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We are the nation that achieved global leadership by excelling in science and technology. In about a century and a quarter, we have invented most of the things that made life during the preceding century unique in human history. They include: the electric light, controlled flight and modern aircraft, motion pictures, television, digital computers, nuclear weapons, nuclear power, high-altitude (pressurized) flight, lasers, transistors, integrated circuits, vaccines for polio, manned Moon landings, the Internet, personal computers, smart phones, genetic sequencing, gene splicing and gene editing (CRISPR/Cas9).
Yet we can’t seem to roll out enough Covid-19 tests to stave off a pandemic. We can’t keep enough masks or ventilators on hand to supply our own medical first responders. We disbanded our top-level pandemic-response team right after three pandemics or near-pandemics hit within a single decade (ebola, SARS, and MERS). We let our “strategic” stockpile of personal protective equipment (“PPE”) become drastically depleted and filled with masks long expired. Now our people and our global reputation are suffering the consequences: disease, death, despair and disgrace.
Let that sink in for a minute. For a century or more, the United States has been our species’ national paragon of science and technology—the nation that the whole world looks to do the difficult with ease and the “impossible,” like our Moon landing, with a bit more effort. How did we sink to the level of such breathtaking neglect and incompetence? How did we become the global center and chief sufferer in a pandemic that started in China, halfway around the world, but that the Chinese now appear to have under control, while we continue to suffer and flounder?
It’s tempting to blame the whole thing on Donald Trump, whom a reformed conservative pundit dubbed “the worst president ever.” But you don’t convert a highly sophisticated and supremely competent society into a bumbling oaf in a mere three years. Nor can a single man, even a supreme leader, do that all alone.
A fall that dramatic takes decades. And it requires the cooperation and conspiracy of an entire class of people. This is the story of that decades-long conspiracy and the men who really deserve most of the blame.
To understand the breadth and depth of our national degeneration, you need a little context. For most of the “American Century,” government and business worked hand in hand to advance science and technology. Government did what it does best. It organized, directed, supported and incentivized research in basic and applied science. (Private investors simply won’t support that research because it’s too risky. The results, if any, are too uncertain and long-term.) Government also took the lead in funding and often managing leading-edge research with potential military and national-security applications, including responses to pandemics.
Among the numerous innovations that government has financed and/or managed were digital computers, atomic weapons, nuclear power, nuclear submarines, high-altitude (pressurized) flight, lasers, transistors, integrated circuits, vaccines for polio, manned Moon landings, the Internet, genetic sequencing, gene splicing and gene editing (CRISPR-Cas9).
The most stunning wartime example was the Manhattan project, which developed nuclear weapons, from scratch, in complete secrecy in less than two years and eight months—a feat never yet duplicated by any other nation, even with a head start. The most stunning civilian example is the Internet. It started as a government-financed project, funded by our Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (“DARPA”) in the Department of Defense, to develop a communications system that could survive a nuclear war.
Once the Internet worked brilliantly and its infinite commercial applications became apparent, then-President Bill Clinton, on Al Gore’s recommendation, released its secret technology for the entire world to use, for free. Our own private sector—and the whole world’s—took it from there. The results, among many other things, are the big-five modern monopolies: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft. Two of these firms briefly became the most valuable private corporations in human history.
Yet long before the Internet’s software protocols were even a secret research project, a subversive counter-trend had begun. It had nothing to do with science or technology. It was entirely political. It was the brainchild of people as far removed from math, science and technology as you might imagine: PR mavens and political operatives.
One of our two political parties had a problem. The Republicans’ “Grand Old Party” was the party of business. It was the darling of people with money and industrial might. But for more than two generations—ever since the Great Depression and the Second World War—it had been mostly frozen out of national leadership, while the Democrats’ progressive legislation sought to correct the errors that had led to those cataclysms. Most recently, Lyndon Johnson, with his War on Poverty, “Great Society,” Medicare and Medicaid, had captured the nation’s imagination by showing what government could do for workers and ordinary people in general. (We’ll get to Johnson’s tragic blunder in Vietnam later.)
Johnson’s avalanche of progressive legislation had also included path-breaking progress on civil rights. His Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 leveraged the moral and social awakening sparked by Doctor King into the greatest legal advance for oppressed people since Reconstruction. But they had a downside: Johnson’ arm-twisting of Southern Democrats to get his bills passed lost them, and the South, to the Dems as a reliable partner in progressive politics.
Johnson himself acknowledged this fact. He complained that he had lost the South to the Democrats for two generations. He actually underestimated the loss: it’s now been nearly three generations, and the South is still solidly Republican. Apparently racism and bossism were and are more important to the South than progress.
