Just a brief follow-up to yesterday’s post, informed in part by other diaries and conversations ongoing at DK.
First, thanks to Daily Kos readers for recommending and commenting on “A simple message: ‘Stop pretending’.” I have not posted here in many years. Your interest and engagement in the diary was quite a welcome back, indeed! Wouldn’t know how to measure what I have learned from this community for over a decade. And not sure how I would have endured MSM coverage of American politics without the correctives, information, links, and commentary that this community continues to sustain.
The gist of the diary was this: if you read, view, or hear someone claim that government has always been “the problem,” tell them to stop pretending that THEY and countless other fortunate Americans have never relied on the federal government. Of course I’m not identifying something that countless progressive voices do not know, and not suggesting a larger strategy that activists and writers have not been pursuing for generations. Rather, I was suggesting a specific challenge—“stop pretending”—that would put opinion-makers on the defensive and thus demand a response. Politicians, pundits, and journalists who invoke the myth—or who tag any progressive policy as an unprecedented “intrusion” of the federal government into the marketplace—need to be put on the spot. We need to continue challenging them to prove that they have “made it” or that their industry has thrived without heavy lifting from federal programs, spending, oversight, or regulations. Force them to show us proof, because they can’t. And we need to encourage others to call these folks out in order to help expose this pernicious mythology.
Certainly we all agree that the U.S. government has an obligation to protect citizenship rights, human rights, and access to opportunity. The federal government has ALWAYS helped structure opportunity, but has long favored some populations over others. We know that the federal state has grown slowly and often begrudgingly more responsive (in fits and starts) to the needs and rights of more Americans, in response to their demands for recognition. Yet we also know that the backlash to this assertive federal role has fueled generations of political myth-making about the sanctity of free enterprise, individual rights, and the American “tradition” of “going it alone” (as well as the paradoxical embrace of the “rights” of corporations). My central point is about the political and media venues in which this myth is sustained. The voices who call for “getting government out our lives” and the journalists who are largely unaware of the history of real-life public policies—these people dominate public discourse and they refuse to acknowledge the government’s positive role, or, alternatively, they parcel it off, labeling only certain types of federal actions “interventions” and collapsing them into an amorphous category of “welfare.” One way to force their hand and help change the narrative is it to demand that they acknowledge THEIR deep debt, and the debt of millions of others, to the public sector. Of course many of these voices will continue to deny. But the challenge can help expose their ignorance and highlight the far more complicated legacy of the federal state.
Look forward to discussing this. And thanks again for listening and recommending.
