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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

Never in the history of the USA have young people – or really anyone else for that matter – liked the government. It's against what this country is really about. There are a lot of countries in the world (maybe even the majority) where a government job is the gold standard and what everyone aspires for, but that is very unlikely to ever happen here.

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The data disagrees with your first statement. Certainly true since the early 2000s, but we don’t have to be fatalistic about this.

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2020/09/14/americans-vi...

“Trusting the government to do the right thing”, which is what that pew research is checking, is a constantly moving target.

In 1955 when that trust was super high, everyone could have trusted the government to stay out of their lives and to only interfere if we had to go to war. That’s very different from people wanting the federal government to take over healthcare, energy, housing, etc.

In 1955 needing to go to the doctor didn’t bankrupt your family.

I mean really? In 1955 people were worried about a literal nuclear apocalypse.

Of course health care was much cheaper when the doctor basically had no health care to give.

A medicine man 2000 years ago was even cheaper, practically free.

For white suburban middle class it didn't. For black people it absolutely did.

People liked FDRs government a lot.

And I'd say that goodwill was passed through into the 1950s and most of the 1960s. The Vietnam War and the accompanying hippie/student movements started to put a big dent in that, followed by Watergate, of course.

What is interesting to me (as a non-American who has never set foot in the US) is that big Government seems to have had a resurgence in Reagan's 1980s, thanks mostly to its military-related expenditure but not only. I think the final "Government is bad"/"we don't need it" coup de grâce was carried out in the Clinton years, the (in-)famous Third Way [1] which was mostly one way, to be honest, i.e. neoliberal policies carried with full speed.

It does seem that the Government and how it is viewed has started to be seen in a more positive light again, thanks mostly to the millennial generation (I hate the "generation" concept but that's the best I can come with), especially after the 2008-2010 financial crisis and the accompanying social changes (increase of economic inequality, mostly), which I find highly interesting. It was also interesting how the US was very keynes-ian in its response to the pandemic, I mean putting cash directly into people's pockets is I think more than Keynes would have hoped for.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Way

Nobody ever? I'm surprised how big the US government has become then, especially with the low salary.

For a country that isn't supposed to like its government, we sure have a lot of government.

At least in terms of taxes as a percentage of GDP, we have less than almost every other Western country.

What is a country with "less" government (by any standard you choose) and better quality of life?

Undermining faith in the government has been a right wing project since riiiight around the time the federal government took a strong role in passing and enforcing civil rights law...

Nope, it’s been a theme since around the time of the federalist papers.

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