The Fifth Risk

THE FIFTH RISK
By Michael Lewis

What is it that has so successfully united the right in the politics of our time? There is little in common between oil company CEOs, country-club conservatives, Tea Partiers, and white males without a college degree or disunionised labour when it comes to economic or even cultural concerns. Instead, what they share is a hatred of the government and an open wish to see it destroyed. Not shrunk, as in previous conservative dispensations, but done away with entirely. Taxes not lowered but abolished. Not less regulation but none at all. The right doesn’t like government and certainly doesn’t see a need for it. Any sort of government action is immediately labeled as socialism. We should just let the market do its work.

Thomas Frank has done a good job of explaining this line of thinking, especially in his book The Wrecking Crew. I won’t go over his analysis here but it’s important to keep in mind when reading The Fifth Risk, where Michael Lewis lays out how such an ideology has blossomed thanks to a widespread ignorance of what it is government actually does and the sorts of dangers it protects the public from. It was, for example, an eye-opener for me to learn that roughly half of the Department of Energy’s annual $30 billion budget is spent on maintaining and guarding America’s nuclear arsenal, and that over half of the Commerce Department’s budget goes to the National Weather Service. I’m guessing these facts aren’t well known by the people who actually pay the bills. And it gets worse. According to one study more than 40 percent of Americans receiving Social Security and/or Medicare benefits in 2008 did not believe they had used a government social program. I believe it was Alexander Hamilton who thought that over time Americans would come to like their government more as they recognized all the good it did. Given their profound ignorance of that good they have, in large numbers, turned against it.

The question then becomes whether anti-government types are even interested in correcting the record.

Lewis thinks they aren’t. Ignorance of the things government does makes it easier to hold to the position that all government is bad. Lewis calls this the “Trumpian impulse – the desire not to know”: in order to preserve “a certain worldview” budget cuts to government services are “powered by a perverse desire – to remain ignorant.” This wilful blindness is where the danger comes in, because it’s what you don’t know and perhaps can’t even imagine that destroys you.

“One day someone will write the history of the strange relationship between the United States government and its citizens. It would need at least a chapter on the government’s attempts to save the citizens from the things that might kill them.” What makes the relationship strange is that such protection is so resented. Any authority exercised by government is viewed as paternalistic and demeaning at best, tyranny at worst. And so it doesn’t matter if Trump is corrupt or incompetent or some combination of the two, since his only role is to discredit and dismantle the state. How did we get here?

Notes:
Review first published online October 16, 2018.