Fox News or Good Government

 

I am not suggesting that all problems created by the prevailing contempt for government in the United State are Donald Trumps responsibility (although in the US the buck stops with him.) In fact it is in part because he tapped into that contempt for government that he got elected. Recall, he was going to drain the swamp!

For 40 years, since Saint Ronald was elected President in the United States in 1980, American conservatives have been on a warpath against all government. They have not wanted good government. That government is best which governs least, is what they keep saying. Many of them wanted to reduce the size of government to such an extent that, as one of those conservatives said, it could be drowned in a bathtub. They believed that good government is impossible. Ronald Reagan was the President who said, “the most scary words in the English language are these: “Hello I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”

In Canada members of the Conservative Party have commonly held similar views, though usually not as extreme. Ever since then virtually every Republican or Conservative politician and even many Democratic and Liberal politicians as well, have disparaged government and government employees. American and Canadian publics have soaked up this rhetoric for 30 years. Disparagement of government is the water in which they swim and therefore is invisible to them. As a result trust in government has vanished in America and  Canada is not much different.

Yet, in a crisis good government is crucially important. People have to believe their government is telling them the truth or the system will collapse. This pervasive attitude is the real culprit here. According to Garret Grath in a Politico article, that attitude is responsible for the following outcomes in America:

Someday, reports will be written about how the U.S. government failed in its response to the Covid-19 epidemic—failures that will surely have cost additional thousands of lives, additional millions of lost jobs, and additional billions (perhaps even trillions) in economic damages by the time this virus is behind us. And yet while those reports will surely point out specific management failures and lost opportunities to arrest the spread of Covid-19, the most basic conclusion of those future reports could already be written: Donald Trump’s Apprentice-style staffing bake-offs and his oft-voiced predilection for acting officials kept the U.S. government distracted, off-kilter and understaffed.

Trump is obviously not responsible for the appearance of the novel coronavirus—but he is responsible for the government’s spiralling failure to respond appropriately in a timely manner. He has ignored the hiring practices, protocols, norms and expertise that would have given him and the federal government a better shot at defeating Covid-19. Three years into his administration and with a Republican-controlled Senate ready to move nominees through to confirmation, he didn’t build the national leadership we needed. That inescapable fact is Donald Trump’s fault.

The “next 9/11” is happening right now because Trump ignored the lessons of the last one.

There is a heavy price to pay for mistrust of government. And Americans, and in fact people around the world, are now paying a heavy price for that mistrust.

The fact is America has a President who has no respect for government, no competence to govern, and most importantly, likes dumb! He also has no respect for brains, knowledge, or wisdom. After all who needs that when you have Fox News at your beck and call? And what really bothers me is that America still likes this President! This is what they wanted and boy did they get it.

From this analysis Thomas Friedman of the New York Times  has made the right inferences. We are in trouble. But it goes even beyond that. As Friedman said,

And Trump’s vindictiveness toward any career public servant who challenges his narrative has surely contributed to the weak response from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Experts are afraid to raise their hands to contradict the president.

It is clear that the US and Canada both need strategies for gradually lifting lockdowns in a rational manner. Sadly, particularly in the U.S. it is unlikely to achieve such a plan with so many holes in its government. Instead of good government it has Fox News!

Friedman concluded this way,

In sum, if we are going to save the most lives while getting the most people back to work to prevent an epidemic of unemployment, depression and despair, it is going to require a federally coordinated, democratic version of the China strategy.

But Trump resists that kind of science-based, nationally coordinated approach, because it serves him politically to urge his supporters to resist his own administration’s health guidelines.

Trump seems to think he can bluster, bluff and talk out of both sides of his mouth with Mother Nature — the way he did in real estate and has done on so many issues as president, when his party could always cover for him.

But it doesn’t work that way with Mother Nature. She is not a contestant on “The Apprentice.” She is just chemistry, biology and physics. We’re the contestants on her show. We don’t get to fire her. She gets to fire us.

She throws viruses, hurricanes, floods, droughts, heat waves and pandemics at us to sort out who’s the fittest. And the ones who survive have one thing, and one thing only, in common: They are the most adaptive at generating the chemistry, biology and physics needed to meet the challenge.

That’s all that matters. All those who can’t, get fired or, rather, are returned to the manufacturer.

 

Here is my conclusion: there is no time in recent memory where we have needed more reliance on facts, evidence, and thoughtful reasoning both by political leaders and their bureaucracy. We need good government. Sadly, there is no time where we are less likely to get what we need. That is my sorry conclusion.

 

One thought on “Fox News or Good Government

  1. preach, rev. newfield.

    one caveat, has there ever been good government truly led by reason, evidence, etc.? or is it a hope, an ideological stance, something arising from the same root that hid the whole history of colonialism, genocide, slavery, war, etc.?
    just consider the history of war over the last few hundred years. virtually continuous, capped by the two great wars and the holocaust, with the ongoing threat of global nuclear war i might add. aside from its functionality, this is the profundity of the attempt to create a european union. the europeans, white/male/christian, have been butchering each other for centuries.

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