The Right Is About To Destroy One Of Its Core Beliefs, Lets Help Them
They Broke It They Own It
The United States of America is over 3.7 million square miles of territory inhabited by over 334 million people. The very notion that one could govern such a massive enterprise with a skeleton government that allows the fairy tale free market to magically handle everything is laughable. Yet it has been the core ideology behind conservatism and the Republican Party since the 1960s.
The movement has been extremely successful nonetheless at selling the idea that if they just had their shot, they could prove that what they’ve been saying is more than just the ravings of crackpots with a Revolutionary War fetish. Well, now is their chance.
Elon Musk is apparently a true believer in this nonsense (ignore the fact that the bulk of his grotesque wealth comes from fat contracts and support from big government), and he bought and paid for Donald Trump to execute on this world view. The GOP has a congressional majority and a bribed and paid for Supreme Court to give them a judicial free hand.
So my advice for liberals is this: Let them do it.
Small government doesn’t work. Small government is the catastrophic response to Hurricane Katrina, COVID, and the Great Depression and the Great Recession. Small government leads to human suffering, national disaster, and economic failure. Business runs best with a strong, robust government providing oversight of competition, consumer protection, and national economic security.
The best version of America is one with a strong centralized government administering to the massive needs of a giant country with a huge population. The Trump-Musk vision is doomed to failure. The notion that America can be run with anything resembling competence with Musk’s “DOGE” committee hounding federal bureaucrats is insanely dumb, but they own this now.
People are going to be hurt, and they are going to die. Liberalism tried to avert this situation but thanks to docility by the Democratic Party, dishonesty by the mainstream media, and thuggery from the right, we are here anyway. Our role? To tell everyone involved, including the public who went along with it, that we told you so.
That means shaking off the Clinton/Obama-era compulsion to still pay lip service to small government braying. That’s over now. Those voters who care about small government (and it was always an overstated number) are hardcore Republicans now. It is time to embrace the big government instincts of past liberal leaders like Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and Teddy Roosevelt – with of course a mindset more attuned to the current century.
Big government addresses the big problems faced by a big country. We are not children fooled by the notion that we can still run the nation as if it were a few thousand people running around in the colonial mud in 13 states subsidized by the labor of enslaved Blacks. We know that we need the government to secure the country, respond to disasters, survive pandemics, protect consumers against corporate greed and excess, and to keep the roads and bridges and rail lines and ports vital to commerce up and operating and protected. Liberalism is adult, conservatism is child’s play.
Failure is coming to America. As a movement, liberalism must be ready to address and brand the coming failure as powered by conservatism. We must also offer up ideas to fix these mistakes (most of them will look like the stuff we have always supported, because liberalism was a response to laissez faire conservatism before the Depression), but the day of taking the high road and not linking the looming disaster to conservatism has to stop.
Right-wing ideas are laughably bad, and I think ironically that Trump has enough of a sensitivity to public opinion that even he understands some of this stuff will blow back on him and his movement. But I also think the horse has left the barn and he will go along with most of it, because he doesn’t care about policy. Musk and most Republicans in Congress don’t have this same kind of outlook because they’re (more or less) true believers.
Make no mistake, this coming nightmare isn’t good for America or the world. But it is a unique opportunity in the midst of chaos to beat the hell out of the idea that is the underpinning of conservatism. Let’s go.
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— Oliver
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What they say, "small government", is not their goal. That phrase is a marketing slogan. What they want is "government owned by the 1%", and they have hired salesmen as well as recruited volunteers.
I would agree with you completely Oliver, but for a few thoughts that trouble me a lot: if they do just half of what they told us they would do, we have a catastrophic depression on the way. Great suffering for many people. The country is swinging right because of the right’s media blanket. Many, many people will never hear any accuracy about why they are suffering, and will keep blaming the scapegoats they are supplied with. Us and ours, no doubt. And then as others here mentioned, the goal is to acquire power and direct the wealth of the economy into the hands of those with the power through privatization and plain grift. Autocratic kleptocracy isn’t going to let elections get in its way if it gets any distance down the road. I hope you’re right and I worry too much.