Henry David Thoreau taught us that the government that governs least governs best. Many of us grew up in cultures that insisted that any government that treaded beyond the red line of least was to be questioned, to be distrusted, and to be eradicated. The notion was and still is the balm of real conservatism in America.
The religion of small government shows its ideal in the Vermont Town Meeting, held early each March. That is where and when they approve the Town and School budget and taxes to support them, where locals can spout off on nearly any subject and get a respectful hearing. I attended one Town Meeting where there was near-unanimous agreement that the town should begin a kindergarten. Who could oppose that? Later in the meeting, the school budget and tax were approved. Neither included money for the kindergarten. People want things that they are not willing to pay for, sometimes.
John F Kennedy preached a form of politics that claimed that government could be a force for good, that it had the power to transform lives. That was, for the time, quite a radical idea, not to be trusted or supported. President Regan told us that government wasn’t the answer, but the problem. We believed that too, many still do.
Thoreau was right for his time. I wonder if his ideas are right for today’s America. It is a dividing issue for many. Good old-fashioned conservatism wrote the rubric of low taxes, little government, and self-reliance. The idea that we are all born equal, but on our own after that implies a level playing field and equal opportunity. That is our ideal, shouted loud and often, but not always our reality. We aren’t the agricultural nation of two or three centuries ago. We live, at least half of us, within fifty miles of the oceans, cramped into tall buildings or houses with small lots. Most of us can’t stand on our front porch and see forever, determined to move if we see the smoke rising from a distant chimney.
President Biden went before a covid-safe Congress to deliver a summary of his first 100 days and to lay out a far-reaching set of objectives for the next ten years. The first twitch for many was to call it over-reaching, too much, and too expensive. For many who yearn for the shores of Walden Pond, it was an infringement of states’ rights, government’s role in society, even socialistic to some, and by any measure, very expensive. But is it all bad?
To say the country changed in the last 50 years is an overwhelming understatement. Not all of us have conquered the maelstrom. Too many in retirement don’t see the need to catch up or want to catch up. It is that cohort of voters, however, who vote in high percentages, less and less each year but still influential. America is going the way of the kids in college, those getting ready for college, or those who were just graduated. They are setting the agenda for the next fifty years. Sometimes it has a ready-fire-aim feel to it. The young people, those under 40 years represent 51% of the population. Sixteen percent of all voters are under 30 years. We are at an inflection point in our history; we can almost see the curve of change as it happens.
Both political parties, when they controlled Congress and/or the White House, could not even agree on a plan to fix the roads and bridges. During those years of inaction, the definition of infrastructure changed. It is no longer simply highways and byways. Thirty-five percent of the students in this country do not have effective broadband. In 1936, Congress passed the Rural Electrification Act, which funneled money to electric cooperatives to help defray the cost of bringing electricity to the rural areas of the country. I remember going to farms with my father, an electrician, who made a living for many years wiring farmhouses and barns in the mountain towns. The last town to get electricity in my rural home state was 1963. The point is simple: the electric grid is part of our infrastructure, but so is broadband. In the US, 94% of the population has access to broadband, but 15 million people in rural areas lack reliable service. The TVA is infrastructure. The interstate highway system is infrastructure. Clean water is infrastructure. Think of Flint Michigan or of the two million people in the US who lack clean drinking water. Dirty water, failing bridges, pot-holed throughways, no broadband, failed electric power sources; is this the way we want the world to see America?
The pandemic opened the sores of our insecurity. Millions of people lined up for hours to get bags of free groceries because they did not have a job, through no fault of their own and they have to feed their family. Is this the US we want the world to see? Our healthcare system showed its vulnerability in emergencies. It needs fixing. The gap between white and minority wages, wealth, schools, and discrimination became evident during the pandemic. It needs to be narrowed or eliminated.
Without knowing it, many Americans have supported the dogma of subsidiarity: decisions and actions at the local level whenever possible, not by some centralized government, Locals will take care of their people unless they can’t. Locals should build infrastructure unless they can’t. Locals should ensure clean water unless they can’t. When we cannot do what needs to be done, we look for the next higher level of competence, maybe a county poverty agency, or a state police agency, or the county road commission, or …. While we hold fast to the belief in local relief, we recognize that some things need to be done nationally. Many of us remember trying to travel long distances across the country on two-lane highways before the interstate system was designed and built. That effort was called socialism by the way. The days of the small electrical systems left us a long time ago. Electric grids span the continent and electricity is bought and sold in the marketplace, just like so many other commodities.
The nation is no longer a conglomeration of small towns and large farms separate and distinct. We became, almost without realizing it, an intertwined network that requires national answers to national issues. We have the same number of acres or square miles, but vastly different needs than the previous century. Doing things as a nation does not register as socialism to me. It doesn’t take away our democracy. The interstate highway system didn’t divide us, it united us. The electrification of the country didn’t divide us; it made life better for millions of people. I am not sure that fixing our school buildings belongs in an infrastructure bill rather than in an education bill, but it is hard to argue that we don’t need a broadened definition of infrastructure. We need national solutions to national problems.
Americans by nature believe that we are the greatest nation on earth, especially because of our democratic form of government. For years, we could brag about how our standard of living was so much higher than the rest of the world. Mostly that was true. But, when you consider that 43% of Americans have never left the country, or that 11% of Americans have never left the state in which they were born, it is hard for them to conceive of the idea that other countries are catching up. They haven’t experienced trains that run at 300 mph or brand new 4-8 lane expressways with more miles than our total interstate highway system. It is hard to imagine countries with wide-spread broadband so prevalent that one hardly needs cash anymore because transactions are by phone or tap cards. We can’t catch up with the world by simple local effort. The country needs big improvements, big ideas to help it maintain a leadership role in the world. We need to go big! We need to go at it as a nation united. Over 80% of the population agrees. The only ones fighting the idea are some members of Congress. America won’t be great again, or better if we don’t rebuild ourselves. Henry David might not like it, but it’s time for a change. A bit of big government can’t be all bad at this juncture in our journey to a more perfect union.
