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Big and Small Doesn't Say It AllSeptember 11, 2005 Big government GOOD Uh, what's wrong with this list? Does the either/orneriness of it bother you the way it does me? Like where do you vote for, say, "A government that's big enough to effectively carry out its constitutional duties and enforce the Bill of Rights, tolerant enough to stay out of my private life, smart enough not to give carte blanche and lifetime tenure to incompetents and hacks, and small enough to welcome participation by a wide array of citizens"? "Big government" and "small government" show up in so many political speeches, not to mention press reports and discussions of same, that it may come as a jolt to realize that hardly anyone is really talking about "big" or "small." When mercantile Republicans say, "Big government BAD, small government GOOD," they mean that they want a government that's too small to enforce civil rights laws, safety standards, and environmental-protection laws -- you know, the kind of stuff that adversely impacts the bottom line -- but that's big enough to go to war to enforce their right to other countries' resources. Liberals and progressives too often react with the opposite, as if "big government" were synonymous with support for civil rights, education, the environment, the arts, the sciences, and the safety net. Got news for y'all . . . I came of age politically in the late 1960s and early '70s. The federal government was screwing up in some pretty conspicuous ways, like the war on Indochina and good old Watergate, but it was also supporting the rights of people of color, women, and workers, among others. It wasn't talking or acting like a wholly owned subsidiary of the Fortune 500 or Creationists United. The politicians in office in those days, both the Democrats and the Republicans, had been shaped by the Depression and the New Deal, and so had most of the electorate. Bashing "big government" elicited a considerably more critical response than it does these days. In the still-cresting political and economic wake of Hurricane Katrina, there are encouraging signs that the days of indiscriminate bashing may be coming to an end. The New Deal taught a generation of USians that government could bail out the republic when the economic levees were breached; Hurricane Katrina is opening our eyes to what a gutted, hamstrung, ineptly led government can't do when disaster strikes. Maybe the lesson has to be relearned every generation or so: When it comes to safeguarding democratic and republican principles (small "d," small "r") principles, "market forces" are about as trustworthy as a hurricane. And government -- which is to say the whole collective bunch of us -- offers our only hope of keeping those forces under control. Think of government as a network of levees. If you let it fall apart, who are you gonna call when the big one hits?
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