MAGA: Making you think government doesn't work
If you don't trust government to work right, they think you will demand they privatize it
The big scheme behind the MAGA destruction of government agencies is an old page from the Republican playbook. Make people think an agency is broken beyond repair, and they will demand their legislators fix the problem, even if they have to privatize the function to fix it.
Most of us don’t understand how federal agencies work, but the vast majority of them work OK, even if they move slowly. Moving slowly is kind of a good idea with services that affect peoples’ lives, because at least if you make a mistake while moving slowly, you can fix it without throwing everyone’s lives into chaos.
The thing is, Republicans hate effective government. The New Deal programs implemented by Franklin D. Roosevelt were so successful and popular that try as they might, Republicans have never quite been able to kill them. The beginning of our present problems, I believe, is when Bill Clinton, anxious for money from Wall Street, let himself be convinced that commercial banks and investment banks would behave responsibly if he would just get rid of that pesky Glass-Steagall Act that FDR passed.
That’s the law that used to prohibit commercial banks from having investment banking operations. The theory was that commercial banks needed to have solid, if boring, finances so they wouldn’t risk their depositors’ money. Investment banking was like a casino (look what happened in 1929). So keeping them separate would keep the banks safe.
But bankers didn’t want boring lives, they wanted the same excitement their cousins on Wall Street were getting, and Clinton caved. And we know what happened in the Wall Street casinos in the 2008 financial crash, right?
Similarly, Adam Gopnik warned us, in a remarkably prescient essay (“The Plot Against Trains,” The New Yorker, May 15, 2015) , why Chris Christie, when he was governor of New Jersey, decided to kill the first effort to build new railroad tunnels under the Hudson River — the first new tunnels in a century, to replace the old ones that had been severely damaged by Super Storm Sandy.
Christie rejected federal funding, claiming that the state would be on the hook for too much money down the road. By killing the tunnel at the time, Christie only made it about double the cost when the project was resurrected under a Democratic governor and a receptive federal government.
The Republican fear was that if government successfully completed the multi-billion-dollar tunnel project and made life demonstrably better for commuters into New York, they would thank government and yes, demand more government services.
Or, as Gopnik succinctly put it, “What we have, uniquely in America, is a political class, and an entire political party, devoted to the idea that any money spent on public goods is money misplaced, not because the state goods might not be good but because they would distract us from the larger principle that no ultimate good can be found in the state. Ride a fast train to Washington today and you’ll start thinking about national health insurance tomorrow.”
They’re doing the same thing with Social Security, right now.
Here’s Gopnik again: “The reason we don’t have beautiful new airports and efficient bullet trains is not that we have inadvertently stumbled upon stumbling blocks; it’s that there are considerable numbers of Americans for whom these things are simply symbols of a feared central government, and who would, when they travel, rather sweat in squalor than surrender the money to build a better terminal.”
So Musk and Trump want you sweating in squalor to get your Social Security, if you can get it at all. Or they want to make it so unpleasant to navigate the system that you demand they turn it over to their billionaire pals on Wall Street to mismanage for you while they extract huge management fees, stock options, and bonuses for fouling things up even more.
Don’t let them fool you. Let them know you’re onto their game, and scream at your elected officials at every opportunity.
We don’t have long to stop them and we won’t get another chance to do so.