But the national Republicans still had a problem. They could hardly expect the rest of the country to follow the still-racist, bossist and regionally resentful South. Anyway, overt reliance on racism, like Donald Trump’s today, at that time made the leaders of the “party of Lincoln” uncomfortable.
For the then-foreseeable future, they would have to rely on innuendo and dog whistles, not overt support for racists like Trump’s, to keep the South and its fellow travelers on board. But by themselves, racism and bigotry just wouldn’t make a winning national strategy. So the GOP needed another hook to catch voters and win national elections. What would it be?
Enter the war on government. This was not just a minor, temporary political tactic. It was not just a ploy to win a single election. It was an elaborate, deliberate, calculated, decades-long conspiracy to turn Americans against the very government that had saved them from the Great Depression, that had made the United States the “arsenal of democracy” in the greatest war in history, and that, in the postwar period, had begun a progressive transformation that would (all too briefly) produce the most prosperous, innovative, happy and egalitarian society in human history.
The conspiracy was not without reason in GOP culture. Except for the brief period around the Civil War, when the Abolitionists had found a home in the GOP, it had always been the party of bosses. For the century after Reconstruction ended, the GOP had opposed virtually every program to make workers’ and ordinary people’s lives better: income taxes, estate taxes, labor unions, collective bargaining, minimum wages, bans on child labor, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and civil and voting rights.
Why did Republicans oppose all these things? Were they evil people? Not really. They just want wealth and power. They want to be bosses. They see, quite correctly, that making the proverbial “everyman” wealthier, more secure and happier will cut down their own wealth and power. It’s really that simple: they just don’t like to share.
Many Republicans are bosses in real life, in large or small businesses. They like it that way. Every tax hike, every regulation, every labor union, every law that protects workers and seniors cuts down their income, their power, and their freedom of action. Or so they think. They are much like the Sunnis in Iraq, who constitute about 20% of the population but, for the decades of Saddam’s brutal rule, had utterly dominated the Shiites and the Kurds. In the middle of the renewed civil war that broke out in 2006-2007, a Sunni pol confessed to an American envoy why it would prove so hard to keep the country together. “You don’t understand,” he said. “You see, we Sunnis just want to rule Iraq.”
Similarly motivated, Republicans set out to deprecate, diminish, downsize and ultimately destroy their own American government. They inflated the notion of “limited government” from a minor theme in our Constitution, intended only to avoid executive tyranny and banish kings, into a major principle of all democratic government. They amplified every setback, mistake and excess of government into a major case of fraud and abuse. They reframed every tax and regulation as a restraint not just on their own freedom as bosses, but on everyone’s freedom. They set about making ordinary people, whom only government can protect, see the government as their enemy. And they have been successful enough to confuse voters into fearing that government and Democrats were conspiring to take away their Medicare!
In an established democracy with a recent history of effective progressive legislation, that was no mean trick. The GOP had to get ordinary people, whom all progressive laws protect, to act against their own real interests and share the Republican bosses’ lust for power and unlimited “freedom.” For that, it needed a magician.
Enter Ronald Reagan. It was he who told the people “It’s your money,” thereby impliedly delegitimizing every expenditure of tax revenue for a public purpose. It was he who repeated endlessly, on the campaign trail and in his first inaugural address, “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” It was he who, as governor of California, started the trend of downsizing and privatizing our great public universities, starving them of state tax revenue and forcing drastic increases in tuition. It was he who, in every way, pushed the lever that drives the public and private spheres entirely into the private sphere.
But how did he do it? How did he get the bossed to support—even revel in—complete freedom of action for their bosses? How did he get the lambs not just to lie down with the lions, but to climb right onto their dinner plates? To understand that, you have to know something about the man and the state that made him, California.
Ronald Reagan got his start in life as a radio announcer and a grade-B movie actor. To say he was a fourth-rate intellect would be an understatement. But he had other things going for him. He had a calm, good nature and incredible charm. Once, during his presidency, Reagan so charmed a petitioner in the Oval Office that the man left a half-hour later never having mentioned the grievance that he had come to Washington to air.
Reagan also had rugged good looks and a mellifluous, gravelly voice that was close to hypnotic. As a trained if not starring actor, he knew how to deliver a line that someone else wrote with force and conviction, no matter how nonsensical it might prove on sober analysis.
To put it simply, Reagan had a dim-bulb analytical intellect but extraordinary emotional intelligence. He was the perfect vehicle to deliver the message that the government that had built the happiest and most prosperous society in human history, and had done so on the ruins of the Great Depression and World War II, was the people’s enemy.
