W hat is government for? Over the last two years, this has been the dominant question of American politics. Yet so few leaders have offered coherent answers.

The Tea Party energized the right during the midterm elections but offered little more than a reprise of unworkable ideas and worn rhetoric about “limited government.” The left, meanwhile, has been in a defensive crouch, reluctant either to embrace Great Society methods of governing or to acknowledge their shortcomings. President Barack Obama last spring offered up a spirited defense of government in a commencement speech at the University of Michigan. But defending government is not enough. There is a higher threshold, for the President and all of us: to articulate, during this time of flux, an affirmative progressive theory of government.

What should we expect government to do? How should government be doing it? And when we say “government,” just whom do we mean?

The current dissatisfaction with government is not a mere perception or marketing problem, as too many on the left still believe. It is a product problem. Government has for too many people become unresponsive, dehumanizing, and inefficient. Only when we improve government itself will our satisfaction with it improve. Unfortunately, the American discourse on government has long been frozen in two dimensions: more vs. less, big vs. small. We argue for an orthogonal approach: more government when it comes to setting great goals and investing to achieve them; less government when it comes to how we collectively meet those goals. We believe this has to be a progressive project. Because progressives remain the only group in America willing to advocate for government, we have a special responsibility to imagine its role anew.

The Mushy Amalgam

  • Let’s begin with an unpacking of the right-wing theory of “limited government.” The conservatives of this era prove that a half-baked theory, like a low-grade virus, can go a long way if left unchallenged. The contemporary right’s prevailing theory of government, a witch’s brew of Beck, Rand, and Hayek, holds that:
  • Democratic government derives legitimacy from the people (indeed);
  • It should be limited and as close to the people as possible (all right);
  • Its charge is to safeguard individual rights and liberties (okay, though how best to do that is a matter of contention);
  • In so doing, the government’s scope of power is limited to a military to secure the territory, police to enforce laws, courts to adjudicate disputes, and some taxes to cover these costs (oh, dear);
  • Any other role for government is illegitimate, and any additional taxes constitute theft and push us toward communism (holy cow); and
  • In any event, such redistributive policies are always inefficient compared to a free market (you’ve got to be kidding).

This philosophy, if we can call it that, fails on three levels: theoretical, empirical, and political. On the level of theory, limited-government conservatives misapprehend both the meaning and value of freedom, and the essential role of government in democratic capitalist societies. Conservatives thunder about totalitarianism and socialism, but well short of those extremes is a broad sweet spot where government actually enhances freedom and promotes wealth creation. Empirically, there is not a single example to be found of a nation that practices “limited government” and is wealthy, secure, and stable. Not one. And for all their preaching about the size of government, conservatives have never been able to practice what they preach and shrink the state when they’ve been in power.

Ah, but the left doesn’t fare much better. We have from progressives an approach to government that for decades has been on autopilot. Obama has put forth some positive reforms that seek to reimagine progressive governance, from Race to the Top in education to health-care innovation incubators to stimulus funding that encourages clean-energy projects. But he has not made such initiatives the signature of his governing philosophy. More to the point, he has yet to spell out a governing philosophy, a big story of what government is for. For all the self-doubt and hand-wringing among progressives today, the reality is that we still live in a nation where the New Deal/Great Society template is dominant. Far too many of us, even in this season of discontent, accept a substantial state role in every sector of the economy, in which big government is meant to counter big business. We all expect government to provide a cushion against all manner of risk and misfortune, and to right all manner of social wrongs.

The result is a mushy amalgam that suits both parties. Democrats get to overpromise what government can do for people, while the GOP gets to underdeliver. Voters enjoy getting benefits from the state but also like hearing that they shouldn’t have to pay so much for it. It’s a nice arrangement for everyone but future Americans. This unspoken bargain leaves us with a national government that is ever more detached and sclerotic; that crowds out citizen action; and that is understood by the public to be the responsibility ultimately of just one party.

Sclerosis In a society as dynamic as ours, problems come too fast, and institutions are too slow. Bigness–whether at General Motors or the Postal Service–is not tolerated anymore. And people pay the price for bigness. Consider that the state of California annually spends almost $250,000 on each youth in its juvenile-justice system–and gets an 80 percent recidivism rate. If this happened one time, with one year’s cohort of kids, it would be an abysmally poor use of resources; that it happens year after year, without change or improvement, is criminal. More specifically, it is criminal that government remains so siloed, non-strategic, non-adaptive, and blind to outcomes. Once upon a time, someone built, on an industrial model and metaphor, a machine for solving the problem of juvenile delinquency. And then humans stopped running or adjusting the machine. The story plays out in our public schools, our mental-health system, our child-welfare system. Liberals should be outraged by this sclerosis, because it literally and routinely kills the weak.

Crowding Out Citizens Another negative consequence of the big-government bargain is that we’ve stopped noticing all the ways that state action crowds out community and citizen ownership of problems and solutions. When Americans come to think of government as a vending machine–drop in the coins and expect a great society to come out–then good citizenship shrivels. Citizens start to think their role is to pay, consume, and kick the machine when they’re unsatisfied. Government, as it has developed, too often drains first the incentive and then the capacity of groups of people to address problems on a human scale. Economist and Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom has written powerfully about groups of citizens, all around the world, who have created nongovernmental networks to allocate resources, police a commons, punish free riders, and sustain high norms of mutual obligation and strong reciprocity. One needn’t be Newt Gingrich to ask why progressives can’t foster more such nongovernmental networks. Progressives say “it takes a village,” but then too often rely on an agency. We acknowledge that some problems–like the interstate behavior of rapacious health-insurance firms–happen on a scale that requires action of equal reach. We insist, however, that many more problems happen on a scale that we citizens can and should own and address.

Complaints Department One of the worst parts of the codependent left-right approach to government is that it is progressives who are blamed for this state of affairs, not conservatives. When one side is expected to do little more than rail against government, its failures at actual governance are not punished. The other side ends up bearing the full responsibility for making government work, and the full blame when it doesn’t. For all their flaws, the Democrats remain the only grown-up party in America, so it’s up to them to make government more responsive, adaptive, and effective–in practice, and not only in promises.

What Government Should Do

To do that, progressives need to update how they see the world. Market fundamentalists would have us believe that our success comes in spite of government. There is literally no evidence for this. If less were always better, then the least regulated economies would be the most successful economies. The opposite holds. It is, in fact, the rules, regulations, standards, and accountability that government provides that fuel and lubricate markets. A robust state is not mutually exclusive with a free market; it is required for it. This is why there is no robust private sector on earth that isn’t accompanied by an equally robust public sector.

Societies can be successful only with the civic cooperation, strategic organization, and economic moderation that activist government provides. And the larger and more complex a society becomes, the more government must do to provide the basis for continued success. True prosperity is always a consequence of generalized prosperity, and only progressive activist government can achieve that. The law of the jungle–market fundamentalism–brings just one possible outcome: a jungle.