Republican voters may rejoice this Christmas as they contemplate the harvest they have sowed on the winds of autumn. I’m sure many of them have read the Old Testament prophet Hosea, who warned that those who sow the wind reap the whirlwind, in this case the political freak show opening on Inauguration Day. Trump’s cabinet already resembles a Christmas fruit cake: the rare Hesgeth chokecherry, the McMahon apple for the teachers, RFK Jr.’s worm-eaten crab-apple, the Kristi Noem Dalmatian bitter wild cherry, Florida citrus varietals such as Rubio lemon and DeSantis lime, the Musk-scented Soursap, and assorted melon heads. Like the Supreme Court and Congressional leadership, the Cabinet comprises an often corrupt crew of incompetents and wing-nuts armed with a mandate to decimate the Federal government.
Since Fox News and radio’s ranting heads cast government as the fifth horseman of the apocalypse, Americans have lost sight of what government means, what it can and cannot do, and what it does and does not do. Too many have swallowed the lie that government is an irredeemable blight on a nation rather than the embodiment of that nation’s values and aspirations. Government is not an abstract blueprint on an erasable drawing board where we can chop off a box here and delete thousands of lines there. Cuts to the federal government mean cuts to federal services: Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, breakfast programs and food stamps. Delays of tax refunds, levee repairs, relief efforts, Coast Guard rescues, veterans’ benefits, mail delivery, and road and bridge repairs. Cuts to V.A. hospitals, forest fire crews, and breakfast programs. Government programs are matters of life and death. Losing them means children crying all night from hunger or their parents failing to survive or recover from long-term disabilities, cars crashing on decrepit bridges and homes devastated by flood, wind, and fire.
Government is by nature a mess, slow-moving and bureaucratic. It is corrupt because it is run by human beings. It makes mistakes. It wastes money because human beings waste money and wrongfully allocate it and siphon it off. It can always be improved. Sometimes inept candidates run against loathsome and destructive candidates and we hold our noses and vote for the lesser evil. Yet the nation’s founders—so often invoked in utter ignorance by Libertarians, Moms of Liberty, Christian nationalists, , and capital “P” Patriots—devoutly believed in the mission of the federal government to provide a viable life for the greatest number of citizens.
And despite the endless inefficiencies and misjudgements and boondoggles, government—our federal government—can and does work. Biden’s Infrastructure Act provides over one trillion dollars that represent jobs, money spent on construction equipment and materials, and infusions of cash into local economies. It is restoring damaged bridges, highways, water supplies, internet access, air travel, and mass transit. Will some of it be misspent? Inevitably. Could state governments even begin a project of this scope? Never. It has never happened. Infrastructure is as vital to society as blood vessels and muscles to each of us. That’s why I sort of feel about the U.S. government the way Rudyard Kipling’s narrator felt about Gunga Din in the famous poem: “Though I’ve belted you and flayed you,/By the livin’ Gawd that made you,/You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din!”.
We live in a complex, utterly inter-dependent global system. Weakening the central hub of a complex, integrated system when it is already under immense stress is nihilistic derangement. The anti-government Republican spree has no end-game. The federal government provides the table at which programs vital to society can be negotiated, debated, and improved. To fold up the table is to leave America hanging. Without strong leadership at the national level, environmental controls and basic rights, infrastructure and food supply, medical care and education, housing and law, and a semblance of social order, all go out the window. That is not simply an over-heated historical perspective. It is precisely the fear that haunts China, Russia, and dozens of smaller nations with seething internal divisions. It is the Achilles heel of the nation-state system. And the Republican agenda is gleefully set on taking apart the basic fabric of Constitutional government.
Government cannot give everyone everything they want. Government exists as a function of regulation and the consideration of diverse, often contending, interests. James Madison’s notes from the June 6 session of 1787’s Constitutional Convention address the then generally held opinion that small states and political units are more liable to corruption than larger ones because smaller ones were more susceptible to local control by narrow interests. The federal government would wield power more equitably because each state would have to modify its own interests to accord with a shared national perspective. This idea informed the Convention’s approach to key issues such as national defense, the federal balance of powers, and interstate commerce along the river ways. That is why the so-called “literalist” arguments of the current Supreme Court are so absurd: Constitutional government is by nature, from its first conception, flexible and adaptive. The Republican party is attacking the principles that animated the Constitutional Convention with nothing to offer in their place other than the feudal corruption of gerrymandered state legislatures dominated by local oligarchs. As Hosea said about the whirlwind: “It hath no stalk; the bud shall yield no meal.” (Hosea 9.7).
We tend to focus our discontent on what pisses us off. Relatively minor irritations gnaw at us and we’re often ready to go to war over a lamb without realizing we stand to lose the whole flock. Government provides the unseen glue that holds things together. Behind every “self-made” business person are federal small business loans and federal water projects crucial to farms, ranches, power plants, mining operations, and local populations. Then there are massive (and certainly questionable) federal subsidies for high tech, agriculture, mining, big oil, and pharma. Few voters are aware of the transfer of tax moneys from the richer mostly “blue” states to the poorer mostly “red” states in an ironically odd form of interstate socialism. Products move on federally funded and administered interstate highways and river ways. For all the holes in health care there’s still Medicaid, Medicare, and Obama-care.
The hard descent has already begun. Since 2010, 130 rural hospitals have closed in the U.S. while more than 700 face closure out of a total of only 1800. Shortages of doctors, nurses, tech staff, and equipment afflict most of them. Increasingly, health care is in the hands of corporate monopolies whose dictates about the bottom line trickle down into reduced services. According to the CIA’s web-site, the U.S. currently ranks 62nd in maternal fatality rates among 186 countries, a shade worse than the West Bank and Gaza Strip and significantly worse than Tadjikistan and Oman. Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress are already planning to cut Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and affordable health insurance, sort of a scatter-shot policy of killing off the poor.
The overturning of Roe vs. Wade has cost women their lives because medical staff were afraid to treat their complications lest they be accused of performing abortions. Infant mortality in Texas, already the worst place in the developed world for maternal mortality, has risen dramatically since their anti abortion law went into effect in September, 2021. Meanwhile, ob-gyn doctors are leaving Texas because it has become impossible to provide safe medical care to pregnant women under the 2021 law. And in the past several years, starting with the date at which each of 14 states banned abortions, an estimated 520,000 women have been raped in those states resulting in almost 65,000 pregnancies. The horror of the larger number, a minuscule fraction of which would be horrific, is intensified by the fact that each of those 65,000 women are in effect being forced to bear their rapist’s child.
That’s the tip of the iceberg lying in wait for the ship of state, a fraction of the suffering and social disaster promised by the Republican agenda and back-room machinations of Project 2025 and religious extremists.
It is a profound failure to mistake political tantrum for protest, the thrill of mindless destruction for rebuilding and renewal, and a self-obsessed demagogue for political leadership. When nihilism is a percolating creative pocket within a stable or repressive society it can provoke creativity and substantive political change. But when it becomes the reigning principle, when government is torn down under the auspices of corporate pigs who never leave the feeding trough and garish political grotesques who dance to their tune, then the gears of “the engine of survival” (Leonard Cohen) grind to a halt. And if you trash national government now because things aren’t quite to your liking, well baby, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
To help NRDC stop Project 2025, click here to sign the petition.
COMMENTS