Unbeknownst to many, Reagan had started out as a Democrat. His first brush with politics was as president of the Screen Actors Guild, a labor union for actors and actresses. But as he grew in fame and power, he switched to the bosses’ side just as California changed, too. Now that he’s dead, we’ll never know whether he switched sides out of conviction, aging, or opportunism.
In those days, California was not the progressive bastion that it is today. Like the nation today as a whole, it was split between a progressive north and a “conservative” (really, reactionary) south.
Southern California has much warmer weather than the San Francisco Bay Area. So it had attracted many migrants from the Old South, especially retirees from the military bases around San Diego. So great was the regional divergence in social and political views that the Regents of the University of California, in 1964, expanded the Scripps Institute of Oceanography into a full, four-year undergraduate university near San Diego, in part to “civilize” the area. (The Regents also had to break a cartel of real-estate agents who refused to sell homes in La Jolla, near San Diego, to the University’s Jewish professors. But that’s another story.)
California also had been the greatest magnet for migration since the pioneer days. The attraction wasn’t just California’s year-round warm weather and its paucity of snow. California was also a mecca for jobs. There were jobs in farming the Central Valley, which still produces one-quarter of our nation’s food. There were jobs in the Bay Area, in education, banking and finance. There were jobs in Hollywood’s movie industry. There were jobs in Southern California’s aerospace industry and (much later) in northern California’s Silicon Valley. There were jobs in housing and property development everywhere. California had good jobs, in good weather, for people of every desire, aptitude and skill.
So as the Baby Boomers grew and matured, and as opportunities lagged in other regions, Boomers moved to California by the millions. They brought with them the selfishness, self-indulgence and sense of entitlement that characterize their generation. So it was no surprise that the very first “tax revolt” came in California, in 1978, when Proposition 13, driven by the GOP, relieved Californians from ever-rising property taxes and starved California’s public schools of revenue.
This was the political environment in which Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan rose from bases in Southern California, first to the state governor’s mansion and then to the White House. But there was a big difference between the two. Nixon rose before the first “tax revolt” and long before the GOP grasped at demonizing government in order to shore up its sagging fortunes.
While he turned out to be bent and eventually was driven from office, Nixon was smart and not devoid of public spirit. He famously went to China, to end that side of the Cold War. He tried wage and price controls to end inflation. He signed the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration into law. Nixon was the last GOP President to seriously attend to the people’s welfare; he never demonized the people’s government. Instead, he tried to run it well, at least until his paranoia got the better of him.
When historians look back at the last forty years, they will focus on Ronald Reagan, not Donald Trump. They will see Trump as the mere culmination of trends set in motion decades before. They will see Ronald Reagan as the perfect vehicle for the Republicans “soft” coup: a revolt of the people against their own government that once kept them prosperous, safe and happy. They will see Reagan, with his dim intellect and great persuasive charm, as the perfect tool of the operatives who achieved the coup and kept it running for two generations.
In a terrible way, Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan were bookends. Johnson made tremendous social progress with his Great Society and civil-rights laws. Then he squandered it all on our needless, losing War in Vietnam—our single greatest foreign policy blunder (and war crime). More to the point, in its zeal to prosecute and escalate his losing war, Johnson’s government “systematically lied, not only to the public but also to Congress.” In so doing, it set the stage for deep public distrust in government that Reagan and the GOP later exploited to demonize it.
Reagan leveraged that distrust to make government workers’ enemy, not their bosses. He also negotiated an end to the Cold War. But his most durable legacy is demonization of government, which still drives GOP ideology and wins elections to the present day. Reagan’s uncritical role in the GOP conspiracy has destroyed the government-business partnership that once made America great. It has destroyed Americans’ trust and faith in their own government, and, with it, the basis for democracy itself.
As our lame and incompetent response to Covid-19 sadly shows, we’ve already achieved evil guru Grover Norquist’s fondest dream. We’ve downsized American government to the point where we can drown it in a bathtub. In so doing, we’ve not only made ourselves nearly defenseless against what may later seem a minor pandemic. (After four in a decade, we’re not likely to escape yet another.) We’ve destroyed the public-private partnership that made us supreme in science and technology for a century. We’ve maimed our democracy. We’ve divided ourselves so badly as to have become Lincoln’s “house divided [that] cannot stand.”
Whether we have any chance of recovering depends on this November’s election and how many of us vote. Needless to say, a vote for the GOP, in any office at any level, is not a vote for national recovery. As Covid-19 has so forcefully shown us, we need a government that works, not one shriveled to the size of a raisin so that the GOP can win elections and their bosses can do more of whatever they choose.