In his column today, Bob Herbert writes,

When exactly was it that the U.S. became a can’t-do society? It wasn’t at the very beginning when 13 ragamuffin colonies went to war against the world’s mightiest empire. It wasn’t during World War II when Japan and Nazi Germany had to be fought simultaneously. It wasn’t in the postwar period that gave us the Marshall Plan and a robust G.I. Bill and the interstate highway system and the space program and the civil rights movement and the women’s movement and the greatest society the world had ever known.

When was it?

Now we can’t even lift New Orleans off its knees.

Welcome to the 28th year since the Reagan Revolution.

I don’t blame Reagan entirely for our state of learned helplessness, mind you. And Bob Herbert wasn’t writing exclusively about government. But by persuading people that “government is the problem” I think the Reaganites caused a shift in how Americans understood government. And this put the nation on the road to learned helplessness.

Even as late as the 1960s, most working- and middle-class white Americans (I realize African Americans had a different experience of things) felt that the government was theirs. Certainly people complained that Washington did plenty of boneheaded things, but still there was a belief that We, the People could accomplish great things by means of government. This may in part have been a legacy of FDR, who had a gift for evoking a “we’re all in this together” sentiment among America’s ordinary citizens.

But today, people treat and speak of “the government” as if Washington DC were occupied by space aliens taking orders from Mars, and there’s nothing we can do about it. Government can’t, or won’t, respond to the needs and concerns of ordinary Americans, and ordinary Americans no longer expect anything from government.

Thanks loads, Ronnie.

I’ve given this speech before, but I still think it’s critical that ordinary citizens be reconnected to the idea that government is “of the people, by the people, for the people.” It’s ours. It’s us. There’s nothing wrong with using government to solve problems that are not being solved by other means.

There’s a lot government cannot do. But, dammit, there’s a lot it can do, if people have the will and the leadership to see it done.

On a sorta kinda related note … yesterday David Brooks wrote one of his most bone-headed columns ever. I wanted to respond to it yesterday but was busy fighting off Shugden culties.

In “The Coming Activist Age,” Brooks said “periods of great governmental change have often been periods of conservative rule.” Really? Change? Conservative rule? Um, Coolidge? Hoover? Nope, can’t be. But lo, Brooks’s main example was Theodore Roosevelt.

You might disagree with TR’s ideas about foreign policy, but in the context of his times TR’s domestic policies made him one of the purest progressives who ever sat in the Oval Office. And after he left the White House he went further Left. His “New Nationalism” speech is the foundation of modern American liberalism.

Apparently John McCain is going around saying he wants to be the new Theodore Roosevelt. A Times letter writer responded,

Is John McCain aware that Theodore Roosevelt was not a conservative? On virtually every domestic issue — race relations, the environment, the role of government in the economy — T.R. was what today would be labeled a robust liberal, and the leading conservatives of his day, like Mark Hanna, hated and feared him.

There’s nothing of TR in McCain, I say.

One more interesting read — Sasha Abramsky, “Putting ignorance on a pedestal.”