Why Asking ‘What Is Government Getting Right?’ Isn’t Naive — It’s Necessary

Guest Column by Rev. Martin Elfert for FāVS News

What is the federal government getting right?

This is not a question I hear often in the liberal or moderate circles in which I move.

For most of my peers, this administration is a disaster without mitigation. And their case is not short on evidence: here is the alienation of our country’s oldest and closest allies via the President’s inane musings on annexing Greenland and Canada; here is the naked grift that is accepting a Qatari luxury jet; here, from the professed Christians in our government, is gleeful contempt for the poor and the stranger, for the very people whom scripture calls us to love and serve.

And yet I can’t escape the sense that this question remains an important one: What is the federal government getting right? And so few weeks ago, with some nervousness given the univocality in my community, I posed it on Facebook along with three possible answers. I suggested that:

Getting dyes out of foods is a good idea.

Buying fewer things is a good idea. My Grandmother and Mother, deep in their commitment to the old-school value that this thrift, would have nodded hard that you can be happy with two dolls rather than thirty. In fact, they would have said one doll. My environmentalist friends today would say the same.

Moving family-supporting manufacturing jobs out of the country was a disaster. So many deaths of despair, so much grinding poverty, can be traced back to the mills shutting down here. (The left has long insisted on this.) I’m not smart enough to know if tariffs are the answer. But I’m glad that someone, for the first time in close to fifty years, is acting like this is a huge and urgent problem.

Maybe you have your own additions to this list.

My Facebook post – spoiler alert! – generated a lively response. The liveliest came from my friends who reckoned that, via my question, I was engaging in a dangerous naivete; that I was looking for silver linings; that I was making excuses for an inexcusable regime.

I’m grateful for the pushback. I nodded along when a philosopher friend said to me, years ago, When you disagree with me, I understand that as a sign of respect. In this case, my friends’ pushback obligated me to examine my conviction that the question that I was asking mattered.

Inspired by my friends, I’ve thought a bunch since I made my post. Here is where my thinking has led me, here are five possible reasons that this question – What is the federal government getting right? – is a good and an important one:

1.         It’s morally vigorous. If I am to condemn the extradition of human beings to a horrifying Salvadoran prison absent due process, then it is necessary for me to say that these extraditions are much, much worse than prohibiting dyes in processed foods. To put that another way, if removing dyes from food is just as bad as reckless extraditions, then reckless extraditions aren’t very bad.

As my colleague and friend, Maria McDowell, put it in her reply to my post, “I wonder if by identifying some of the good, we actually have a more solid ground to stand on that says, these other things you’re doing are really terrible and must stop.” I robustly agree. If everything is an emergency and an outrage then nothing is.

Identifying the good and differentiating it from the bad is different than looking for silver linings. A silver lining, to my ear, begins with those old and unfortunate words at least. So: yes the plane crashed, but at least I became friends with the flight attendant. I’m not mining for silver here. I’m suggesting that our investigation will be better, more thorough, and more accurate if we acknowledge that the pilot did multiple things right before they did the disastrous things that led to the crash.

2.         It’s intellectually vigorous. I want to be able to articulate the best version of my opponent’s argument. I am a better Christian, for instance, because I can make a solid case for atheism; my faith is more examined and more mature and has greater reason for it because I’ve sat with the most persuasive objections to it.

I recently learned a term for this: the steel man (contrast with the classic rhetorical fallacy that is the straw man). My first great steel man experience was with one of my favorite profs during my undergrad. Dr. Slater had us read The Communist Manifesto not because he was sympathetic to communism (gosh, Dr. Slater could not have been less sympathetic to communism) but because he believed it was important for us to know the very best case for communism. Looking for that best case is part of the very foundation of critical thinking, of moral discourse. I want to hear the best case for this administration. My experience is that my own reasoning will get better as I do so.

3.         It invites us into curiosity and empathy with our neighbor. A little more than half of the American electorate voted for President Trump. And a substantial number continue to believe that he is doing a good job. Those neighbors are never, ever going to take us seriously, we are never going to have a meaningful conversation with them, if we genuinely can name nothing that this administration is doing right.

Harris Walz – Obviously was a compelling lawn sign for those voters who already found the Harris-Walz ticket obvious. But for those who did not think it obvious that sign just reeked of smugness. I long for us to rediscover curiosity and humility. What does it look like to get humbly curious about our neighbor? Not to concede that they are right, to make peace with evil or injustice, but to look them in the face and listen. The folks who coach us on conversation across difference tell us as much. If you genuinely want to connect, to listen, to learn – and just maybe even to persuade – then it is imperative for us to find something even fleeting in common, a place where you can say, “I feel that way too.”

4.         It calls us out of polarized thinking. The worst actions of the Trump administration flow out of the insistence – sometimes implied, sometimes named out loud – that the world is populated by heroes and villains, by the pure and the impure, by the human and in the inhuman. When we deny the possibility that there is anything good, virtuous, or reasonable in this administration, we duplicate that thinking.

Every genocide ever has begun with this kind of polarization. It is a way of thinking, of being in the world, that Jesus refutes. At his table are both the tax collectors and the prostitutes, both the collaborators with empire and those whose jobs or identities are spoken of in euphemism. If we imagine Jesus’ table today, we see at it the man in the MAGA hat and the drag queen, both looking at each other in suspicious bewilderment as they pass the potato salad. Jesus refuses to understand or encounter any of us as less than human.

The kids have given us the language of non-binary around sexuality and gender. What if there is liberation and justice for us in rediscovering non-binary reasoning?

5.         It insists on our autonomy and agency. If I am required to hold that everything that this administration does is equally, awfully evil, if all of its actions are equally worthy of my contempt, then this administration is quite literally in charge of my thoughts, my feelings, and indeed my very life. I regret those times in the first Trump administration when I fell into a state of perpetual reactivity, in which I felt a need to react to and reject his every word and action.

I don’t want to lapse into that reactivity again now.

I reckon that getting dye out of food is a good idea. And I reckon that, a handful of months ago, saying as much out loud would have been unremarkable and, for many of my peers, perhaps even praiseworthy. (Let me pause here to add that saying that having less dye in our foods is good does not prohibit us from interrogating government’s motivations in banning dye.) If I am now obligated to celebrate Citrus Red No. 2 – or at a minimum if I am required to keep silent, lest I accidentally praise the President – then I am this administration’s hand puppet. This administration does not deserve that kind power over me. Nor does it deserve it over you.

My hunch is that my peers fear that if we give this administration even a rhetorical inch that it will soon take a rhetorical mile, that if we allow that it is getting even the smallest thing right then we are living in a halfway house to Trumpism.

I suggest that this is a mistake. I suggest that nurturing moral vigor; that building intellectual vigor; that seeking curiosity and empathy; that practicing non-binary reasoning; and that insisting on our autonomy and agency are, in fact, part of the antidote to Trumpism. If you prefer, to use the language of the moment, I suggest that seriously asking the question What is the federal government getting right? is an act of resistance.

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