This is an edited version of an article that first appeared in the Times Literary Supplement in the 4th July issue. I’ve cut it a little to focus on the question in the headline. Many thanks to the TLS for allowing me to reproduce the article for subscribers.
Despite our polarized times, there is one thing everyone agrees on: government isn’t working very well.
For the modern right, this is axiomatic. They believe that government is incapable of working as effectively as the private sector because it lacks the right incentives and has been captured by the bureaucratic class of metropolitan graduates that is responsible for all our woes.
This certainty that the state is a force for bad is impermeable to evidence or reason. One can note that much of the modern technology that supplies the profits of our biggest companies – from the internet to touchscreens – was developed thanks to government-funded research.
Or that state health initiatives have saved billions of lives over the past century. Or one can point to the litany of private sector failures when services have been outsourced to them.
It won’t make any difference. Even personal experience to the contrary can be subject to cognitive dissonance – recall the famous sign held aloft by a Tea Party protestor during the Barack Obama years,
“Keep your government hands off our Medicare”. Indeed, the modern radical right is happy to use state apparatus in a highly authoritarian fashion when it suits it to do so, while maintaining that it is incapable of improving society more broadly.
Liberals tend to be more divided on the subject. They agree government should be a force for good and that it has worked in the past, and that it even works now from time to time – the Covid death toll would have been far higher without the rapid funding and distribution of vaccines.
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