April, 2020
Washington – Historians sometimes write of "eras" or "ages." It is time to think about an "age of govertainment," defined as a period when entertainers and their industry fundamentally took over governance functions. And not for the better, to be sure.
The age's apotheosis may be Donald Trump, an entertainer with no previous government experience, but he was not the first. Entertainers Jesse Ventura and Arnold Schwarzenegger preceded the president as governors in their respective states.
The age is also marked by the treatment of public policy as entertainment, especially on cable television and AM radio.
A progenitor of the entertainer-as-elected-official was Ronald Reagan. Although he was governor of California before he became president, it was his acting and story-telling that attracted voters, not his record in office.
He regaled audiences with an anti-government message: "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are 'I'm from the government, and I'm here to help'." It set off decades of joking about government. Rather than fixing government's shortcomings, and demanding better, it became fashionable to cut government support so as to make certain it failed.
It worked. One agency, the Internal Revenue Service, has even programed failure into its operations by acknowledging it is not able to audit the wealthy, so it concentrates on the lower-income.
No one expressed the anti-government sentiment better than the Washington lobbyist Grover Norquist, who said, "My goal is to cut government...to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub."
A generation of the nation's best talent turned away from public service to make money on Wall Street, where Ph.D. scientists invented financial derivatives rather than work in essential government research, development, readiness, and logistics.
Nobody's laughing now, what with govertainment leaders unable to cope with a coronavirus pandemic. It's not as if we didn't know it was coming: everyone from businessman Bill Gates to national security director Dan Coats has been sounding the alarm. Now it's here. At first we're in denial about the pandemic, then in panic over our lack of preparedness.
A lot of us have never, ever been laughing at the failures of government. I've been in the trenches fighting government waste, fraud, incompetence, and corruption for many years, mindful that as much as I like limited government, it must be up to the job as if our lives depended on it, which sometimes they do.
When the pandemic passes, those who are left to pick up the pieces must bring to an end the disastrous "age of govertainment" in America.* Surely we are a better country than we've been of late.
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*Other countries have likewise experienced govertainment eras. Italy, in the recent past, was led by Silvio Berlusconi, a media tycoon who had no government experience before becoming premier. Like the U.S., Italy was unprepared for the pandemic. Countries with more traditional leaders, like South Korea, Taiwan, and Germany, have been better prepared and have held down the pandemic death rate. Which suggests an emerging hypothesis: govertainment regimes have worse pandemics. The evidence is mounting daily.
