A thought about progressive versus conservative agendas for the government.

A major change in the role of government in U.S. society started with the Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration and has continued since, especially in Democratic administrations. The federal government role has grown larger and more progressive, including:

• Providing a social safety net (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the Access to Care Act, unemployment insurance, food stamps, etc.)
• Increased regulation to reduce risks of financial crises, environmental risks, and risks to workers.
• Fiscal and monetary policies to fight inflation and promote economic growth.
• Expansion of voting rights to Blacks, women and other minorities.

On a historical time scale the government innovations of the past 70 years are an experiment. Conservatives who feel that they are unwise may prove to have been right in the fullness of time. I suppose one of the strengths of the Madisonian Constitutional system is its emphasis on progressive and conservative negotiations that might avoid a disastrous emphasis of one or the other ideology. Surely conservatives have rolled back some of the progressive initiatives over the past three decades.

Other changes have taken place in governance over the same time, such as the expansion of the military-industrial complex and the growth of the federal budget and debt. External changes have take place such as growth of cities and megacities, globalization, the expansion of corporations, and changes in the sources of migration to the United States.

Where the 80 Representative Republican Caucus Running Speaker Boehner Come From

Source: The New Yorker

I assume that the people most upset by the progressive changes in the U.S. government are those who elected the Republican Representatives most active in seeking the repeal of the Access to Care Act.  I quote from a New Yorker article:

As the above map, detailing the geography of the suicide caucus, shows, half of these districts are concentrated in the South, and a quarter of them are in the Midwest, while there’s a smattering of thirteen in the rural West and four in rural Pennsylvania (outside the population centers of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh). Naturally, there are no members from New England, the megalopolis corridor from Washington to Boston, or along the Pacific coastline........ 

While the most salient demographic fact about America is that it is becoming more diverse, Republican districts actually became less diverse in 2012.......... 

The average suicide-caucus district is seventy-five per cent white, while the average House district is sixty-three per cent white. Latinos make up an average of nine per cent of suicide-district residents, while the over-all average is seventeen per cent. The districts also have slightly lower levels of education (twenty-five per cent of the population in suicide districts have college degrees, while that number is twenty-nine per cent for the average district). 

The members themselves represent this lack of diversity. Seventy-six of the members who signed the Meadows letter are male. Seventy-nine of them are white.

These conservatives seem to me likely to feel left our by the changes in the world and especially the changes in the U.S. government. White men elected from rural constituencies ran this country when it was founded and for much of its history. When such men were in charge, government was small and very limited in its functions. The 80 in what the New Yorker article calls "the suicide caucus" have noticed that the United States no longer holds the commanding position in the world it held in the aftermath of World War II; the espouse a political ideology that was once dominant, and then now find themselves in a small minority, holding power in the Congress only through the efforts of state governments that have provided them with gerrymandered districts, and parliamentary tactics to deny legislative power to the majority of their colleagues.

Of course, since World War II the countries that were decimated by the war have repaired their economies and prospered. More recently, China, India and some other nations have made huge strides in abolishing poverty. In part these advances have been made through the globalization of production and trade. For those who believe that people everywhere should have rights to health and a decent standard of living, that is all to the good. For those who believe in modern economics, the convergence of living standards among countries is a normal historical process.

But do we believe that the progressive program is counterproductive? Certainly the European nations do not; for example, they have social safety nets, socialized medicine, and policies that are more proactive in promoting equitable distributions of income and wealth than does the United States.

The country is much richer now, and can afford more government. We also understand economics, management, sociology, and other fields of learning better, and can better manage governmental affairs. Perhaps we have grown up enough to manage a progressive government.

The United States government was established as an experiment in democracy, seeking to better provide for the "life, liberty and pursuit of happiness" than monarchies had done. The Constitution was an experiment in government designed to produce "a more perfect union". Over more than two centuries most people in the country have come to feel that the progressive agenda better accomplishes that agenda than does a system based on the conservative agenda.