I drove home yesterday from Provincetown. I took I-195 and then I-95. These roads are part of the interstate highway system envisioned by President Eisenhower in the Fifties. In that era the government invested in things that benefited people, like interstate highways, which allowed average people to drive to take vacations and see the wonders of America. They created the GI Bill and expanded state universities and made college education available to the masses for the first time. They built and funded public schools that created a generation able to go to college in the first place. They made the investments that created the American middle class.
I couldn’t help thinking of the contrast between those leaders and today’s, especially in the wake of the Minnesota bridge collapse. Under assault for 3 decades by the Republican Right, “big government” has been so delegitimized and defunded that it can’t even perform basic functions like maintaining bridges anymore. Infrastructure like highways, our air traffic control system, and our public schools & colleges are literally crumbling. The government programs that put me through college basically don’t exist any more. Instead of investing, the Bush administration hands out tax cuts to the rich and runs up a deficit that future generations will have to pay off, mortgaging our collective future so a small elite can prosper. And that elite sends its kids to private schools and universities, drinks bottled water, hires its own security guards, and basically has retreated from any sense of the public good into a privatized world where only those who can afford such luxuries can be counted on to get a decent education or have clean water to drink or feel safe in their homes and communities. Whereas once our leaders sought to use government as a tool to insure everyone had those things, today’s leaders just say “government is bad.”
Well, guess what? “Big bad government” brought us highways and schools and colleges and clean drinking water. We’d have had none of those things without government. If we needed any evidence of why we need government to be effective, we saw it this week as people scrambled for their lives in the rushing waters of the Mississippi River that divides the Twin Cities. Good government makes a civil society possible, and taxes are the cost of admission to such a society. The next time you hear a Republican demonize government then, ask them, who else is going to keep our bridges standing and our kids educated and our streets safe? You just can’t do those things privately, not for the entire nation at least: you have to have “big government” and the taxes that such government requires. Otherwise, we’ll all be swimming for our lives — in some cases, literally and, in all, figuratively.