Traditional expectations of government are rooted in the Progressive Era of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Progressives believed in the power of rational inquiry to identify solutions to problems in modern American society and in the power of government to solve those problems.
In its long life, Progressivism gave America things like anti-trust laws, the Federal Reserve, women’s suffrage, food and drug regulation, and environmental protection. In later iterations like the New Deal it provided protection of labor, social security, rural electrification and even later, in Johnson’s “Great Society”, medicare, immigration reform, voting rights, and federal aid to education.
Even those opposed to such programs conceded that government could do good.
That’s changing. Two wars, fumbled federal responses to Katrina and Irene, the NSA scandal, the shutdown, and the disastrous rollout of Obamacare - all eroded public confidence that government can make things better, not worse. Recently we learned the federal government can’t even keep track of who’s dead, sending benefits to people gone for years while classifying as deceased thousands very much alive.
What a contrast to our confidence in the efficiency of private enterprises like Google. Given the chance, how many of us, inching through endless highway construction projects, might vote to hand the job off to Amazon or Zappos?
Sound far-fetched? Consider the growing gap between government inefficiency and the elegantly effective service delivery of so many private enterprises. Of course, that only goes so far. In a recent blog post, historian Chris Jones reminds us that at the latest Simcity launch, last March, players upset by limited server capacity and coding bugs “petitioned the White House to mandate a universal video game return policy.” How quickly we forget.
And there’s the difficulty. The rising generation has limited experience with what government does for people. To them efficiency seems an unalloyed good. It isn’t. As Harvard scholar Alex S. Jones argues, young Americans led the nation in trading accuracy for speed, information for entertainment, privacy for convenience, and liberty for security. They now seem to be giving up on the progressive promise that government can help.
That’s a problem. Efficiency is good; accountability is better. By that I mean a willingness to accept responsibility for broad public good. In a democratic society, government must be accountable in ways that the most efficient private enterprise isn’t and never will be. But accountability requires a citizenry that understands that government has served the public good in the past, is confident that it can still do so, and is willing to work to achieve that aim. And that’s the real danger posed most recently by the Obamacare rollout fiasco – the erosion of public trust in the idea that government can help, not hinder.
