This week, the U.S. government narrowly averted shutting down. Now, a debt default crisis looms on the horizon. This brinksmanship has been driven by Senate Republicans, who threatened a shutdown and are blocking raising the debt limit as part of a strategy to undermine President Biden’s economic agenda. Unless an agreement is reached by Oct. 18, the U.S. will default on its debts for the first time in its history.

How did government become the enemy? The simple answer is that Ronald Reagan successfully ran for the presidency in 1980 by declaring, “Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.” 

President Reagan ultimately presided over three government shutdowns, the first time that shuttering the government was used as a political weapon. President Trump took this scorched earth political warfare to a new level, presiding over the longest government shutdown in history – 35 days — which occurred in January 2019 over disputes with Congress about funding his border wall. Trump’s shutdown cost American taxpayers about $5 billion.

According to Yale historian Paul Sabin, the anti-government movement that Reagan rode to victory was actually inspired by citizen activists of the 1960s, such as Ralph Nader and Rachel Carson. He describes this improbable connection between 1960s liberal activism and the current anti-government movement in his new book, Public Citizens: The Attack on Big Government and the Remaking of American Liberalism. Sabin is a professor of history at Yale University and director of the Yale Environmental Humanities Program.

Sabin is deeply concerned by the authoritarian bent of the current anti-government movement. “We need to actively defend the government and its purposes and the public goods and the role of public institutions.”

“My dream would be we could find a way to… combine active government with the idea of continuous reform and improvement and we could come to terms with complicated, flawed institutions.”

“We’re never going to have a perfect government,” Sabin concludes.