by Bill Bradley
America is like a championship team that has hit a slump. A few losses in a row can make team members begin to doubt themselves. Then something happens to remind them of who they are, what they have achieved, and what they can achieve again. Their ability to overcome adversity is one of the reasons they’re a championship team. Never underestimate the resilience of the American people. If you’ve lost your job and your health insurance and your pension has been cut in half, you dig down deeper and work harder. You refuse to give up. You find some reason to believe in tomorrow. That’s who we are. We can lose our homes, our jobs, even our friends or family members, and—like the Joads at the end of John Ford’s film of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath—we’ll go on. “We’re the people that live,” says Ma Joad. “Can’t nobody wipe us out. Can’t nobody lick us. We’ll go on forever, Pa. We’re the people.”
7
Government Is Not the Problem
On a gray March morning in 1933, President-elect Franklin Delano Roosevelt, wearing striped pants, cutaway, and silk hat, moved by car up Pennsylvania Avenue to the U.S. Capitol. The braces on Roosevelt’s polio-stricken legs clanked against the sides of his open car as he got out. Leaning on the arm of his eldest son, James, he slowly made his way through the rotunda and down the steps to the Capitol’s east front. Preceded onto the platform by outgoing President Herbert Hoover, white-bearded Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, and Vice President John Nance Garner, Roosevelt was about to be sworn in as president of the United States.
The country was in deep economic depression. Five thousand banks had failed, and with them went the savings accounts of 9 million Americans.1 Fifteen million people were looking for work.2 There were no jobs. Each failed job search reduced the applicant’s self-esteem and increased his hopelessness. Apartments were repossessed and homes were foreclosed on. Couples moved in with their relatives. Having children or getting a divorce became too expensive. Men sold Christmas cards for a little cash, borrowed off their insurance policies, and stoically stood in bread lines. When the Soviet Union advertised for six thousand skilled workers, offering them jobs in Russia, more than a hundred thousand responded. As literary critic Edmund Wilson wrote from Chicago, “There is not a garbage dump in the city that is not diligently haunted by the hungry.”3
Confronting the biggest national crisis since the Civil War, Roosevelt stood and, braced on James’s arm, approached the rostrum. Veteran broadcaster Ed Hill noted that if Roosevelt had sufficiently overcome his invalidism by forcing himself to walk, he had the personal qualities necessary to lead a nation crippled by economic depression.4 With a stone-faced Herbert Hoover looking on, the Chief Justice administered the oath of office. Roosevelt’s left hand lay on the family Bible, opened to 1 Corinthians (“Though I have all faith . . . and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing”), his right hand extended toward the heavens. He had asked that the oath be administered a sentence at a time, so that he might slowly and firmly repeat the words of the Chief Justice. When they finished, President Roosevelt turned to the rostrum, his face grim and unsmiling, surveyed the crowd of over a hundred thousand as the sun broke through the clouds, and launched into his first inaugural address:
This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today. This great nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. . . .
What Roosevelt did here was address the emotional state of the country. He became the symbol of hope; and then he turned to the specific circumstances of the country.
A host of unemployed citizens face the grim problem of existence, and an equally great number toil with little return. . . . And yet our distress comes from no failure of substance. We are stricken by no plague of locusts. . . . Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men. . . . They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish. Yes, the money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of that restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit. Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort. . . . These dark days will be worth all they cost us if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourselves and to our fellow man. . . .
In these words, he identified the cause of the peoples’ pain. It was not the people themselves, but Wall Street, whose values represented only a sliver of human possibility. He then went on to make specific policy recommendations.
Our greatest primary task is to put people to work. . . . [T]here must be strict supervision of all banking and credits and investments. There must be an end to speculation with other peoples’ money. And there must be a provision for an adequate but sound currency. . . . I favor, as a practical policy, the putting of first things first.
He had respect for our system of government with its balance between the legislative and executive branches, and thus he urged Congress to act on his substantive program or develop one of its own. And he also put Congress on notice:
But in the event that Congress shall fail to take one of these two courses, in the event that the national emergency is still critical . . . I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis—broad executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe. . . . We do not distrust the future of essential democracy. The people of the United States have not failed. . . . [T]hey have made me the present instrument of their wishes. In the spirit of the gift, I take it.
After the inauguration, FDR went back to the White House, reviewed the inaugural parade with General Douglas MacArthur, and then, while a White House reception was in progress, went to the Lincoln Study, where he presided over the swearing-in of his entire cabinet, whose members had all been confirmed by the Senate just a few hours earlier.
