Washington Monthly - September/October 2019 - 117

Denial of State

Americans literally can't believe popular
public programs are public.
By Lee Drutman

P

erhaps no image makes liberals more likely to palm their foreheads than the infamous photo of a Tea Party protestor with a sign declaring, "KEEP GOVERNMENT
OUT OF MY MEDICARE!"
But Medicare is a government program! shouts the frustrated liberal. If only these people knew!
But why don't these people know? For one, most people experience Medicare not as a
government service but as a direct interaction with their doctors. Government is frequently invisible in the process. But it isn't just the government's invisibility that's the
problem. Most people are quite happy with their Medicare coverage, and many Americans have become so convinced that government programs are low quality and inefficient that the idea that a high-quality service could be from the government doesn't compute. They think it must be private.
So explains Amy E. Lerman in a new book, Good Enough for Government Work. It's an
important and well-timed publication. Democratic presidential contenders are now proposing major new government programs, such as Medicare for All (most Democrats),
universal child care (Elizabeth Warren), and a federal jobs guarantee (Cory Booker).
If these programs are to have a chance of becoming law and succeeding, supporters
will need to confront the public reputation crisis head on. To do so, they'll need to break
down its underlying causes and work to change public opinion. Lerman, a professor at
the University of California, Berkeley, has provided a great guide for doing so.
First, the good news: in polls, majorities of Americans say they would like government
to solve public problems and provide more services. But-and this is the key-many of
these same people also think government is inefficient and wasteful. And so while in
theory they'd prefer a government solution, in practice they don't have faith that government can get it done.
This mind-set is the product of more than four decades of undifferentiated government bashing. It began in the 1970s and '80s as a project of the political right, when
undermining faith in government was a way for businesses to shut down economic
regulations and for socially conservative whites to weaken civil rights programs. "The
nine most terrifying words in the English language are: 'I'm from the government and
I'm here to help,' " quipped Ronald Reagan. The credibility of thousands of public servants vanished.
Bill Clinton picked up the baton and, to switch metaphors, dug the knife in deeper. In
his 1993 State of the Union address, he told Americans, "It is not enough simply to cut
government; we have to rethink the whole way it works. . . . The real engine of economic
growth in this country is the private sector." Democrats still remain more positive about
the potential competence of government. But a generation of anti-government rhetoric
solidified this perspective on both sides.

Good Enough for Government
Work: The Public Reputation
Crisis in America (And What
We Can Do to Fix It)
by Amy E. Lerman
University of Chicago Press, 304 pp.

C

hanging these attitudes won't be easy. We are all prone to motivated reasoning.
We see what we expect to see, and most Americans now expect to see waste and
inefficiency in the public sector. Take the Department of Veterans Affairs. As documented in these pages (see, for example, Alicia Mundy, "The VA Isn't Broken, Yet,"
March/April/May 2016), the VA health care system is-by most metrics-faster, more
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