Rebranding Government: It's Time Politicians Stopped Running For or Against Government and Started Running it Well
For thirty years, Americans have absorbed the well-branded mantra of Ronald Reagan: Government is the problem, not the solution. They have absorbed it so well that it has literally become part of the fabric of their--and our--brains. "Government" is unconsciously associated with bureaucracy, failed programs, inefficiency, waste, socialism, and all kinds of words, concepts, and images that are in turn associated with negative emotions for the average American. Neuroscientists have demonstrated that repeatedly pairing one word or idea with another leads to changes in both the connections among neurons in the brain that represent those ideas and the readiness of those neurons to fire together, so that even those of us on the left do not realize that concepts like "bureaucracy" and "waste" are triggered unconsciously in our brains when someone mentions government.
The social psychologist Claude Steele and his colleagues have demonstrated how powerful the effects of these kinds of associations can be in their work on what they call "stereotype threat" in African-American students. Simply asking black students to fill in a question about their race among several innocuous demographic questions substantially lowers their performance on SAT questions. The same is true when asking female students to fill in their gender before answering math questions. Although black and female students may not consciously believe stereotypes about their relative intellectual or mathematical abilities, simply "priming" them with their race or gender activates those unconscious stereotypes, which in turn activates anxiety and undermines their performance. The best way to counter these processes--indeed, the most effective way to counter virtually all forms of unconscious bias or efforts at "stealth" persuasion or propaganda--is to make them conscious.
The effectiveness of the conservative branding campaign on "government" is in fact a central reason we are in the economic mess we are in today. The notion that government is an evil--among some voters a necessary one, but among most voters an evil nonetheless--is what led Democrats to remain silent for much of the last eight years as George W. Bush turned record surpluses into record deficits in the name of scaling back government intrusion; weakened or eliminated regulations that had been in place for decades to protect American consumers, homeowners, retirees, and people saving for their retirement or their kids' college education; and failed to regulate new threats that were as preventable as they were foreseeable, such as unregulated commerce in "commodities" most people don't understand (e.g., derivatives) or putting too much money into risky investments without enough capital to back it up if good-times loans were to go bad. And the effective branding of government as the problem is part of what has led, over three decades, to Democrats remaining relatively silent as our infrastructure crumbled because of their (well founded) fear that their conservative opponents in the next election would attack them for their "tax-and-spend" profligacy. The result has been that we cut taxes to the wealthy and failed to invest in our future in times of relative prosperity, while creating the conditions that will require nothing short of massive government deficit spending, extraordinary governance, and a lot of luck to get us out of an economy that is still in free-fall.
Fortunately, we have a leader at the helm who understands the fierce urgency of now. None of us has ever seen anything like a government-in-transition emerge with the rapidity and effectiveness of the new Obama administration, or a first week in office in which a new President reversed course so dramatically on so many issues--particularly in foreign policy--with stroke after stroke of his pen. Obama promised change, and he has already begun to demonstrate, in one domain after another, the last part of his campaign slogan: that this is change we can believe in, because it is happening already.
But all is not quiet on the domestic front. President Obama promised a bipartisan, pragmatic, solution-driven approach to governing, but a bipartisan solution requires the willing participation of precisely the people whose bankrupt ideology and overweening concern for those at the top of the economic ladder has led to record bankruptcies and a broken ladder for the middle class. And not surprisingly, the Republican super-minority in the House and Senate who only have a voice because the new President has graciously offered them one are using his beneficence to try to rehabilitate their ideology, rebuild it into a stimulus plan with an excess of tax cuts and a deficit of infrastructure development, and repeatedly attack any solutions anyone offers to the problems they created other than more tax cuts to the wealthy and a return to budget balancing at just the wrong time now that their friends will no longer be the beneficiaries of the record deficits they created.
As someone who has argued, for both historical reasons (unanswered attacks are effective attacks) and neurological reasons (allowing the other side to tell a story without immediately offering a counter-narrative gives them the opportunity to shape the neural networks that constitute public opinion without any interference), against ever handing the microphone over to your opponent without singing a duet, I was delighted to hear President Obama, less than a week into office, signal to the Republican minority that he was not going to reach a hand out to them unless they unclenched their fists, with his simple rebuke: "I won." In so doing he has sent a clear shot over the bow that if they want a voice in Washington it will need to be a constructive one.
