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This is going to sound counter-intuitive at first but I have become convinced in the course of discussions with both conservative and progressive people in recent months that at its core, the surge in anti-government sentiment and the progressive angst in the Obama era so far both come from the same root issue. The heart of the problem is that our government has become captured by a small number of very big and very powerful corporate interests, and that has made the federal government increasingly dysfunctional.
This dysfunction feeds the right-wing plenty of fuel for its anti-government-all-the-time narrative, helping them build their movement. Unfortunately, though, it has also created a crisis point for progressives. Progressives have always understood that government not only has an important role to play in promoting the public good in areas the market doesn't work well, but is sometimes the only entity that can be strong enough to take on monopolistic or oligarchic private corporations who can become too powerful in a free market economy. When government gets captured by these powerful interests and becomes dysfunctional as a result, it puts progressives in a bad spot: defending the role of government when it keeps screwing up doesn't play very well with voters.
Because the progressive movement got used to the federal government playing a mostly positive role in economics, civil rights, the environment, and other issues during the New Deal era and the decades after, and because we don't worship the free market in all things and at all times the way conservatives do, there has been a tendency on our side in these last three decades of brutal attack on all things government to be reflexively defensive about it. As one example, I have had friends argue that progressives should avoid using the term "government waste" because it just feeds a bad frame about government. I have also heard many people talk about how important it is for us to be spending a lot of time explaining to people the positive role of government.
As someone who wrote about the historic political debate between the conservative and progressive movements, I don't agree with these arguments. The role and size of government in our society has changed dramatically over the course of American history, as has the role and size of private corporations, but the bedrock values and goals of the progressive movement have not changed. We stand for more democracy, more equality, and a better economic situation for poor and middle-income people, and we oppose trickle-down economics and the concentration of wealth and power for economic elites. To get better results in terms of those goals, we have frequently turned to government. But government is only a means to those ends, not the ends themselves- and it is not the only means to those ends, either. I want wages to go up for poor and working class people, and that can happen because the minimum wage increases (government) or through workers organizing a union and negotiating (collective action). I want to lessen the concentration of wealth and power of big corporations, and that can happen through regulation and anti-trust and progressive taxation (government), or through class action lawsuits, consumer boycotts, and shareholder resolutions (collective action). Of course it is always better for our purposes to have government on the right side, but we are not limited to government action to improve people's lives, and we also shouldn't be stuck defending government when it is on the wrong side.
When our government screws up, we shouldn't be afraid to say so. When government wastes money, we should call them on it. When government officials favor big business special interests over the rest of us, we should fight them. When government caves to the demands of powerful insider lobbyists, we should raise hell about it.
Social Security and Medicare are government programs which have worked incredibly well to lift senior citizens out of poverty and give them healthier, happy lives. Public education is the only way most children are ever going to get the education they need. Police, firefighters, roads, bridges, our national defense are all functions needed to be done by government. People with mental disabilities and people trapped in long-term poverty and unemployment need a government safety net. And only government has the ability to provide the oversight and check on the power of big corporations who would otherwise wreck our economy, pollute the environment, and make unsafe products. So, yes: government has an important role to play in our modern economy, and the right wing fantasy that government is not good at anything, and that the free market is always the way to go, needs to be thoroughly rejected. But progressives also need to stop being defensive of government in general. Government does waste money sometimes; government doesn't do all things well. And a progressivism that is always defensive of a government that isn't doing its job, that isn't delivering the things people need to make their daily lives better, will find itself at exactly the kind of crisis point we find ourselves in today.
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