Within living memory, those concerned with protecting the environment, reforming the economy, etc., could assume a baseline level of administrative competence in first-world nations like the United States—a stable arena for policymaking. No longer. How in the world did the U.S. end up in its current mess, with a President and his agents actively demolishing the federal government and its infrastructure, Congress sitting by complacently, and a significant minority of the population cheering the bonfire?
One might say: blame Reagan.
In 1981, in his first inaugural address, Ronald Reagan famously declared: “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” Reagan was giving voice to the gripes of the business community, the Chamber of Commerce crowd, that since the late 1960s had felt stifled by labor and environmental and consumer protection regulations and was nostalgic for the simpler days of the robber barons and Henry Ford.
He was giving voice as well to the racism of the Old South, which had been equally hemmed in and shamed by the same era’s civil rights reforms.
And he was giving voice to the gripes of his own class, the wealthy, who paid taxes. During the dark days of the 1940s, when there was a war to be won and his countrymen were fighting and dying, Reagan the movie star was raking in $400,000 per film—and he was incensed that the government was taxing his excess income at a top rate of 90%. By his own account he chose to “loaf” around feeling sorry for himself, making no more than two pictures a year rather than contribute additional taxes to the war effort.
Tax rates on the wealthy fell after the war, but Reagan never let go of this gripe. His political career was defined by it.
Reagan was no ideologue. He didn’t want to destroy government, or create a libertarian utopia. He just wanted to take government down a peg. But he was, unhappily, the “Great Communicator,” and he managed to oversell this particular idea to the American public. He managed to convince ordinary people of America, very effectively, that government—their own government, their Constitutional government—was a burden to them, and to make that idea seem self-evident.
Reagan did more damage than this. In what must be considered a defining moment of Reagan’s presidency, his administration abandoned the “fairness doctrine.”
Since 1949, television and radio broadcasters, in return for using public airwaves, had been required to meet some minimum standards to serve the public interest. One of these, the fairness doctrine, required news programs to present balanced coverage, presenting complex issues in a way that gave voice to multiple viewpoints.
In 1987, Reagan’s Federal Communications Commission struck down the fairness doctrine. The result was the rise of conservative “shock jock” AM radio, and then the breakout stardom of angry conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh, followed by a slew of imitators, and then Fox News, and now an entire media ecosystem of Breitbarts and Newsmaxes and Infowars.
These post-fairness-doctrine news sources give their conservative patrons not the information they need, but the outrage they crave. They compete to most effectively stroke that outrage. And hardly any subject is better calculated to produce outrage in the conservative amygdala in the post-Reagan era than outrage at government.
Conservative politicians learned to adapt to this new angry media ecosystem. They learned to play the game of outrage, to mouth Reagan’s words: “government is the problem.” They learned that this was an effective way to get elected. But they were playing with fire—because once elected, they governed.
They governed like conservatives, to be sure—lower taxes for the wealthy, business-friendly policies, a strong military—but they governed nonetheless. They took their jobs seriously, and they took the difficult decisions necessary to steer the ship of state. And the base, those who truly believed the mantra that government is the problem, could sniff them out.
Enter Donald Trump. In the Republican primary of 2016, he eviscerated a field of conservative career politicians by exposing them as the hypocrites they were—people using the gullible Republican base to get elected and then govern. Donald Trump, a man of no principles and no coherent ideas, would be the Republican base’s revenge on the elite of their own party. His candidacy was essentially a protest. Not even he thought he would win the general election against Hilary Clinton. But the outrage machine is supremely effective at mobilizing angry voters, and it pushed Trump over the top.
Of course, winning posed a problem for Trump. He would now have to govern, which would make him the problem, just as it had for all the other hypocrites who used the outrage machine to get elected. A new tactic was needed. In 2017, elements of conservative media, led by Trump ally Steve Bannon, started using the term “deep state” to deflect the outrage machine’s anger away from the bumbling President of the United States. The President doesn’t have any real power, they said. Your anger should be directed at an imaginary cabal of sinister federal employees who have somehow usurped the power of the President: i.e., the career civil servants who deliver the mail and write the checks and gather the intelligence and staff the embassies.
The idea is as absurd on reflection as it is on its face. But it was successful as a tactic to keep the outrage machine focused on targets other than Trump.
In the second Trump Presidency, we see the apotheosis of Reagan’s legacy. The outrage machine, running at full steam, has given us a Republican President, a Republican Senate, and Republican House, and a flagrantly partisan Supreme Court. The President is a Teflon President: he is immune to the base’s outrage. But he can focus that outrage at will on any target. The vulnerable are targeted, of course: immigrants, legal and otherwise; the gender-nonconforming; and “DEI”—i.e., under-represented minorities. But the most important target is the government itself, because government is the problem.
What we have arrived at is not the small-government conservatism of Reagan. It is not the Shangri-La libertarian utopia of an Ayn Rand. It is the rampage of a Godzilla. Entire agencies (first up, USAID) are shuttered, illegally. Loans and grants of all kinds are halted, illegally. Unauthorized persons are given access to the government’s payment systems in the Treasury Department, illegally, to jigger with the system’s software using AI and make it unpredictable and unreliable. Key fixed-term appointees are fired, illegally, to bring independent institutions like the National Labor Relations Board to a grinding halt. Mass illegal firings are made in the Justice department. Almost all of the government’s corruption watchdogs, the Inspectors General, are fired, illegally. Almost the entire federal workforce is offered a bogus (i.e., promising funds that have not been authorized by Congress) “early retirement” package, in the hopes that a large percentage of them will voluntarily step down, saving the administration the trouble of firing them.
When we say “illegally,” we mean in violation of laws passed by Congress. Congress has the power to push back on the President’s illegal actions, to save the republic by confronting him and bringing him to heel. They also have the power to make the President’s actions legal—to participate in the destruction—by passing laws authorizing them. But the Republicans who now control Congress have finally learned the lesson their base has been trying to teach them. If they assert their Constitutional power, they are governing. And government is the problem. So loyalty to the outrage machine that put them in power requires them to passively acquiesce, to do nothing. Then Congress will not be the problem. And the President will not be the problem. And when the President has at last finished destroying what’s left of the government—when there is no more reliable aviation control, no more reliable weather service, when the trains are no longer running on time—then there will be no more problem.
Featured image by Matt Botsford on Unsplash
