The Price of Civilization_ Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity - Jeffrey D. Sachs [19]
CHAPTER 4.
Washington’s Retreat from Public Purpose
How did we get into the dreadful situation in which the federal government is in the lap of the corporate lobby? Why has the federal government stopped providing the public goods that Americans need to remain globally competitive in a fair and sustainable society? These are the puzzles we must solve in order to move forward. In the next four chapters we’ll look at the role of globalization, domestic politics, social change, and even the media as contributors to this debacle. We’ll see that many powerful currents have flowed together to tilt our politics away from the public good to special interests. As society understands what has happened, it will be in a position to turn the country toward its true democratic values once again.
From the New Deal to the War on Poverty
For roughly three decades, from the New Deal of the mid-1930s to the War on Poverty of the mid-1960s, the federal government steered the national economy as a relatively trusted and respected instrument of democratic power. The federal government led America through depression, war, and peacetime boom. The federal government conceived and financed the national highway system and the national power grid. Science and technology (S&T) initiatives created in Washington helped launch several of the most important technologies of the past half century: nuclear power, satellites, computers, the Internet, and much more. The federal government fought poverty and exclusion, culminating in the 1960s in Medicare for the elderly and civil rights legislation on behalf of minorities, women, and the disabled. When necessary, as in World War II, the government mobilized industry, putting it at the service of the nation. More often, it partnered effectively with industry in starting new industries (such as computers and the Internet) or expanding them (such as aviation and satellites). There was no question, however, about who was in the lead of the relationship.
Then, after three decades of active economic leadership, Washington gradually stopped steering. The public’s support for collective action through federal policy making dissipated. The government stopped steering just as America faced growing challenges in the forms of globalization, the ecological crisis, and the massive rise of immigration. During the 1980s and onward, the instruments of federal power were increasingly handed over to vested corporate interests to be used for private advantage. The new corporatocracy was under way. And the economy, now guided by narrow interests, quickly became divided, unstable, and ultimately vulnerable to the kind of collapse that ensued in 2008.
The overarching reversal of Washington’s role, from defender of the common man to the enabler of narrow interests, is the most important political change during the eight decades since the Great Depression in the 1930s. It is eye-opening today to recall the clarion words of Franklin D. Roosevelt in his second inaugural address, as he ushered in the era of government leadership in the economy:
[G]overnment [is] the instrument of our united purpose to solve for the individual the ever-rising problems of a complex civilization. Repeated attempts at their solution without the aid of government had left us baffled and bewildered.1
Those sentiments are no longer recognizable. America had already begun to change fundamentally