eliminating government in the post Reagan age

from the NY Times ...
States Are in Crisis. Why Won’t Trump Help?

Federal support for cities and states was a core part of the New Deal. The president is tearing it apart.

By Lizabeth Cohen

Dr. Cohen is a professor of history at Harvard and the author of “Making a New Deal.”

April 29, 2020, 5:00 a.m. ET

When most people think of the New Deal, they think of the enduring institutions it created — above all, the web of agencies and programs that has provided the social safety net, such as it is, for life in the United States since the 1950s. A national retirement system, public housing, collective bargaining, unemployment insurance, the minimum wage — all had their origins during the Great Depression.

More important than any specific benefits, however, was the way that the New Deal recast the structure of American federalism. Washington stepped in to address a crisis that states and local governments were failing miserably to meet on their own, overwhelmed by tremendous need and limited by the resources and powers at their disposal.

New Deal federalism has shaped American governance for almost a century, and it has played a vital role in our country’s success. Now, with the Covid-19 crisis wreaking havoc across every state in America and the president unwilling to hold up Washington’s end of the bargain, that system may be falling apart.

For all the New Deal’s achievements, the American welfare state would never live up to the fuller protections provided by some European nations and our neighbor Canada. And there were glaring flaws in the programs that were created, such as excluding agricultural and domestic workers from the minimum wage guarantees of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 and refusing to pass anti-lynching legislation. Both of these failures were partly attributable to the fragile coalition of Southern Democrats and Northern liberals that made the New Deal possible.

Still, the New Deal’s programs, enhanced by the Great Society’s addition of Medicare and Medicaid in the 1960s and President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act in 2010, made the United States on the eve of the Covid-19 pandemic a far more benevolent place than it had been when the Great Depression hit in 1929.

New Deal federalism likewise made it easier for the states to respond to challenges and emergencies. But in exchange for federal resources, states accepted the federal government’s expectations and regulations. That relationship has substantially contributed to historic levels of economic prosperity and notable progress toward greater class and racial equality across regions.

Many of the landmark programs originating in the New Deal and the postwar era were built on this system of governance, with great success. Social Security has reduced poverty among older Americans. Intervention by the U.S. Justice Department helped the struggle to register African-American voters in the South and to integrate public accommodations nationwide. And the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 provided a legal basis for accountability, even if challenging to enforce.

The expansion of federal authority took place under Republican and Democratic presidents alike. When the variation in workplace protections state by state left some workers more endangered than others, the federal government under President Richard Nixon created the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to set national standards for safety.

And faced with wildly unequal welfare benefits across the states, the government instituted the uniform, federally funded Supplemental Security Income program in the early 1970s. Federal consumer protection and clean air and water legislation in the 1960s and 1970s protected citizens in all states, however friendly their local leaders were to mass marketers or polluters.

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