The next hundred days saw feverish executive and legislative activity, including proclamation of a bank holiday; federal super vision of investment securities; abandonment of the gold standard; the Glass–Steagall Act, which created federal deposit insurance and separated commercial banking from investment banks; establishment of the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Tennessee Valley Authority; drastic economies in government (“Too often in recent history,” he told Congress six days after his inauguration, “liberal governments have been wrecked on rocks of loose fiscal policy”); the Agricultural Adjustment Act, which increased farmers’ buying power; a program for refinancing mortgages; and direct government employment through the National Industrial Recovery Act.
But it wasn’t these measures alone that Roosevelt gave the nation. After a decade characterized by excess and the blind pursuit of self-interest, he reasserted the moral standard that we are each our brother’s keeper. He reminded us that the heritage of Americans was not only freedom but a government that would inspire us to—in Abraham Lincoln’s words—“Do together what we cannot do as well for ourselves.” He was invoking a bipartisan tradition that recognized that there was, along with the sphere of private life and a private economy, an equally important public sphere, in which each of us assumed obligations to all of us.
We hear so often these days about government being the problem. “Would you rather spend your own money or have the government spend it for you?” is the knee-jerk question. If we just got rid of government, some politicians say, our economy would roar back to life. The exact opposite is true. Our history tells us that government action frequently
lays the foundation for economic growth. In our current economic circumstances, as I’ve argued, government is critical to a solution.
Lincoln was the first progressive. He understood that individual freedom was not the only foundation on which America was built. Our government was set up in part “to promote the general welfare,” as the Preamble to the Constitution puts it. Lincoln proposed the Homestead Act, which gave public land to individuals who would settle on it. He granted public land and financing under the Pacific Railway Act for the construction of a transcontinental railroad, and he championed education by establishing land-grant colleges across the country. He knew that lone individuals could not get a college education if there were no colleges. He knew that the West would not be fully developed if there were no railroads. It took a government acting on behalf of all the citizens to accomplish those kinds of things. And in turn, this promotion of the general welfare benefited individuals. Throughout our history, the development of national infrastructure—and that includes education as well as highways and railroads—has enriched individuals. But when a government promotes individual wealth at the expense of the general welfare, the rich get richer and very little reaches the rest of us.
Lincoln’s successor in the wise use of government to promote the general welfare was another Republican, Theodore Roosevelt, who was horrified by the concentration of power and wealth in the hands of financiers and industrialists at the end of the nineteenth century. Like Lincoln, he saw government as the tool of our collective dreams. He broke up the Trusts, passed pure food and drug laws, and secured millions of acres for national parks. Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, didn’t agree with Roosevelt on specifics but shared the principle of using public power to set the rules of commerce, give average people a chance to better their condition, and make public investments for the benefit of all. Both of these presidents recognized that the public sphere was essential for the private sphere to prosper and for its fruits to be shared by the greatest number of Americans. They were presidents for all the people. They felt a moral responsibility for the nation’s welfare and believed that citizens working together could make our democracy the envy of the world. Their ethos was simple: Care about your fellow citizens, not just about yourself, your family, your friends, but also about your country and even those strangers in your midst whom you may never know.
When General Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican, became president in 1953, he continued in the footsteps of Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Wilson, and FDR by establishing the Interstate Highway System, passing the National Defense Education Act, and accepting the New Deal as a permanent part of America. As the former commander of U.S. forces in Europe during World War II, he had an appreciation not only for the industrial might of America’s private sector, which had helped us win the war, but also for the spirit of Americans on the field of battle who had risked their lives both for their comrades and for all of us, because they believed that America’s form of government was worth dying for. He understood that individuals acting alone could not build a society or win a war; public institutions had to have the power to act on behalf of the citizenry against the invincible forces—hurricanes, drought, wildfires, pandemics, market crashes—that threaten us all. His vice president, Richard Nixon, would continue in the liberal Republican tradition that government should not be dismantled but used to make America stronger. Far from attempting to repeal Social Security or Medicare, President Nixon worked with a Democratic Congress to advance the public’s interest. His proposals for catastrophic health insurance, affirmative action, and welfare reform, while less generous than the Democratic alternatives, amounted to a broad governmental commitment to the lives of ordinary Americans. Explaining to ABC’s Howard K. Smith, in early 1971, his plan to propose a budget that would wind up in the red, he declared, “I am now a Keynesian in economics,” by which he meant that government could and should help stabilize our economy.5
The bipartisan consensus that government exists in part to promote the general welfare was demonstrated in 1964 when Democrat Lyndon Johnson won 61 percent of the vote against Republican Senator Barry Goldwater. The scale of the defeat did not deter Goldwater’s true believers, who had vanquished the liberal Republican Nelson Rockefeller in the primaries and wanted, among other things, to repeal Social Security and end the TVA. They only redoubled their efforts to capture the government, repeating consistently the same sullen refrain: “The government is the problem. . . . The government is the problem. . . .” When Ronald Reagan declared, in his 1981 inaugural address, that “government is not the solution,” it was the antithesis of FDR’s inaugural address forty-eight years earlier. Although his vice-presidential selection of George H. W. Bush was a bone tossed to the pragmatic wing of the party, Reagan’s electoral success brought to Washington many ideological Republicans who did not believe in the legacy of Lincoln, the Roosevelts, or even Eisenhower. They emphasized pursuit of self-interest as a way to secure the general interest. Under their narrow definition of common responsibilities, any government investment in the health, education, or welfare of individual Americans was seen as government trampling on individual liberties. Taxes were a form of robbery, and transfer payments, such as Social Security or Medicare, were a form of highway robbery. Nature was there to exploit. Government programs were paternalistic. If you were poor or unemployed or both, it was undoubtedly your own fault, and government should do nothing to help you. They preached a self-centered view of individual responsibility.