But I believe he will need to do more than that. He will need to rebrand government, to make a case that what most Americans consider a dangerous Leviathan can actually be helpful to the lives of the average working American, and that what most Americans have come to consider "them" is actually "us." President Obama is asking Americans to make a leap of faith that that monster they have heard about for 30 years that steals a third of their paycheck and then wastes their money or redistributes it to the lazy and undeserving (and dark-skinned) is really their friend.
That is a tall order, and one that will require not only good policy but a transformational leader with a powerful story to tell. We have the leader, and his administration is groping toward the policy, but we haven't yet heard the story. We have heard the etchings of policy details but not the narrative about how we got into the predicament we're in and what principles--not just what policies--the President and his advisors are using to try to guide us out of it. How did we get to the point where we don't trust government but nevertheless expect it to rescue us? Why was deficit spending a bad thing for the last thirty years but a good thing now? The American people are profoundly ambivalent about government intervention, as witnessed by their fickle support for government efforts to rescue one after another drowning industry that could sink our collective boat. They need a leader who can tell them clearly, forcefully, and truthfully why the boat is filling with water, why they need to toss some very expensive life preservers into the water, and how the captain hopes to do plug the leaks and rebuild the ship while it's still on the ocean. And they need to hear this story over and over as they start to see the effects of what we can all only hope will be effective government intervention in the next few months and years until this new narrative overtakes "government is the problem, not the solution." President Obama has to tell whatever story he believes to be true, but this is the kind of story I have in mind:
We are facing a crisis like none we have seen since the Great Depression, and there's a reason for the similarity: The same ideology that led us into the Great Depression in the 1930s has led us into the most severe economic crisis we have had since that time. Both times we were brought to the brink of disaster by a radical ideology that says that if you just leave the free market alone, unchecked by any rules designed to protect our shared welfare and our shared values--like the idea that people willing to work hard should be able to get a good job, own a home, and feed their kids and take them to the doctor when they're sick--everything will work out. Well, we've now tried out that ideology twice, and it has been a disaster both times.
Franklin Roosevelt led us out of the Great Depression by taking a pragmatic, not an ideological path, setting up safety nets for people who didn't deserve to lose their homes or their dignity in retirement through no fault of their own, testing one program after another until he got it right. In the process, we learned something important: that the market may be the engine of our prosperity, but someone has to be at the steering wheel when that engine is on or we'll run aground, and that someone needs to be us: the people, through our elected representatives. That new vision of government guided us for 50 years, and it served us well, making us the strongest, most prosperous nation in the history of the world.
But over time, not everyone who led our government shared Roosevelt's vision of trying something out, keeping it if it worked, and discarding it if it didn't. Over time, bureaucracies calcified, and people felt entitled to programs whether they worked efficiently or not. Politicians found it difficult to make the hard decisions to keep what worked and cut what didn't, and others used that as an opportunity to play on our worst impulses, blaming all our problems on the poor or infirm. Then Ronald Reagan entered office with a simple creed: that government is the problem, not the solution. That creed resonated with a lot of people because it captured their sense that their tax dollars weren't being used effectively, that while they were struggling to make ends meet, a bloated bureaucracy was thriving on their hardship.
There was something to Reagan's critique, but his solution was too simple. Government is neither the problem nor the solution. Government is nothing other than us--the citizens of this country--coming together to solve our shared problems, and if it's ineffective, we need leaders with the courage and the vision to speak the truth and fix it. Unfortunately, over the next 30 years, the pendulum swung so far from Roosevelt's vision of government for the people--federal protection of our bank accounts, a minimum wage to guarantee that people who work hard can feed their families, Social Security so Americans can be assured of dignity in their twilight years, worker safety laws so they make it to those years, unemployment insurance to protect us against the inevitable ups and downs of the market, and regulations on Wall Street speculation that could prevent another crash--that we found ourselves right back where we were 80 years ago, with an unregulated market running amok, an ethic of unfettered greed, and a lot of good people losing their jobs, their livelihoods, their retirement, their health care, and their dreams through no fault of their own.
