American Amnesia, by Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson
American Amnesia, by Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson
By MATTHEW BISHOP, APRIL 6, 2016, original
AMERICAN AMNESIA
How the War on Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Prosper
By Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson
455 pp. Simon & Schuster. $28.
If Bernie Sanders were a book by two leading politics professors, it would be American Amnesia. This is the story of how government helped make America great, how the enthusiasm for bashing government is behind its current malaise and how a return to effective government is the answer the nation is looking for.
How America came to forget about the merits of good government, and the price now being paid, is the meat of “American Amnesia,” the third book by Jacob S. Hacker (Yale) and Paul Pierson (Berkeley), whom Bill Moyers calls the “Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson of political science.” According to these academic detectives, America’s amnesia is no accident. The country has been brainwashed by a powerful alliance of forces hostile to government: big business, especially Wall Street, spending unparalleled lobbying dollars to advance its narrow self-interest; a new wealthy elite propagating wrongheaded Ayn Randian notions that free markets are always good and government always bad; and a Republican Party using a strategy of attacking and weakening government as a way to win more power for itself.
You don’t need to Feel the Bern to take this book seriously. The unexpected popularity of both the senator from Vermont and Donald Trump in this year’s primaries arguably reflects their tapping into widespread anger toward the American establishment. American Amnesia provides chapter and verse on why the public has good reason to be angry.
For the country’s first 200 years, Americans combined healthy skepticism about government with an acceptance of its necessity. Today conservatives, in particular, have “forgotten” that balanced view. Woodrow Wilson, No.?1 on Glenn Beck’s list of “Top 10 Bastards of All Time” (above Hitler, Pontius Pilate, Pol Pot), actually ushered in valuable improvements in government. His innovations — the Federal Reserve and income tax, trustbusting the robber barons — paid off handsomely. By the 1950s, America was leading the world across a “Great Divide” separating centuries of “slow growth, poor health and anemic technological progress” from “hitherto undreamed-of material comfort and seemingly limitless economic potential.”
America has always had freewheeling entrepreneurial capitalists. Hacker and Pierson argue persuasively that the 20th-century change that enabled them to create extraordinary wealth for all was “effective governance” — reflected in such crucial foundations of a “mixed economy” as better physical infrastructure, health care and education for the masses, and generous funding for “blue skies research” that made possible everything from antibiotics to the Internet.
As recently as the 1950s, government was broadly appreciated by Americans. In his first State of the Union address, the Republican president Dwight Eisenhower mentioned “government” nearly 40 times, almost always positively. Such sentiments were even shared by business. The bosses of great companies, like Kodak and General Motors, worked closely with government through the Committee for Economic Development to solve the country’s most pressing problems. Yet by the 1980s, Ronald Reagan was memorably saying the “most terrifying words” in the English language were “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” As the public mood changed, the Democrats soon joined in, though without wholly embracing the Republican philosophy. In his first State of the Union, Bill Clinton mentioned government only around half as often as Eisenhower, mostly negatively.
Clinton felt he had to declare that “the era of big government is over” — even though it had already shrunk considerably: By 1989 there was only one federal government worker for every 110 Americans, compared with one for 78 in Eisenhower’s day (and around one for 150 today). Now America is paying the price for beating up its government, Hacker and Pierson argue. It is sliding down international rankings of social progress that it used to top, in areas like public health and education. America ranks only 25th in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development for the share of 3-year-olds in early childhood education, for example.
So why did America turn against government? With their previous book, Winner-Take-All Politics, Hacker and Pierson won rave reviews for explaining why inequality has risen faster in America than in any other rich country and how a strategy started by conservative foundations and rich libertarians to limit and weaken government paid off spectacularly. This new book rehashes enough of that analysis to give readers not amnesia but déjà vu. It also contains grim new evidence, especially about the growing lobbying and legal influence of the Business Roundtable and United States Chamber of Commerce. Hacker and Pierson argue that “no private organization in the history of American politics has assembled anything comparable in scope or capacity to today’s Chamber of Commerce.”
Hacker and Pierson highlight three main prongs of the Republican attack: “Denounce crony capitalism” while catering to narrow business interests; “Feed political dysfunction and win by railing against it”; and “Undermine the capacity of government to perform its vital functions” and at the same time “decry a bungling and corrupt public sector.”
Still, the authors are suffering their own amnesia about the troubled state of the economy and American business during the 1970s, which is when the public fell out of love with government. This gets only a few pages, with observations like “the decade was not the economic wasteland it is often remembered as today.” Yet experiencing stagflation and other economic troubles for the first time in the era of mass prosperity provided ample reason for Americans to question the prevailing mixed-economy orthodoxy and ask whether government was overreaching.
What’s more, for all that bashing, government has become the dominant American political narrative, and for all the Randian resources deployed by the Koch brothers and others, antigovernment forces have been unable to stop the current Democratic president from introducing a huge expansion of government in health care, and then getting re-elected. The authors also bury near the end their surprising belief that despite everything, as a society, “we really have never had it so good.”
Then there is the excessive nostalgia for the heyday of trade unionism. While Hacker and Pierson acknowledge the negative role played by teachers unions in blocking education reforms that might have kept America higher in those international performance rankings, that fact gets barely one sentence. And as for Wall Street, they are too one-sided the other way. Though Wall Street deserves much blame for the crash of 2008 and the subsequent Great Recession, the financial sector is not all a giant rip-off. Many of its innovations over the past 50 years have been adopted around the world because they can yield significant economic benefits.
As for solutions, Hacker and Pierson say “there is no magic bullet.” They offer several sensible suggestions — further limit the use of filibusters in the Senate; institute campaign finance reform; make it easier for people to vote; introduce regulatory reform to tackle today’s robber barons in finance, energy and health care. Yet their big call is for a new, broad-based movement to restore America’s love for effective government — the modern successor to the Progressives of a century ago.
Is this realistic? There are a few hopeful straws in the wind. The popularity of Bernie Sanders with younger voters hints at a generational change in attitudes. Some enlightened business leaders — Bill Gates, Howard Schultz, Marc Benioff — are emerging as a different sort of role models, on issues like inequality, the treatment of veterans and gay rights. Perhaps the unexpected strength of Donald Trump will provide a wake-up call — if it isn’t already too late — to the Republican establishment, reminding it that if all you ever do is bash government, you risk creating a vacuum that may be filled by something you will really want to forget.