Strangely enough, that didn't happen. Before we examine the shutdown in detail, let's get some context by looking at how the conservative movement has evolved since World War II, and the effect of that evolution on people-power and in America. Take a look at social media meme below. Everything it says is true. In 1956, the Republican platform really did call for big government solutions to national problems.
President Eisenhower famously said, "Should any political party attempt to abolish social security unemployment insurance and eliminate labor laws and farm programs you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group of course that believes you can do these things. Among them are a few other Texas oil millionaires and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid."
Boy, did Ike get that one wrong. After he left office in 1961, Republican leadership was first dominated by Senator Barry Goldwater and later by President Ronald Reagan, both of whom believed in essence that the only good government is a dead government. (That is of course, unless the government is policing women's reproduction, putting most of America's young black men in prison, spying on college campus radicals, etc. But I digress.)
So here's our study question for the day: Ronald Reagan and the conservative Congresses of the 1980s and later taught that big government liberalism, designed to bring about greater equality in our society, does not work. Instead, government soaks up taxpayer money while bossing everyone around, effectively becoming a tyranny. So by radically reducing government, there will be less tyranny and thus more power to the people in every aspect of daily life. How did that all turn out? And as a case study, how did folks react to an extended government shutdown?
A picture worth a thousand words: the productivity of the American worker has grown steadily since the mid-20th century, and until 1980 wages rose in proportion. But since the era of Republican ascendancy, an era marked by union busting, a lower minimum wage and dramatically increased power for businesses to make government a tool of corporate interests, wages have been flat.
The rollback of New Deal-era protections for workers was of course just the beginning for Reagan conservatives; they were also successful in rolling back every kind of regulation designed to protect consumers from abuses by banks and corporations. These rollbacks have had consistently disastrous results. In the early 1980s, deregulation led to the Savings and Loan crisis.
Having learned nothing, the country suffered from the far worse crisis of the Great Recession of 2007-2009. Now it must be said that if one looks into the claim that deregulation caused the Great Recession, many sources will point out that the crisis was not caused by any specific regulatory rollback. They are correct. The debt crisis was caused by totally irresponsible practices by lenders, Wall Street brokers and bond rating agencies that went unchecked because of an environment that did not regulate those practices. The economy was pulled back from the abyss by big government in the form of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, otherwise known as the Bailout, which saved banks and major industry.
The era of deregulation also opened the door for government to become a tool of corporate interests, rather than a tool of the interests of the American people. For a good study of the problem, I recommend a 2015 article entitled, How Corporate Lobbyists Conquered American Democracy by Lee Drutman of The Atlantic:
"For every dollar spent on lobbying by labor unions and public-interest groups together, large corporations and their associations now spend $34. Of the 100 organizations that spend the most on lobbying, 95 consistently represent business.
One has to go back to the Gilded Age to find business in such a dominant political position in American politics. While it is true that even in the more pluralist 1950s and 1960s, political representation tilted towards the well-off, lobbying was almost balanced by today's standards. Labor unions were much more important, and the public-interest groups of the 1960s were much more significant actors. And very few companies had their own Washington lobbyists prior to the 1970s."
Moving on to our current study smaller government, let's consider the recent government shutdown. President Trump was forced to back down from his refusal to reopen government on Friday of this week. Charlie Pierce of Esquire made some observations regarding the public reaction to the shutdown -they didn't like it- and how that reaction reflects on everything that's happened in the smaller-government-is-better era:
"The White House got rolled on Friday by Nancy Pelosi, to be sure. But it also got rolled by TSA agents, and air-traffic controllers, government employees standing at food co-ops and pantries, as well as thousands of inconvenienced ordinary Americans standing in line at airports. This is more important than the fact that the president* got beaten again by the new-slash-old Speaker of the House.
It was said by more than a few people that the shutdown would prove to be an alpha test for small government. Instead, it became a demonstration that 40 years of that kind of thinking may finally have run out of energy. Without necessarily meaning to do so, those thousands of Americans made the opposite case by standing in all those lines. Without necessarily meaning to do so, those thousands of Americans decided that government was the solution, and not the problem, at least as far as getting from the ticket counter to the jetway.
I'm stressing the whole air-traffic business because that's where the long slide toward Trumpism began. When Ronald Reagan broke the controllers' union, he signaled that the federal government was a) open for business, and b) on the side of management, and therefore on the side of capital and not labor, and the Republican Party committed itself to that equation as a matter of faith. Simultaneously, it adopted supply-side economics as its only real policy in that area. And that's where it's been since 1981. Until, I suspect, maybe, now."
A final observation: The Republican claim that big government is tyranny does have some truth to it when the President is Donald Trump. Demanding a border wall that most people don't want, then holding everyone hostage until he gets it? Yeah, that's tyranny all right. As blogger Laurence Lewis of dailykos.com observed this week:
"The modern Republican Party has shattered every norm of democratic governance. The shutdown is an attack on the republic itself. It is an attack on government by the people. (It's) an attempt to enforce authoritarian rule against the will of the people.
In recent years, shutdowns have become standard Republican Party operating procedure, although they still haven’t figured out that they won’t work. And in Donald Trump, Republicans have found their apotheosis. He’s a liar and a bully and a bigot and a sadist, and they’re terrified of crossing him. He is a clear and present danger to the United States, and everything he does must be seen in that context."
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Post script: Richard North Patterson of huffingtonpost has posted some thoughts similar to those I've written above in an article called, Republicans Cynically Demonized Government For Decades. The Shutdown Belongs To Them.