That is where we find ourselves today. It's time for politicians to stop running for or against government and to start running it well. It's time to set aside rigid ideologies and deal with the realities that confront us. We have an economy that is spiraling downward, and we have so tied our hands with unpatriotic, anti-government rhetoric that we haven't invested in our own country in decades. It's no accident that our bridges are crumbling, our levees aren't holding, and our children aren't getting the world-class education that will allow them to compete in the global economy. It's no accident that we can't trust the water our children drink, the food we eat, or the banks that finance our mortgages. It's no accident that our main import is oil and our main export is good American jobs. In all these cases the reason is the same: we have come to believe that the ship of state can run itself, that big businesses can police themselves without a real cop looking over their shoulder, and that we, the people, are so incapable of coming together to create institutions to serve our common good that we should just say no to the idea that we can govern ourselves effectively.
I believe Americans are better than that. I believe the nation that invented modern democracy can surely figure out how to solve our collective problems if we put our heads together and call that government.
Government is neither the problem nor the solution. It is us, and if it isn't, we should--and we can--remake it. We need leaders who understand that the market is the chief engine of prosperity in a free society, but that sitting idly by as people lose their jobs, their homes, or their doctors isn't leadership.
Drew Westen, Ph.D., is Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at Emory University, founder of Westen Strategies, and author of "The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation."
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Having just listened to Obama's speech honoring Lincoln, I'd wager that someone on our new President's team may have received an advanced copy of this post. Of course it could just be a coincidence that Obama's speech was so eerily on key with the good doctor's orders, though there seem to be an awful lot of these coincidences whenever Dr. Westen comes out with a new post about where Obama is slipping and what he should do to get things back on track.
Whatever the reality of the situation, it was nice to see our President remind us in such an eloquent and engaging way about the proper function of government.
"For thirty years, Americans have absorbed the well-branded mantra of Ronald Reagan: Government is the problem, not the solution."
*****************************************************************************************************
This has been proven to be true when the Republicans are running the Government. Why don't Americans take another look?
Government is Good:
Ronald Reagan said “Government is not a solution to our problem, Government is the problem”, and proceeded to destroy it. Under George W. Bush’s policies, we have the same situation plus his view, "The Constitution is just a piece of paper" - G.W. Bush
Here is another viewpoint.
http://www.governmentisgood.com/
Government is not the problem. CONSERVATIVES are the problem.
Therefore... get rid of the conservatives.
So when exacly did government run "well"? All I have ever seen, is it reacting to the next "crisis". The great depression, wars, terrorist attacks, financial meltdowns, whatever. The only people you can blame is the american people, who vote them in.
Everything that you bring up is either the direct fault of conservative governmental policies (great depression, financial meltdown) or something that cannot be planned for (terrorist actions, hurricanes) with the sole exception of war, which has only one example of a bad war in the last 50 years which was NOT started by a Republican!!
In other words, the Republicans are bad for the USA, since they cannot run the govt well enough to keep us out of financial crises, and they cannot handle after a natural or man-made disaster!
Republicans just don't have what it takes to lead a nation.
Sure they talk a good game, but as they just spent eight years proving, they aren't equipped to do anything other than bluster and whine.
Hard work just doesn't appeal to conservatives. They always need to take the easy way out.
Hard to believe they're *your friend* when they don't listen to you, spend most of their time campaigning for their next election and worrying about how to make their party have a larger majority than the other.
I don't want my representatives to be my friends, I WANT THEM TO REPRESENT ME, not corporations not people from other countries and certainly not themselves or their party.
I want my old banker back. I do'nt want bank monopolies. I do'nt want big corporations to "merge". Is'nt it still illegal to have monopolies?
"It's Time Politicians Stopped Running For or Against Government and Started Running it Well"
Unfortunately most politicians can only run their mouth.
It's time for progressive politicians to stop making a federal issue out of everything. The financial crisis should have taught us that an elite club in Manhattan is no better than an elite club in Washington at taming the macroeconomic risks that discourage economic development and tear at the social fabric.
Both are institutions that allocate a pool of capital through a collective decision-making process where a large number of stakeholders are represented by relatively few agents. Both are only as effective as the connection between the stakeholders and their agents. The problem with democracy is the same as the problem with finance: centralization.
