enduring catchphrase: “Government should be run like a business.”

Forget that Trump was a lousy businessman. Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are not for-profit businesses – they are investments in a healthy and humane society, covered by taxes, which are designed to protect us all. Disaster relief doesn't pay for itself, let alone turn a profit. Nor does national defense; the weather service; assuring the safety of our food and medicines; treating veterans for PTSD; protecting public health; or investing in pre-K education. They simply help us preserve our communal safety and productivity – not to mention our decency.

A far better saying about governance is that: “Government is the name we give to the things we do together.” More precisely, it’s what we call the public employees who maintain the country all of us live in.

But now Trump wants to fire them - or turn them from professionals to loyalists by destroying the government as we know it. In turn, by severely limiting the ability of government to help us when we need it most, he will turn the myth of its inutility into a reality which justifies Republican demagoguery – exploited by an authoritarian intent on converting it into his personal instrument.

Enter DOGE.

Set aside, for the moment, that much of what Trump and Musk did was contrary to law and the Constitution – the actions of an autocrat. Instead, consider how - empowered by contempt for government - they did immeasurable damage.

They fired hundreds of thousands of federal employees without any notion of what they did - then tried to rehire them when they discovered their jobs involved things like managing our nuclear weapons stockpile. As a result, DOGE cost us priceless expertise by driving some of our most knowledgeable people out of government. That's why Newark Airport stopped working: too many air traffic controls got fired, compromising passenger safety while causing delays of up to seven hours. Ask Trump's Secretary of Transportation, whose wife canceled a flight out of Newark in preference for LaGuardia.

For all the carnage, Musk actually cost us money: after promising to slash $2 trillion off the budget he managed to cut an estimated $150 billion - roughly the cost of firing so many people. According to the Yale Budget Lab, his cuts at the IRS alone will cost an additional $350 billion in revenue over the next 10 years. That's the price of not knowing what you're doing.

Beyond that, DOGE cut funding for innovations by American entrepreneurs, the engine of the technological and scientific progress which has made us the marvel of the world – and which, by the way, gave us Elon Musk. Then there’s the slash in funding for Head Start - the program which provides pre-K education for low income kids - at a cost not only to children, but to the society which can profit by helping more children thrive. Or the pointless cuts to the National Park Service or Americorps - whose cost is minuscule in budgetary terms, but whose purposes are important to the soul of America.

Then there's the cost to the hundreds of thousands of government employees who serve us well – and by extension, to our societal decency.

At a minimum, we owe them better than Trump. For another form of ugliness particular to Trump's second term is that our contempt for government has now become a contempt for civilservants at large.

Indeed, Trump, Musk and their acolytes seemingly revel in the cruelties inflicted through terminating thousands of government employees, many of them veterans, by fiat of a narcissistic billionaire who is by far Trump's biggest donor. But Musk, like Trump, has little concept for what government does, and cares even less about the harm he is doing to those who serve us, and to the country which needs them.

In keeping with the GOP's budgetary fantasies, this mindless demolition is rooted in a larger fiscal fraudulence - the idea that Trump and Musk can demolish the deficit by throwing out government employees willy-nilly. Nonsense.

As the New York Times calculates, if Musk did the impossible - fired every civilian Federal employee and canceled their benefits - he would reduce the deficit by only 14%. Government is not a business; it's not even Twitter turned X.

Trump's real purpose is to bend government to his autocratic will. This captures another cost of Trump's contempt for governance - the selection of incompetents to fulfill crucial roles

A second-tier Fox anchor is Secretary of Defense. A vaccine denier runs HHS. An unqualified crackpot is the Director of National Intelligence. A spiteful right wing polemicist directs the FBI. Collectively, they reflect a cabinet stuffed with toadies and enablers. Competence is no longer a requirement of leadership.

At some point, Americans will pay the price in very concrete ways. Maybe FEMA won't respond adequately to a flood or hurricane. Maybe intelligence agencies or FBI will miss a terrorist threat. All we know for sure is that Trump has made such failures virtually inevitable.

All of this leads to another grave cost of our disdain for government: as civic education writ large recedes, so does our collective understanding of the institutions and ideals designed to protect liberal democracy and the rule of law.

If “democracy dies in darkness,” nothing will kill it more surely than a populace ignorant of why we have three branches of government; or what the Bill of Rights is; or the principles, however imperfectly realized, on which we were founded; or the Constitution as anything other than a cover for imposing partisan biases; or the services government actually performs; or the respect for democratic traditions required from those who lead us. As the sensibility of James Madison wanes, the venomous spirit of Donald Trump waxes.

Preserving a true democracy means knowing how it is governed, and for what purposes.

Without such communal re-engagement with our core principles, 21st century America will become a landmass with a flag instead of a soul. That's not exceptionalism; it is history’s melancholy norm.