The results of this week's elections have led to a good deal of speculation in the press about the repudiation of the hard right among the American electorate. Democrat Terry McAuliffe's victory over Tea Party-backed Ken Cuccinelli in the Virginia gubernatorial race and Republican Governor Chris Christie's impressive reelection win in heavily Democratic New Jersey have both been interpreted as evidence of the broader appeal of moderates in both parties. If true, this would be a welcome development, particularly on the Republican side of the ledger, where the obstructionist winner-take-all attitude of the extreme right has rendered the United States virtually ungovernable and nearly brought the country to ruin on two occasions within the past two years.
President Obama and other political leaders on both sides have frequently cited the economic damage that this "crisis governing" has wrought to our economy. But equally significant -- particularly for those of us who favor more activist social and economic policies -- is the damage done to government itself, and by extension, to our democracy.
Indeed, the American people's faith in government, especially Congress, is at an all-time low. Of all the issues confronting liberals or progressives today it is this issue, faith in government, that is perhaps the most important. For without the support of the broad electorate it will be impossible for Congress and the executive to move forward on a whole range of issues.
Eighty years ago, in the midst of an even worse economic crisis, Franklin Roosevelt won the support of the American people by asking them "to find through government the instrument of our united purpose to solve for the individual the ever-rising problems of a complex civilization." Moreover, he insisted that the failed non-governmental attempts to meet the crisis brought on by the financial collapse of 1929-1932 left the American people "baffled and bewildered," without the means to fashion "practical controls over blind economic forces and blindly selfish men."
But in the wake of the many programs that Congress and the president put in place to meet the crisis from 1933 on, the people began to sense the truth "that democratic government has innate capacity to protect its people against disasters once considered inevitable, to solve problems once considered unsolvable. We would not admit", he continued, "that we could not find a way to master economic epidemics just as, after centuries of fatalistic suffering, we had found a way to master epidemics of disease."
In making this argument, FDR insisted that the American people were not discovering a wholly new truth, but were simply "writing a new chapter in our book of self-government."
Our history, then, tells us that it is possible for us to meet the challenges before us -- but only if we are willing, as FDR advised, "to find through government the instrument of our united purpose."
On November 8-9, the Roosevelt Institute and the Clinton Institute for American Studies at University College Dublin will hold a major international conference entitled Progressivism in America: Past, Present and Future. Featuring such noted figures as Nobel Laureate and Roosevelt Institute Chief Economist Joseph Stiglitz, journalists like E.J. Dionne and Jonathan Alter, and historians such as Alan Brinkley and Ellen Chesler, the conference seeks to address today's policy challenges with solutions grounded in and inspired by the legacy of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt -- including the all-important realization, as FDR remarked years ago -- that "government is competent when all who compose it work as trustees for the whole people." This event will be livestreamed. Click here for more details.