Many more Americans would be open to more public services if they were tailored and administered at the state level. Fifty parallel efforts to build a secure and encouraging foundation on which private enterprise can thrive. A little more overhead, but competition is just another word for productive overhead, and we can't afford the cost of a federal monopoly on social safety nets.
Obama is a master of the art of decentralized organization, and he's made several public gestures toward vesting more authority in governors and state legislatures. You don't have to be a conservative to advocate "states' rights". Decentralized democracy is in fact a thoroughly progressive ideal.
Great piece as usual. I'd add that transparency and citizen reporting, (as opposed to the corrupt main street media) will be key to insure accountability. There must be accountability or there is always the danger of government becoming the problem ( see U.S.S.R.). Power corrupts as surely as greed. In fact, there are already too many ineffective and inefficient government employees. We cannot let them be like that or the "government is the problem" crowd will come back to power sooner, rather than later.
If this is to happen we must support Obama and the desire of progressives like Russ Feingold to lead.
It is essential for us to make our case in public as well as in private. We need to be in the streets celebrating our vision and being more alive than the Limbaughs, Boehners, and DeMints. We will need to demonstrate passion for our beliefs.
Then the world will tip in our direction. Obama was just the beginning of the change, just the catalyst. We're the heart of the deal.
To those who believe that government is the problem (leaving in its wake, only private enterprise as a plausible solution) I can only offer my experience:
Having worked for both government (Fed and State) and corporate America (IBM among others). It would be true that smaller organizations are able to react to events on the ground quicker and adjust accordingly. But I have found that it doesn't matter whether its public or private: a bureaurcracy is and bureaucracy.
But the difference is obvious: Private industry answers to a narrow group (shareholders, customers, in the case of a business to business model they don't even answer to consumers). Government in a democratic republic must answer to the will of its citizens. We have more control over the government than we do business. But neither is the superior of the other. One acts to create goods and services and one regulates those actions. Anyone who signals one out over the other may as well voice of preference for yin or yang for all its worth.
IBM is a big company but Government makes them look tiny.
So what? In the case of IBM they make a very limited number of product lines, and they make MANY of each of those lines. In the case of the govt they are regulating not just IBM, but Ford, and Microsoft, and Exxon, and.....etc..... In addition to that there are other functions of the govt, which are not regulation, but rather public safety, such as safe air travel, and police, and fire, etc..... OF COURSE the federal govt (and the state govts.....) are huge, they are trying to make the whole country keep moving forward!
You're mostly right. The only two disagreements that I have with you are that some of the stuff the govt does is more than just regulation, such as Air Traffic Control, and Police, etc.... I would also like to say that I *DO* have a preference for one over the other. I would prefer for the govt to stay in the regulation business and for business to stay OUT of it, because business SUCKS at regulation of business. At the same time I would prefer for the govt to stay OUT of the manufacturing business and keep business IN it because govt SUCKS at manufacturing!
In other words, a preference for one over the other, provided that the preference is for each one's sphere is a good thing.
Boehner and his buddies in Congress do not seem to realize we are all tired of their partisan games. ..........
http://thefiresidepost.com/2009/01/26/packed-with-pork-economic-stimulus-in-perspective/
Bad and ineffcient Government is something than spans parties . . .
342 economic development programs;
130 programs serving the disabled;
130 programs serving at-risk youth;
90 early childhood development programs;
75 programs funding international education, cultural, and training exchange activities;
72 federal programs dedicated to assuring safe water;
50 homeless assistance programs;
45 federal agencies conducting federal criminal investigations;
40 separate employment and training programs;
28 rural development programs;
27 teen pregnancy programs;
26 small, extraneous K–12 school grant programs;
23 agencies providing aid to the former Soviet republics;
19 programs fighting substance abuse;
17 rural water and waste-water programs in eight agencies;
17 trade agencies monitoring 400 international trade agreements;
12 food safety agencies;
11 principal statistics agencies; and
4 overlapping land management agencies
I think this would be called inefficient at the federal level . . .
"12 food safety agencies;"
Besides the FDA, what other 11 federal agencies are you referring to? Can you possibly name some of these agencies or are you just hoping that no one calls you on that absurdity? And please don't name various programs administered by the FDA. A program is not an agency.
