Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Friday, September 16, 2011

Democrats Must Defend the Very Idea of Good Government Against the Anti-Governmentality of the Libertopian Anti-Civilizational Neo-Feudalists of the GOP

Paul Begala, of all people, gets it right. More like this, please:
Conservatives talk about government as if it were something foreign, alien, or extrinsic when in fact the Constitution says it truthfully and simply: “We the People.” Government is us... I’d go further: the U.S. federal government is the greatest force for good in human history. Period. The federal government freed the slaves and defeated Hitler. It built the interstate highway system, won the Cold War, integrated the South, put men on the moon… President Obama… got it right in his Sept. 8 speech to Congress, pummeling the notion that “the only thing we can do to restore prosperity is ... dismantle government, refund everyone’s money, let everyone write their own rules, and tell everyone they’re on their own -- that’s not who we are. That’s not the story of America.” The president is right.

The truth is many of our problems were caused by too little government, regulation, and taxation (at least of the rich). Wall Street was deregulated, and when the casino went bust, taxpayers bailed out the gamblers. Regulators cozied up to oil companies, and 11 working men were killed in the Deepwater Horizon tragedy as BP’s well gushed millions of barrels into the Gulf of Mexico. After 29 miners were killed in the Upper Big Branch Mine disaster in West Virginia, an independent investigation found that the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration “failed its duty as the watchdog for coal miners.” … When New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie bashes retired teachers for getting an average pension of about $35,000 a year, why does no one point out that they’re worth it? Or that New Jersey students have the highest AP test scores in the nation? Because that wouldn’t fit the antigovernment narrative. The truth is teachers didn’t cause our recession; firefighters didn’t cause layoffs; nurses and cops didn’t turn a record surplus into a record deficit. Politicians and corporate greedheads did. And yet government remains the villain…

[O]ur Founding Fathers, so revered by the Tea Partiers, gave us a motto: e pluribus unum -- from many one… They did not choose canis canem edit -- dog eat dog. Some of this country’s bravest and best work for the government. Yet in the GOP debate at the Reagan Library, Perry simultaneously praised the Navy SEALs who killed bin Laden and claimed government doesn’t create jobs. Precisely whom does he think those SEALs work for? Enron? If Perry hates government that much, maybe the next time his state’s on fire he can call a CEO.
In the necessary ardent defense of democratic governance there is a permanent danger of anti-democratizing jingoism -- to which Begala succumbs in his piece from time to time -- but this makes the defense no less urgent.

Democrats should pepper speeches with genuflections to the aspiration for and necessity of good accountable government in every speech, in every ad, in every position paper, whatever its apparent subject. The progressive writers of sit-coms and action films and late-night monologues should pepper their dialogue with democratic pieties and their plots with anti-democratic villains.

I believe that the liberal media (more in evidence outside newsrooms than in them) and the reality-based and humanistic academy have largely managed to win the culture war over queerness with implications to Movement Republicanism they have scarcely begun to grasp let alone cope with. It's time to devote our energies and imaginations in earnest to the now ongoing culture war over the viability and righteousness good government and democratic civilization.

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