By David K. Shipler
In his
acerbic 1776 pamphlet Common Sense,
Thomas Paine skewered the British monarchy with a broad assault: “Society is
produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes
our happiness POSITIVELY by uniting our affections, the latter NEGATIVELY by
restraining our vices.” Government was a necessary evil, he thought, “a mode
rendered necessary by the inability of moral virtue to govern the world.”
Moral
virtue vs. imperious oppression: that was Paine’s picture. Yet those opposite
poles of the human personality represent not just a conflict between society
and government but within government itself, especially in the modern era.
On the one hand, as President Trump
is demonstrating, government can be a cruel enforcer of political and social
conformity, with punishment for dissident speech and policy differences
reaching into the distant reaches of civil society. But government can also act as a facilitator
of the common good, mobilizing resources to channel society’s generosity and vision,
with protection for the economically vulnerable and stewardship of research in
vast fields of science, engineering, education, and beyond.
It is precisely that second,
beneficial dimension of government that is being dismantled by Trump, his
aides, his Republican members of Congress, and his like-minded Supreme Court
justices. What remains, enhanced, is the most threatening facet of government,
its absolutist power to frighten, arrest, deport, and close down space for the
intricate play of ideas and debate.
In crisis, ironically, the modern
society turns to government, either to blame for failure or to beseach for
help, as in the aftermath of the Texas floods that swept away girls in a
riverside summer camp. Rescues and searches were done by many volunteers, yes,
but calls for future preventive measures were directed at government, not at
private enterprise. It is government that has the power to pool and direct
funds, and thereby amplify the caring of the community. Good government harmonizes
with people’s needs.
Trump’s government, however, is
hostile to people’s needs, both immediate and long-term. He cuts funds for
rescue and repair emergencies such as the Texas flood. He cuts Medicaid funding
for the poor, which will also jeoparize health care for the rural non-poor,
whose hospitals will struggle to survive without the government aid. He cuts
food subsidies for low-income children whose malnutrition will cause lifelong
cognitive impairment.
He ends funding and thereby hobbles
America’s advantage over China in alternative energy and other fields. He
yields his country’s lead in medical advances to others and frightens talented
foreign researchers away. He forfeits his country’s affluent compassion in
addressing famine, conflict, health crises, and other suffering abroad, thereby
diminishing American global influence. He disrupts the future prosperity of the
United States, its credit rating, and the strength of its currency by toying
impulsively with tarriffs, robbing the intricate worldwide trade mechanisms of predictability,
that essential prerequisite for economic investment.
What he leaves intact are the worst
elements of government: its totalitarian impulses, its arbitrariness, and its
bullying penchant for political oppression: Watch, the ground is being laid for
Democratic candidates to be arrested on trumped-up charges, as in Turkey and
other semi-authoritarian systems.
Remarkably, little is being done to
preserve the genius of the Framers’ constitutional system—its separation of
powers—which is being abandoned by the legislative and judicial branches (at
the Supreme Court level), leaving Trump’s executive with exorbitant authority
to ride roughshod over the checks and balances that have kept American
democracy functioning for more than two centuries. That makes the Trumpists and
his acolytes in Congress and the Supreme Court anything but “conservative.”
They are not conserving. They are regressionists, not revolutionaries in Thomas
Paine’s meaning. In 1776, they would have been British loyalists, monarchists.
They are staging a counter-revolution, and the country is letting them get away
with it.
Perhaps understandably, most
Americans have been slow to recognize what is happening. Comparing the early days of Trump with the
early days of Vladimir Putin, a Russian told an American friend several few
months ago, “You guys are caving faster than we did.” That was probably because
the Russians knew what was coming; they’d been there. Americans do not. They do
not yet know how terrifying government can be. Immigrants are learning.
Citizens are next.
What Trump and his followers are
creating fits Thomas Paine’s characteristic of “intolerable” government, in
which “our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by
which we suffer.” Under Trump and his successive followers, the United States
is likely to become less free, less prosperous, less healthy, less safe, less
educated, less just, less stable, less influential, less admired, less
connected with the world, and less happy and comfortable for Americans’
children and grandchildren.
To invert Paine’s dictum, Trump’s
government has become an instrument of our vices, not a restraint. It
represents society’s worst impulses, which coexist with its generous decency.
The question going forward is whether American society, by “uniting our
affections,” can someday remake government into a collective effort of virtue
that reflects whatever caring resides in the civic culture of the country.