I agree with so much of what you said. And, isn't it ironic that two of our republican presidents over the last two decades ran to limit government and spent more tax payer money than any other government since?
But, I do think our government is too large. Americans spend their hard earned wages to pay the salaries of too many pencil pushers and unneeded positions. There is too much waste in the Federal budget.
Limited government is a way to prevent tyranny. We need a president like Theodore Roosevelt who understands the need for large coorporations, but still prevents them from running amock.
Maybe the people in the government are extremly over paid. Washington has become the cash cow for many with "Greedy ' agendas, in all aspects of the government just follow the money. Washington has turned into a "Cesspool" .
Government is the problem, specifically, the Congress. Face it, we have democrats and republicans that gain an almost lifetime tenure interested in holding their seat and benefits -- period. Look again at the expense of running our government and see the bloated staffs, overlapping committees, obscenely expensive benefits, minimal hours worked, laughable "fact finding" trips (with families), bottomless expense accounts ad nauseum. And we the people enable these.................. (insert your own pet term).
This is the clearest and most accurate statement I have read about what ails us. Unfortunately, the establishment doesn't get it, or if they do, they like it this way just fine. I don't think Obama has the vision or inclination to bring real change. I think he means bipartisanship, not fundamental policy change.
We need the government to steer and drive us into the future, because the private sector cannot see beyond next quarter's financial statements. But we don't have leaders who are capable of governing, nor who care about governing, nor who understand what has to be done. Our leaders are not the solution, they are part of the problem, because they come from the people who caused the problem.
Let me suggest a necessary step forward. You say, "And the effective branding of government as the problem is part of what has led, over three decades, to Democrats remaining relatively silent as our infrastructure crumbled because of their (well founded) fear that their conservative opponents in the next election would attack them for their "tax-and-spend" profligacy." To me, that means that Congressional Democratic leadership need to be refreshed, because they apparently still have that siege mentality, or PTSD, whatever. They've been playing defense for so long they don't know how to take the offense. I'm a Democrat, worked for Obama, but have no confidence in Pelosi's or Reid's ability to lead the Congress forward and take the necessary political risks needed to do the right thing.
Ditto. They need a bit of that pit bull mentality repubs wield so well.
great post.
yesterday I read where the republicans are once again claiming that tax cuts are the solution, and I feel like I've just gone back in time. these people just don't know how to move forward or to work cooperatively, and yet they think they are the better deal for the country.
Where have the tax cuts gotten us for the past 8 years? exactly where we are now. and the r's are calling for more of the same. really, in the current climate, what is a $300-$600 tax cut going to do for the average american other than pay a credit card bill? completely out of touch.
and a thought that has occurred to me recently - it may be that in this current age, the ideal of "small government" just might not be possible in a global society. but these people who keep harping on "small government" won't bother to stop and ask themselves that, they just keep preaching an ideal without thinking if it's really an attainable goal.
I couldn't agree more with your position that "It's Time Politicians Stopped Running For or Against Government and Started Running it Well." All of those in government who spend their time trying to dismantle government are not serving the country.
Government isn't the problem , its the "Criminals in government. Let's not forget the citizens of the United States of America, are the government. When reagan stated' government was bad"" guess what, He was stating ' the obvious " the people were bad.
It is not accurate to say that republicans limted government in the last 30 years despite that being their objective. Government and regulation have increased since the 20's let alone the last 8 or 30 years.
You cannot run anything well when the decisionmaking is based getting re-elected rather than sound logical decisionmaking. I think government at all levels needs to go through a reorganization much like a private company that goes through a chapter 11 bankruptcy. That is how all the waste and innefficiency gets flushed out. Political interests have prevented this kind of housecleaning from happening.
"It is not accurate to say that republicans limted government in the last 30 years despite that being their objective. Government and regulation have increased since the 20's let alone the last 8 or 30 years."
I wasn't saying that they HAVE limited government - I was referring to the their constant bs talk of "that's what's best for the country." it may not be what's best - it's an ideal and an assumption. can you really have "small government" for such a large country in a global society? large government might just be a consequence of the times. it might not be possible to have a small (effective or ineffective) government in these modern times.
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