Folks, what this country needs is a heavy dose of civics and history. I say that as an educator, sure, but also as a citizen. I'm not (ever) surprised when Fox "news" "reporters" and commentators get history wrong, but it's a little disheartening when National Public Radio misreads a critical document in American history in a way that makes the tea-party hysteria sound mainstream and "As American As Apple Pie," as today's Morning Edition segment called it.
I heard it in the car this morning, and seethed all day about it, and now am ignoring hunger pangs to rant about it on Daily Kos. Such are the wages of radio induced road-rage.
Offending quote below the fold.
The NPR segment was about the new Pew survey about anti-government feeling (which I also have problems with, but more on that further down), and explained that anti-government feeling goes all the way back to the revolution and the early founding fathers. They then cite Federalist #1, which begins with this famous (among historians) line:
AFTER an unequivocal experience of the inefficiency of the subsisting federal government, you are called upon to deliberate on a new Constitution for the United States of America.
Without a transcript from Morning Edition, I can only paraphrase: the commentator used it to show that anti-government feeling has been strong since this passage was published in 1787.
Problem is, the author, Publius (a.k.a. Alexander Hamilton) was actually arguing for a stronger government, not a weaker one. He viewed the government under the Articles of Confederation, a weak federation of sovereign states, as unable to provide a coordinated response to attacks, or a coordinated commercial policy, and argued that only a strong union of states acting in concert would survive.
So yes, he was arguing against a government of a particular kind--specificially the weak, decentralized government that had been hastily formed during the Revolution. He was pro-government of the strong, centralized, unified kind.
This brings me to my second grievance, more generally, about the Pew poll and the use of the word "government" in these discussions. What does Pew infer from a poll that shows low favorability ratings for current members of Congress? Why, a lack of faith in government, of course. But in fact, what it expresses is a lack of faith in politicians.
What we need is a clearer idea of what we're talking about here. Government is not the politicians who make laws so much as it is the machinery that runs things people need and want: services, pensions, consumer protections, and so forth. Questions about whether people want government more involved in the economy seem designed to elicit anti-government responses. Better questions to tap into actual feelings about government, such as "should government crack down on fraudulent banking practices" or "should government-operated Medicare be made available to those who want to buy into it?" might elicit completely different responses.
It's not surprising that people being bombarded with misinformation and propaganda have erroneous views about government. Good survey questions should be able to penetrate the fog and find out people's real views, rather than just reinforcing the spin.
I'm not saying we should ignore warning signals about the public mood. But if those signals are wrong, or if they're being misinterpreted, we may respond in the wrong way. Is it possible that we'll never really know how people feel about "government"?