[T]he Bushies didn’t have to worry about governing well and honestly. Even when they failed on the job (as they so often did), they could claim that very failure as vindication of their anti-government ideology, a demonstration that the public sector can’t do anything right.
This isn't just a question of the hypocrisy and inertia of elite institutions favoring incumbent and moneyed interests above all. All that was depressingly in evidence often enough, but now that the tables have turned somewhat we are in a better position to understand the different stakes and conditions that structurally confront good government as against anti-government types more generally.
There is a special difficulty for good-government types (who closely but do not perfectly track Democratic as against Republican partisan politics, so one should be a little careful around this) in an era in which it is relatively easy opportunistically to deploy righteous dissatisfaction with organized corruption and incompetence into a popular anti-governmentality that actually benefits most who also benefit most from the corruption and incompetence itself.
(It has been largely the mass-broadcast media formations of the late modern era that facilitated this ease opportunistically taken up by the successive 20C waves of the Right, from the rise of fascism through to the bloody postcolonial global implementation of the corporate-militarist Washington Consensus comsummated in the killer clown college of the Bush II administration. Meanwhile, the ongoing -- but more vulnerable than you might think -- eclipse of mass-broadcast media by peer-to-peer formations has created the conditions, well, together with the emergence of post-nationalist environmental concerns, for a genuinely revolutionary recasting of the planetary political terrain to which radical democracy and social justice movements would do well to avail themselves while the getting's good. This is actually a topic for a separate post, but the politics that are roughly indicated through the shorthand of "good government types" are actually indispensable to this democratizing consensualizing planetary moment in my view -- without them, radical democracy is all too likely to be appropriated by the usual rhetoric of "spontaneism" and "negative liberty" that always eventually buttresses the politics of incumbency over the politics of resistence.)
It is crucial for "goo-goos" (advocates of good government) to resist their temperamental attraction to "moving on" in the name of problem solving here and now. They need to rethink their apparently endless capacity to "forgive and forget" those whose skills seem scarce and wasted should accountability for failure and corruption shunt them aside. And they must explicitly discredit all those who proffer blanket condemnations of government as such -- when good government is literally indispensable to the maintenance of legitimate, democratic, equitable, diverse, consensual social order. They must condemn those who would condemn public service in general as corrupt, incompetent, or ridiculous -- rather than excoriating corrupt and incompetent public servants in particular together with praise of the heroism, service, and sacrifice of public service in general. They must expose the self-serving pretense of those who like to insinuate that there something foolish or impractical or self-marginalizing in a dedication to integrity, fairness, long-term thinking, empathy, waiting for one's turn, achieving competence, right modesty, critical thinking, and taking responsibility for one's mistakes and even for the unintended harms one has had a hand in making -- when these are the public values that help make the world a place worth living in for all, peer to peer.
The anti-government types are all too eager to eat the world they did nothing to make and little to maintain, to howl that there "ain't no such thing as a free lunch" even as they feast themselves on a crumbling infrastructure (not only the physical infrastructure of roads and pipes and professionalisms and legal precedents, but a psychical infrastructure of goodwill and trust and decency and commonwealth eroded by self-promotion and looting and snide short-sighted opportunism) they refuse to pay for, eating it and thinking or pretending they can have it, too. Their carnival of looting and cruelty has been a vicious circle that swallowed a whole generation, their bad behavior feeding failure after failure and ensuring always only that those who were the most vulnerable or who actually sought to save the world from these predations would be the first to fail themselves, the first to burn out, the first to be squeezed, the first to be criticized for any misstep, the most vulnerable to the charge of hypocrisy if they succeeded in accomplishing anything at all, however momentary, under these impossible conditions, and so on.
Good government types must install virtuous circles to overcome these vicious ones always at the ready to undermine the harder work of common sense and common wealth. They must ensure that those who benefit from the equitable administration of society and law understand very well their absolute interdependence with their fellows for their continued security, prosperity, and expressivity and are devoted to maintaining the institutions and standards without which that security, prosperity, and expressivity are hopelessly fraught and fragile: imperiled by the short-sightedness, self-rationalization, and parochialism all human beings are susceptible to, but on which incumbent authority and privilege especially tend to depend for their long maintenance in a dynamic world.
Good government is fragile, and the task of good government types is far more difficult than that of anti-government types (except in rare moments of devastating reckoning like the one we are likely in for at present when the costs and stakes become flabbergastingly stark). Just as anti-governmentality succeeds with every failure, at least until these many failures accumulate into a failure too sweeping and too deep to hide or mistake or bear, good governmentality must ensure that its every success is indeed experienced as the success it is, as an accomplishment of common sense and common wealth for which we can all of us be proud and grateful and which should find us newly dedicated to the common work, peer to peer, without which every creative achievement, every collaboration, every reconciliation, every secure comfort would all too likely have been stillborn or stolen or smashed by the frailties we are all of us heir to otherwise.
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