Forum: Who’s responsible for meeting needs of those around us?

By Dan Hazen / Herald Forum

When I talk with friends in the U.K. two questions inevitably come up. “Explain the ‘gun-thing’ in America…” and “Explain Trump…” In the first case, I sometimes make headway. In the second, like so many others, I’m stumped.

But a May 15 piece on HeraldNet helped bring part of an answer into focus. The title of the piece reveals a premise held by many college-educated, media-engaged progressives and working class, traditionally Democratic Americans: “Nonprofits filling gap left by federal cuts isn’t answer.”

Sophia Shaw, who helps nonprofits with strategic planning, writes, “Since the founding of our republic, nonprofit organizations have supplemented the work of government.”

“Supplemented”? Was the U.S. government the primary provider of relief to the poor in 1820s Ohio? Were senators and congressmen debating funding child care in Kentucky or food stamps in Vermont in 1915?

Her assumption seems to be that the default, proper, expected, moral and natural sustainer-protector of well-being is government. The central tenant of the American experiment is the opposite.

The story has been re-written, creating an expectation that if the government doesn’t do it, then it’s not “democratic.” But the American experiment was not about establishing a better kind of ruling class or institution.

A deep-seated repulsion and fear of this ruling class is behind a good portion of Trump support. It’s wrong-headed. It’s selfish. It might get us all killed, but it is understandable because it’s actually happened. A new ruling class has transformed government over the last 75 years.

Trump got traction because he promised (lied about) a return to something his supporters couldn’t quite describe, could only see out of the corner of their eyes but knew was deeply valuable, and slipping away. Something that admittedly has only winked in and out of existence (and even then, only for a privileged few) but nonetheless with expanding promise to others over time: self-governance.

The Crocodile-in-Chief promised to “drain the swamp” and too many people, longing for that elusive self-governance, laid right down in his jaws. As misguided as they are, replacing the crocodile with a colony of rats as Shaw seems to suggest, is not seen as a solution by them or anyone else interested in swamp reclamation.

Shaw worries that even if private charity fills the “gap” left by government that democracy would suffer. She writes, “those services must remain accountable to the people. To all people.” This is a self-defeating argument. Democracy spoke. The people (well, a plurality of them) asked for the crocodile. Her version of democracy worked, she just doesn’t like the result. (To be clear, I don’t like most of it either, but that’s not the point.)

She goes on to say, “In such a scenario, public goods are preserved but no longer publicly governed. Scientists, teachers, librarians, rangers, curators and nurses would serve at the pleasure of private funders.”

In Shaw’s universe, “public” is synonymous with “government.” This is the double-speak that has been at work for the last 75 years. Public, by definition, means “concerning the people, in open view.” Interestingly it also strongly implies “adults.”

Government institutions, as they have evolved, are the opposite of “public.” They are impersonal, opaque, elite and impenetrable systems, incapable of recognizing humans at the individual scale and increasingly run by the clinically non-adult. Try getting a building permit, Social Security, disability, help for an elderly neighbor or a driver’s license and you will encounter a petulant machine, not a “public.”

I share Shaw’s concern for the vulnerable people who will inevitably suffer at the withdrawal of institutional largess from Washington, D.C., Olympia, Everett or your city council. But let us not continue to slumber in the fitful, hopeless dream that the “adults” from those far-off places will swoop in and save them. The adults, the public, live right next door. We are responsible for those we can reach.

Resist Trump; love your neighbor.

Dan Hazen lives in Marysville and works in Everett.