Government fails, long live government! The rise of 'failurism'.

AuthorPayne, James L.
PositionColumn

Recent decades have not been kind to believers in big government. At the beginning of the modern era, they wrote utopian novels about how society would be excellently managed when government took over everything. Or they drafted manifestos that implicitly assumed that the State (Marx capitalized it) had the ability to redeem mankind once the right people were put in charge. A handful of conservatives and libertarians questioned this enthusiasm, but they were ignored. Mainstream opinion assumed that government was an effective and responsible problem-solving machine. The result has been big government that fitfully grows bigger each decade.

In the early days of this growth, there was little analysis of the actual outcomes of government policies. Politicians promised solutions, programs were enacted, and both the politicians and the public simply assumed that the programs "worked." The New Deal exemplified this credulity. Most voters of the day believed that Franklin Roosevelt's policies were fighting the Great Depression and kept voting for him on that basis. Indeed, many historians, journalists, and public-school teachers subsequently absorbed this interpretation. For them, "Roosevelt got us out of the Depression" became a cliche.

More recently, this complacency about policy outcomes has begun to dissolve. University-based historians, economists, and political scientists regularly analyze public policies; a host of policy-oriented think tanks have appeared; whistleblowers who report failings in government agencies are now usually protected; governmental units, including the Government Accountability Office, the Congressional Research Service, and the inspectors general in the various departments have become more aggressive in reporting dysfunctions in government programs.

The findings of this vast policy-evaluation industry have been rather consistently unflattering to government. Report after report has found that government programs don't work the way they should and are riddled with inefficiencies and harmful side effects. For example, economists' closer look at the 1930s now reveals that Roosevelt's policies, far from fixing the economic slump, actually made it worse (Roose 1954; Anderson 1980; Best 1991; Hall and Ferguson 1998; Smiley 2003; Higgs 2006; Shlaes 2008).

In addition to the scholars, the news media have begun taking an interest in policy and policy scandals, feeding the public a steady diet of miscues: the savings-and-loan bailout, Hurricane Katrina cock-ups, endemic incompetence of the Veterans Administration, corruption and ineptitude in the Secret Service, and so on.

This tide of negative information has produced a decline in public confidence in government, a decline that has strongly impacted left-leaning intellectuals. They no longer turn out utopian novellas and optimistic manifestos. In a trend that became noticeable in the 1990s, they instead produce volumes that severely criticize government. These works of censure are remarkable in one odd respect, however: the authors remain steadfastly loyal to big government and suggest no significant reduction in its scope.

This stance is puzzling because the normal approach to failure is to distance ourselves from the source of the disappointment. If an umbrella or a bicycle or a restaurant performs poorly, we say that poor performance is a reason to use it less. The intellectuals of the moderate left who are critical of government do not adopt this stance. Indeed, most of them make a point of firmly rejecting the limited-government stance taken by conservatives and libertarians. Their position is: government fails, and we can expect more failure in the future, but we must rely on it as much as ever. I have taken to calling this stance "failurism." Here is a sampling of works in this genre (given in chronological order of publication):

E. J. Dionne Jr., Why Americans Hate Politics (1991)

Philip K. Howard, The Death of Common Sense: How Law Is Suffocating America (1994)

Jonathan Rauch, Demosclerosis: The Silent Killer of American Government (1994)

Jonathan Rauch, Government's End: Why Washington Stopped Working (revised edition of Demosclerosis) (1999)

Steven M. Gillon, "That's Not What We Meant to Do": Reform and Its Unintended Consequences in Twentieth-Century America (2000)

Derek Bok, The Trouble with Government (2001)

Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track (2006)

Richard A. Clarke, Tour Government Failed You: Breaking the Cycle of National Security Disasters (2008)

Paul C. Light, A Government III Executed: The Decline of the Federal Service and How to Reverse It (2008)

Lawrence Lessig, Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress--and a Plan to Stop It (2012)

Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, It's Even Worse than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism (2012)

John J. Dilulio Jr., Bring Back the Bureaucrats: Why More Federal Workers Will Lead to Better (and Smaller!) Government (2014)

Peter H. Schuck, Why Government Fails so Often and How It Can Do Better (2014)

We may smile at the contradiction that failurism represents, but we should not take it lightly. The failurists are not deviants. The American public in general partakes in the failurist mindset. It is disappointed with how government functions, but, like these writers, it wants government to keep trying to fix things. For example, the public witnessed the month-by-month scandal of the clumsy, dysfunctional rollout of Obamacare, but this failure did not lead the public to conclude that government ought to be less involved in health care. Most people still want government deeply involved in regulating and funding it.

Failure All over the Map

One feature of failurism is its highly diffuse character. The feeling that government fails is deep, but there is no consensus on what this failure consists of. In Republic, Lost, Lawrence Lessig says that "the mess that is our government today" is caused by the corruption of money, especially in election campaigns (2014, 1). Congressional scholars Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, writing in It's Even Worse Than It Looks (2012), believe the cause of "dysfunctional politics" lies in adversarial political parties. Philip Howard, in The Death of Common Sense, thinks that the problem is the web of mindless, niggling government regulation that "crushes our goals and deadens our spirits" (1994, 183). Jonathan Rauch, in Government's End, says the problem is the growth of special interests that has turned government into "a large, incoherent, often incomprehensible mass" (1999, 18). In Bring Back the Bureaucrats, John Dilulio charges the American government with becoming "deeply dysfunctional" mainly because private contractors implement government programs (2014...

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