You never know what’s going to grab a kid’s attention, but I actually think I got interested in politics because I liked the buttons and bumper stickers. Campaign swag seemed fun to me. Whatever started it, I became kind of a politics nerd, and it has stuck.
I wrote a letter to the president when I was 9 – about a tax policy, of all things – and I worked on a presidential campaign when I was 19. I spent four years in my 20s working on Capitol Hill, and in my 30s, I was a political journalist.
This personal history is relevant only to underscore this point: I believe in government. A lot of people don’t these days. Yes, I’ve learned well its limitations and failures, but I know that smart public policy can change lives in this country and around the world.
Here’s a great example: When the child tax credit was hiked during the COVID pandemic – you know, to offset families’ lost income – there was a dramatic decline in childhood poverty. Millions of kids’ lives were changed for the better. But now that achievement of government is gone. In fact, child poverty in our country doubled in 2022, despite a growing economy and historically low joblessness. Why? Because of united Republican opposition to the child tax credit in the U.S. Senate, where the federal deficit is suddenly a big issue – which Republican senators didn’t care about, you know, during the Trump presidency, when they gave multi-billion-dollar tax cuts to the wealthy and corporations.
Yes, the deficit matters, and yes, the tax credit could cost an estimated $100 billion a year. That’s a lot of money, but get this: It would have generated $1 trillion in societal benefits — in better earnings and improved health outcomes for generations ahead, as well as from reduced costs related to criminal justice. Can you imagine a business that would turn away from a 1,000 percent return on investment? Our government did.
So it’s the pose of fiscal conservatism that is consigning millions of children in America to a life of poverty. You could say that it was a dispute over policy, but there was hardly even a pretense of that in the fight that paralyzed the U.S. House for weeks. That was triggered by Republican members of Congress who want to shut down the government rather than compromise on issues with Democrats. Now, with a conservative hard-liner as the new Speaker of the House – an architect of the fraudulent effort to overturn the 2020 election – it’s likely that we’re going to see more dysfunction in Washington.
This is how a democracy can die: through misuse and abuse of power that leads citizens to lose any confidence in its functioning. And that, it turns out, is what most people think. A new report from the Pew Research Center finds that only 4 percent of U.S. adults think the political system is working very well, and just 16 percent say they trust the federal government at least most of the time. Only one in 10 Americans say they feel hopeful when they think of politics. I have more than a few friends who are ready to give up – to quit voting and swear off paying attention to the news, or maybe move to another country.
This anti-government attitude can be debilitating for a nation – because in a democracy, we are the government. And whether you are a progressive or a conservative, you cannot help but be shaken by the direction of American politics over the past four decades or so. The blame is not equally shared; it’s the far-right crowd that has taken over the party of Lincoln that is telling people that government doesn’t work, and showing them that on their watch, at least, that’s true.
It's not only the politicians’ fault, certainly. The half-truths that drew millions of listeners to talk radio in the 1990s, and the distortions since then of FOX News, which over time turned into outright lies aired nightly into millions of homes, have supported a view that government can’t be trusted — and have also pushed into prominence politicians who made that slander so.
So what should we do? Well, as somebody who believes our political system can work, I have to say that the solution to democracy’s problems is, of course, more democracy: We need to work harder for the causes we care about, and accept that sometimes the drive for the perfect can be the enemy of the good. We need to convince our fellow citizens that an investment of time and effort in supporting good candidates and sensible policies will eventually pay off. It’s more engagement, not retreat, that will restore our government’s efficacy and our citizens’ pride.
So I seem to not be cured yet of my devotion to American democracy. It’s not buttons and stickers, though – it’s evidence that government has worked, and can again. If you share that view, I hope you will cling to it in the days or months or even years ahead when our government may well fail for a while. It can still work. Keep hope alive.
Rex Smith, the co-host of The Media Project on WAMC, is the former editor of the Times Union of Albany and The Record in Troy. His weekly digital report, The Upstate American, is published by Substack.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.