Narrative changing on government as solution

Probably no phrase has had more influence on the course of contemporary American politics than Ronald Reagan’s pronouncement that “the government is not the solution to our problem; the government is the problem.” It was both the culmination of years of fulminating against “big government” and the beginning of an actual devolution of the federal government as a means to address national issues.

The antigovernment view, further expressed in Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America,” Grover Norquist’s “Starve the Beast,” and the Tea Party’s revanchist posturings, reached its most recent apex in the Trump administration’s insistence that the COVID-19 pandemic was a matter for the states, there was virtually no role for the federal government, and the president “take[s] no responsibility at all.”

Untold thousands fell ill and died, uncounted millions are out of work, and millions more face uncertain futures because of the unwillingness to marshal the resources of the world’s richest country to act with a unified purpose against the disease. It cost Donald Trump the election, but the country has lost a great deal more.

How a plague with no regard for race, creed, or politics became a measure of political loyalty is best left to psycho-historians, but it happened. Perhaps the phenomenon will provide a way to understand how kids’ books, reproductive rights, and “cancel culture” receive congressional attention while collapsing bridges, failing water systems, and shameful childhood poverty are ignored.

Political tide has turned