Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy created a ruckus last week with his draconian budget proposal, neatly sparing the oil industry while proposing to decimate Alaska’s public institutions and rain down hell on schools and municipalities.
You can call Dunleavy a lot of things – Gov. Mongo, Caribou Trumpie, Wasilla’s Revenge – but don’t call him a liar. Dunleavy promised bigger dividend checks and smaller government, and he’s working on those.
Mind you, candidate Dunleavy never provided specifics on what he would cut, and the wimpy Alaska media and too many voters allowed him to dodge that question. Dunleavy vowed to spare ferry service and education, so he’s welching on those promises, but by and large Mongo is doing what Mongo said he would do.
Just as the Cheetoh-in-Chief is moving ahead with his wall at the Mexican border.
So let’s ratchet down the surprise reaction and consider some history.
Dunleavy came of age during the Reagan era, when government was cast as bad and the private sector was good and too many people lost sight of the big, grey-area truth that both government and the private sector must succeed for progress to occur.
Government saved the country’s bacon when the private sector crashed Wall Street in 1929, forcing reforms that prevented that history from repeating (until a Republican Congress and Bill Clinton scratched the rules in the late 1990s, leading to the 2008 Wall Street crash and the Great Recession).
Government led the U.S. effort to save the world from totalitarian rule in World War II. Government provided us a minimum wage, a weekend, and clean food and water. Government ended child labor and took us to the moon.
But that was all forgotten by the time Reagan came around, swaggering with all the fake bravado of a TV cowboy, which was exactly when our very own Gov. Mongo was coming of age.
I know Gov. Mongo because I’m the same age as he, and like him I grew up in Pennsylvania with three brothers and attended a Catholic university during the Reagan era. I was surrounded by Mongos.
These guys were decent enough but they were generally ignorant of history and drunk on the nation’s myths: The myth of the hardy homesteader carving a homestead in the wilderness, the myth that government stymied human progress, the myth that all we needed was to set loose the dogs of industry to save us. These guys drank that Kool Aid as quickly as Reagan could spoon it out.
They drank it for the same reason voters drank Trump’s promise to Make America Great Again, because it tasted good going down.
Like Reagan and Trump, Dunleavy didn’t have to live those myths, or prove they were true. He took a public-school teaching job, eventually working up to become a high-ranking district bureaucrat.
When he ran for governor, Dunleavy didn’t have to spell out a workable, economic plan and present it to anyone. He just turned on the swagger and spouted platitudes.
In our culture, if you’re a tough-talking guy with TV cowboy bravado, you can get away with such subterfuge. Who’s going to call you on it? A mealy-mouthed Democrat? A pencil-necked reporter? Ever since the television age, a five-second sound bite can take a political candidate further than any Ivy League college degree.
Guys like Mongo, Cheetoh and Gipper aren’t dumb. They’re lazy. And too often we forgive them their sloth and fall for their cheap tricks.
But it won’t work for Gov. Mongo. We tried trickle-down, voodoo economics 40 years ago, and it didn’t work. Removing regulations, shrinking government programs, and destroying unions was the Great Republican Plan of 1980. It was carried forward for so long that it hacked chunks out of America’s middle class.
The gap between the rich and the poor in America is now as wide as it’s been in 100 years. The rich are living behind gates with armed guards, our public schools are war zones, and real wages have not increased since the 1970s.
Gov. Mongo is trapped in a time warp. He’s bringing Reaganomics to Alaska 40 years later. The problem is that Reaganism was a cheap political trick, and the nation’s condition is proof that it didn’t work.
Here’s another cultural touchstone Gov. Mongo might remember from his college days: We won’t get fooled again.