For The First Time In Our Lifetimes, Americans Want The Government To Do Stuff
People are thirsty for an activist government that's on their side.
Not even a half century of propaganda hatched inside the most insidious right-wing think tanks you can imagine could stop Americans from eventually wanting their federal government to do some shit.
The vast anti-New Deal project has reached its hideous culmination in this second Trump term, but it started decades ago with one simple idea implanted into the minds of every single person born in the United States since at least the late 1970s: Government is inherently corrupt, wasteful, and run by incompetent eggheads. This conservative thinking – jammed into our brains like the thought smuggling in Inception – has been widely accepted as the Truth. Government can never solve problems. Government is the problem.
We all have Ronald Reagan's ghost floating around our frontal cortex.
All it took was the rapid decay of democracy and the rise of authoritarianism to change Americans' attitudes, if recent polling on the government's role in American life is to be believed.
Americans, as you can plainly see above, have never been so bullish about the federal government doing some shit to make life a little better for its people, who, I've argued, only want a little dignity and not much else. That the little orange line rises during Republican presidencies shouldn't surprise anyone who pays even fleeting attention to the state of things: People can tell when basic societal functions are faltering, and with Elon Musk's criminal DOGE raiders having wiped out huge amounts of U.S. government capacity over these past few months, folks are starting to notice.
That same organe line jumped during George W. Bush's eight dystopian years in power, and creeped upward during Trump's first term, perhaps fueled by Americans trying to go about their lives during the heart of COVID and wondering to themselves if their government should maybe get involved in responding to a one-a-century pandemic.
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Joe Biden tried to do the activist government thing. He pushed for federal policies that would protect workers and strengthen certain lagging economic sectors and forgive hundreds of billions in student loan debt, and activist right-wing judges stepped in time and again and said no, sir, the Constitution says Americans can walk around Walmart with machines guns strapped to their backs and the Klan can march anywhere at anytime and threaten vulnerable communities, but nowhere does that big, beautiful document say the president can unilaterally cancel student loan debt that has annihilated the economic prospects of an entire generation. Biden and his administration tried and failed to use the government to "solve problems," and he and his party were punished severely at the polls for trying such a thing. It's not the best omen.
Benefiting from the greatest anti-democracy backstop in modern history – commonly known as a Supreme Court that checks all the boxes of a captured institution – the American right has stopped every effort to leverage government power in favor of working and middle class people. This, naturally, has soured these folks on the mere idea of government. It was the plan all along.
Polling is deathly grim for a Democratic Party that has no leader and remains rudderless in every capacity heading into the sixth month of Trump's second term. There are leaders out there – I wrote about them in February – but none that have emerged as national figures in the American mind.
"While neither political party is viewed as especially strong or effective, skepticism weighs particularly heavily on the Democratic Party," the CNN polling said. "Americans are far more likely to see Republicans than Democrats as the party with strong leaders: 40% say this descriptor applies more to the GOP, with just 16% saying it applies to the Democrats. They’re also more likely to call Republicans the party that can get things done by 36 percent to 19 percent, and the party of change, by 32 percent to 25 percent."
Those abysmal numbers for Democrats are explained by the party's own partisans hating the shit out of how Democratic electeds have operated in a moment of authoritarian free fall. "GOP-aligned adults are 50 points likelier than Democratic-aligned adults to say their own party has strong leaders, and 36 points likelier to view their party as able to get things done," according to CNN.
Denny Carter
It's not that Republicans refuse to use government to affect daily life in the United States. They very much do that by using federal power to assemble a secret police force assigned to terrorize those who threaten the white supremacist project, dismantle and threaten good-government, democracy-supporting organizations, and tear down critical protections meant to stop corporate behemoths from exploiting folks trying to live their lives in an age of capitalist acceleration, which is less fun than it sounds.
People don't like this, of course. In fact, they hate it, if Trump's approval ratings are to be believed (I think his approval remaining above 40 percent is a function of a press that can't adequately cover fascism). Maybe the blackpilled freaks among us think the regime is doing well in using the federal government to "solve" the "problem" of desperate migrants seeking a decent life in the US. The public – thanks in part to elected Democrats traveling to El Salvador to protest the regime's illegal deportations – has soured on Trump's immigration bullshit, according to recent polling from the Marquette University Law School. He's underwater by 24 points among self-described independent voters on immigration; it's the steadfast support of Republican cultists that makes Trump's immigration numbers look halfway normal. I know: You're bowled over by this. You need to sit down. You've never been in such shock.
The same goes for the issue of trust, a key metric in presidential approval. The Marquette polling found that seven in ten independent voters "do not trust" or "completely do not trust" our tyrannical president. Ninety-two percent of Democrats said the same. Ninety percent of Republicans, meanwhile, trust the most dishonest man in the history of American public life. So again, the overall numbers appear normalized because Trump – the ultimate failson – is treated as an infallible godlike figure among his radicalized base.
It's my hope (cope) that elected pro-democracy folks recognize in the coming months and years that Americans are primed for positive action by the government to address issues and problems that only appear intractable because Republicans and their anti-democracy judges have made them so. We have reached record-low rates of Americans who believe hard work is a guarantee of success for most people, or that the government is capable to making their lives better. Folks aren't dooming as much as they're calling ballgame.
I've written at length over the past month about a (near) future in which pro-democracy lawmakers summon the will to do what's needed to beat back authoritarianism and establish a robust democracy that can defend itself against future fascist threats that bubble up in times of economic uncertainty, or when people get bored with stability. This sort of effort will require the elimination of anti-democracy roadblocks erected by the American right over the past half century along with massive government intervention in every part of American life. No more norms, no more capitulation, no more pissing your pants over alienating some right-wing goon in rural Pennsylvania who would rather eat his beloved dog for dinner than to vote for a Democrat.
The analytics are clear: For the first time in living memory, people are thirsty for an activist government that's on their side. Give it to them.
Follow Denny Carter on Bluesky at @dennycarter.bsky.social
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