Let me begin with the ending:
It’s axiomatic that government isn’t perfect and that we’re better off having a large private sector. It ought to be axiomatic that the private market isn’t perfect, either, and that we need government to step in when the market fails. The success of the auto bailout and the failure of the Republicans’ anti-Medicare campaign both teach the same lesson: The era of anti-government extremism is ending.
That is the conclusion of a Washington Post op ed by E. J. Dionne titled Rescuing Detroit: No news about government’s good news. Dionne calls Republicans to account, reminding us how critical they were of the administration's decision to bail out the auto industry.
If you prefer, we could begin with his very brief opening paragraph:
Don’t expect to see a lot of newspapers and Web sites with this headline: “Big Government Bailout Worked.” But it would be entirely accurate.
He offers real headlines from his paper and the New York Times which describe the tripling of GM's profits to $3.2 billion for the 1st quarter. He brings back the "theological" (my word) economic statements of the likes of Republican Representatives Dan Burton of IN and Lamar Smith and Louis Gohmert of Texas so we remember how insistent they were in opposing the bailout of Detroit, and wraps them up in a nice neat bow:
The lack of accountability is stunning but not surprising. It reflects a deep bias in the way our political debate is carried out. The unexamined assumption of so much political reporting is that attacks on government’s capacity to do anything right make intuitive sense because “everybody knows” that government is basically inefficient and incompetent, especially when compared with the private sector.
By now the thrust of this op ed should be clear. I will not quote further. I want to explore the idea a bit further, and it will not surprise you that I want to extend Dionne's thinking to education as well.
First, let's remember one aspect of this bailout that Dionne does not explore. The automobile industry, both the big three and their suppliers, is one of the last remaining bastions of industrial unionization in the US. There is no doubt in my mind that one reason Republicans were willing to let GM fold - and in the process also take down the supply chain for Ford - is so they could argue that what caused the problems were unions, to use the subsequent failures as an excuse to gut unions once and for all. What is interesting is that the administration, while it imposed some demands upon the unionized workers, looked at it differently. We could not be a major economic power without a viable auto industry. We would devastate one entire state - Michigan - and quite a few other states, and far too many local communities. Ultimately many of GM's problems were less the fault of union contracts than they were poor decisions by management. To save the industry sacrifice was required by all - management and labor - and government had a responsibility to step in and make a difference.
Let me compare this to education. To totally privatize education is ultimately to abandon large parts of our population to a diminished future, because meaningful education is the best hope to change one's more limited economic circumstances. Too many Republicans have a similar "theological" approach to education. They have drunk the waters of Milton Friedman, want to voucherize everything, believe the solution to all problems is the unlimited free market - oh yes, and they see opportunity for private profits at the public trough.
Dionne rightly points out that the government intervention in the auto industry did not overturn capitalism - it intervened when the market was incapable of solving the problem by itself. It bought time, it helped make adjustments.
I am not an economist, but I think after years of teaching social studies - history as well as government - I understand enough about our economic system to be clear on one thing - America is not and never has been a completely free market system. Were that the case, there would be no patents or copyrights, we would require no licenses, government would not inspect products for safety. Everything would be pure economic competition and we would have a Hobbesian economy of the war of everyone against everyone else, and as Hobbes notes in Leviathan, and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
We have government in part to provide a framework within which we can exercise our freedoms, economic as well as political.
We also have for the better part of at least the last century, with glimmers before, had an understanding that there are some things that we should not privatize. We may use private companies to supply material for the military, but the military - and the police and the fire and many other aspects of our life - are properly the role of government, not of profit. At least, ultimately, most Americans understand if given a chance that they should not be.
Our media often does as poor a job of covering economics and government as I know it does of covering education. Too often we do not hear about the successes of government programs, only the failures. We should know about the failures, we should be prepared to change or even abandon programs that are not working, although we should be certain that the "failure" is not because opponents have starved them of the necessary funding or hamstrung them with ridiculous regulations, both approaches designed to make them fail. But we should insist on examining the successes and attempting to understand why they worked, so that we can learn positive as well as negative lessons.
Lesson - learn - gee, that's part of education, is it not? Maybe, just maybe, we should do a better job of explaining the reality of our economic system.
This nation did not develop a meaningful Communist party in the 1930s because our government intervened in the New Deal. For 8 decades some on the right have been trying to dismantle all aspects of the New Deal, starting with Social Security, without which our elderly would be in serious financial distress now.
This is about more than framing political discussions, although that is important. It is about ensuring that our young people do learn history and economics, so that they cannot be mislead by the lies - yes, lies - that are propagated by the paid organs of the other side, the institutions of what Hillary Clinton rightly described as a vast, right-wing conspiracy.
We need to tell the truth. In our media. From our politicians. In our schools.
We need appropriate civic education. Which teaches our children how to think, how to question the assumptions others attempt to impose upon them.
Dionne notes how Republicans are now trying to distance themselves from at least part of the Ryan budget, the part that would begin to end Medicare. They have found out how unpopular that approach really is. Democrats need to hold their feet to the fire, to remind people of how wrong the Republicans were on that.
Democrats should also remind people constantly of how wrong the Republican approach on the auto industry was. Hell, if that had been part of the message last year, perhaps we would not now have the atrocities of the Republican governors in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, three industrial states heavily dependent upon the auto industry and its supply chain.
Government exists to help the people, to preserve the order and stability necessary for a civil society, to provide safety nets to cushion us from the worst that can occur, be it from hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes, or attacks from outside the nation - political, military and economic.
Despite the years of propaganda from the other end of the political spectrum, I think most of the American people still have a sense of this role for government.
We should be proud to claim success when government works, and to remind people of how wrong the Dan Burtons, Lamar Smiths, and Louis Gohmerts were.
I titled this with a question: does Dionne have it right? Can we look at the pushback in Wisconsin and Michigan, in the backing down of Republicans on Medicare, on some of the other issues out there right now, and affirm this statement: The success of the auto bailout and the failure of the Republicans’ anti-Medicare campaign both teach the same lesson: The era of anti-government extremism is ending.
He may be right, but only if we are prepared to hammer that message home, to force the media to cover it, to ensure that the American people remember that one side was willing to risk on behalf of us all, and the other was prepared to destroy the economy in order to win political points.
At least, that's my take.
What's yours?