Jay Kuten: Wanted, another Nixon to save US

I may be regarded as a troglodyte in that I don't have hundreds of Facebook "friends". In fact, I don't "do" Facebook. Nor have I "tweeted". But that choice of personal privacy over becoming au courant doesn't keep me from the sorts of information that passes for debate on the social network.
My wife does have a Facebook page and though, thankfully, she exercises much self-control in limiting her time on it, the latest iteration of an old mantra from right-wing ideologues of meagre acquaintance (read "friends") still manages to come across the screen. It was during a political debate by two of her "friends" that one fellow asserted that "government doesn't make anything. It doesn't create anything. It just takes our money and gives it away to the irresponsible."
Here was irony at its finest. This argument could never have occurred in this way, electronically, at long distance, in real time, but for the creation of the internet. The internet is the descendant of the ARPANET, created by DARPA (Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency) in response to the Soviet's Sputnik, created to safeguard military communications.
Of course, the US Government makes many things. The two debaters are regular working guys, who need the interstate highways to get to work. They rely on government for clean air, clean water and safe food. The list could go on. It is not that government "makes nothing" but rather that faith in government has eroded on the right and the left in America.
On the left, faith in government has been shaken by its relative indifference to joblessness while bailing out financial institutions. Confidence is further eroded by a Democratic president who governs as a moderate conservative and, even there, surrenders positions to his opponents.
That view on the right was famously introduced by Ronald Reagan who said explicitly that government was not the answer, government was the problem. While he championed deregulation, Reagan was paradoxically the originator of massive deficits and government actually expanded on his watch. His present-day Republican heirs have taken his conservatism much further to the right than Reagan.
The current Republican Party has been effectively hijacked by a minority of Tea Party representatives, willing to hold the country's economic future - indeed, the world's economy - hostage, by refusing to raise the US debt ceiling unless any deal to fix the deficit not include tax increases. Ideology, it seems, triumphs over common sense. So much so that voters were disgusted. In a poll, they gave Congress an unfavourable rating of 82 per cent.
It wasn't always this way for Republicans. Yesterday, August 9, was the anniversary of the 1974 resignation of Richard Nixon, 37th president. Nixon, a Republican, is often remembered for the Watergate scandal and abuse of power. His history of ruthless foreign policy and of domestic anti-communism and personal racism and anti-Semitism obscure the fact that his domestic policies while in office were more left-leaning than any subsequent US president of either party.
Nixon oversaw the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission. He tripled federal outlays for civil rights and began affirmative action in federal hiring. He supported the Equal Rights Amendment and signed Title IX, the law granting equality to female student athletes.
Nixon made Social Security cost-of-living increases automatic, expanded food stamps and started Supplemental Security Income for the disabled and elderly poor. And he proposed a national health insurance scheme at least as far-reaching as Obama's. The current debate is a lose-lose for government. One side would shrink government "to drown it in a bathtub". The other side thinks government is too corrupt to save. Either way, the people lose. What the US may need now is a Richard Nixon, a man ruthless enough, corrupt enough, to save the government.