When Limited Government Meets Unlimited Expectations
Recent poll numbers suggest Joe Biden’s presidency is in trouble. Fifty-six percent disapprove of his handling of the economy and 48 percent disapprove of his handling of COVID 19. Fifty six percent think he’s been incompetent in running the government. Congress fares even worse, with its approval rating regularly at or below 20 percent. Joe Biden and Congress are not alone. Almost every president in recent decades has faced growing dissatisfaction with his performance in office and satisfaction “with the way things are going” in the country has been below fifty percent for the past 15 years, reaching just 25 percent late last year.
Are the Executive Branch and Congress just forever plagued with incompetence? Is democracy on its last legs? Fifty-three percent of Americans are “not too” or “not at all” satisfied with the way democracy is working, and 34 percent now think violence against the government can be justified, up from 16 percent in 2010.
Yet, at the same time, the unemployment rate dropped by year’s end to 4.2 percent from 6.3 percent last January. Seventy-two percent of Americans 12 and older are now fully vaccinated – and all those over 5 can be if they or their parents so choose. Consumers are spending again and the world is mostly at peace. So why are Americans so down on democracy?
Tom Nichols tackles this conundrum in Our Worst Enemy: The Assault from Within on Modern Democracy. “Democracy is a set of behaviors and beliefs that make institutions work, not a machine that grants wishes,” he reminds us. In short, he argues, we’ve demanded far more from government than is reasonable. This should put democracy’s assumed failings into perspective.
The Constitution was designed to preserve liberty, not grant everyone a nice home, a good living and an entertaining lifestyle. To preserve the freedom we need to achieve these desired ends, the Constitution gives the federal government limited powers. It’s charged with meeting core needs not satisfying ever-escalating wants. Its limited powers can often tackle complex problems but not always solve them, especially where the solution depends on what we do as private citizens. We get angry at Biden’s “mismanagement” of COVID 19, yet he cannot require universal vaccination and mask wearing, stop the virus from mutating or quickly produce the means to stop every strain in its tracks. Most of the nation’s problems – everything from racial animosity to poor education to law-wage jobs to local law enforcement are not amenable to easy solutions, and most Americans and their state governments would resist federal dictates anyway.
Democratic government is also slow, by design. Roads, rails and bridges are technical problems the national government can do something about, but look how long it took even to enact an infrastructure package. Though we rage against that slowness, we’d hate the alternative. If you want speed in dealing with crime, go to Saudi Arabia, where arrest usually means conviction and the sentence is swiftly carried out. If you want laws passed quickly, go to Russia where debate, party politics, free elections and public opinion rarely stand in the way of what Putin wants to do. If you want faster control of the pandemic, go to China where they lock down entire cities and drag those who don’t stay home off the streets.
In Nichols’s view, dissatisfaction with democracy rests significantly on Americans’ rising expectations and decades of politically driven demands upon and anger against government. As he puts it: “Decades of constant complaint and grievance, regularly aired in the midst of continual improvement in living standards by almost every measure, have finally taken their toll.” Less than a century ago, there was no Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment insurance, child labor and minimum wage laws and a host of other things we now expect and take for granted. The history of American democracy is in large part a history of ever-rising expectations. Yet Americans’ demands can easily outrun government’s ability to meet and pay for them. That does not stop the demands, and the gap between them and what we expect inevitably disappoints.
Democracy only works when citizens understand what government is designed to do, how it works, and practice the essential civic virtues of tolerance, compromise, cooperation, trust and sacrifice for the common good. We haven’t witnessed a great deal of any of these at the national level for some time.
“There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America.” – Bill Clinton has said. But if what is wrong is that Americans no longer believe there is anything right, where does the faith in democracy and the energy for fixing what is wrong come from? Or, as Nichols puts is: “In a liberal democracy, citizens are the masters of their fate. If we believe democracy has failed us, we should first ask ourselves whether we have failed the test of democracy.”
Photo Credit: Brett Jordon - unsplash.com