Reagan followed this agenda by cutting taxes, which the ideologues thought would create pressure for defunding government programs. But Reagan did not throw out the other constitutional purpose—“to provide for the common defense.” The combination of tax cuts and sizable increases in defense spending resulted in a whopping budget deficit. Although the political tone of the administration was ideological, Reagan himself seemed pragmatic, and the people around him, such as Chief of Staff (later Treasury Secretary) James Baker, wanted to govern more than they wanted to dismantle the New Deal or turn the clock back on the welfare state.
As it turned out, Reagan did not shut down government; there was more stability than revolution during those years. Reagan accepted catastrophic health insurance for the elderly. When his 1981 tax cut proved a fiscal nightmare, he agreed to the largest tax increase in our peacetime history. While his actions to promote the common good have largely been forgotten by the general public, his anti-government rhetoric has not, and he is repeatedly invoked as a Tea Party icon. But the real Reagan would flunk the “no new taxes” litmus test required of today’s Republican candidates.
When George H. W. Bush was elected, the pragmatic Republicans were back in charge. While his administration might not have been a second Eisenhower administration, as some liberal Republicans had hoped, it was an administration of reasonable people who were willing to compromise in order to get something done. Our next president, Bill Clinton, a brilliant, gifted politician, had been shaped by the Reagan years, when the ruling rhetoric was about government being the problem. During those years, he had been an active member of the Democratic Leadership Council, a group whose purpose was to develop centrist policies that would allow Democrats to win in an age of anti-government sentiment. He passed a significant deficit reduction package in his first year, but when Republicans won control of Congress in 1994, instead of asserting the moral principles of the Democratic Party holding that the American enterprise was at its best when we took responsibility not only for ourselves and our families but also for our neighbors, our country, and the planet, Clinton decided it was better to appropriate so-called Republican issues such as crime and welfare, move to the center, and appeal to the electorate with less-than-ambitious symbolic proposals couched in phrases from focus groups. Maybe that path was his only political chance, but he went too far when, in his 1996 State of the Union address, he said, “The era of big government is over,” and commentators agreed that he sounded just like Reagan. Clinton was re-elected,
but the unwanted side effect was the muffling of the Democrats’ moral vision, while conservative Republicans kept hammering away against Big Government in the moral language of right and wrong.
When George W. Bush won in 2000, the Republican communication juggernaut had already provided him with the new vocabulary. Freedom from government, the primacy of the individual, financial success as the ideal—these were the values that had been repeated over and over by the Republican machine, permeating the media, for nearly forty years. All Bush had to do was mouth the words and then, after he won, turn the government over to the ideologues. He did both. There were no Jim Bakers in the Bush II White House. For every Karen Hughes and Condoleezza Rice, there were ten Karl Roves with grand designs for dismantling the government, embodied most starkly by the attempt to “privatize” Social Security. Science was out, ideology was in. Global warming was not a problem. Evolution and creationism were equally valid academic subjects. Stem-cell research was immoral. A helping hand was the business of church charities rather than government. Still, even George Bush evinced some bipartisanship in foreign and domestic policy. His war in Afghanistan had support in both parties. His education bill, No Child Left Behind, had Democrats Ted Kennedy and George Miller as partners. His bill to include a drug benefit in Medicare was a significant expansion of government, even as it rewarded pharmaceutical companies by denying Medicare the right to negotiate lower drug prices for recipients.
Today we’re in a different world. Virtually no Republican can adopt the positions of past Republican presidents and survive the political firestorm from the Tea Party. The right-wing orthodoxy of the Tea Party is unforgiving, uncompromising, and relentless. It is a radicalism that has always resided in the Republican Party but formerly characterized only a fraction of its members. Now it’s the prevailing view. Indeed, the congressional Republicans are more nihilistic than Reaganesque. They seem to want only to obstruct.
