A complex society requires effective government

Glenden Brown at OneUtah uses the current water crisis in Atlanta, Georgia, to examine the failure of conservative ideology:

The bottom line: We live in a complex society that requires intelligent planning, foresight and effective government to mediate between competing private interests and to organize and manage the infrastructure. The basic infrastructure needed to operate a modern city is mind-bogglingly complex — a series of interconnected systems that require constant maintenance, upgrades, changes and improvements. The engineering feats required to simply install an effective sewer system for Salt Lake County's million residents staggers the imagination. When it works smoothly, we don't notice it. When it fails, it does so spectacularly. […]

Hostility to government — part and parcel of the conservative ideology — creates its own problems. Throughout the US, thirty years of conservative anti-government, anti-tax madness has created its own legacy of rolling failures. Bridges collapsing in Minnesota, levees failing all along the Mississippi River, sinkholes swallowing streets. These are foreseeable events, but a government crippled by anti-tax, anti-government ideology can't act. Forced forever into a defensive crouch, conservative governance has proven itself incapable of doing what must be done to maintain the basic needs of a modern, complex society.

Forty years of hostility to government action has led Atlanta into a box canyon — ever more development, ever less planning. Conservatism triumphant. Newt Gingrich's district was in the suburban sprawl north of Atlanta (think Provo without the sense of style and a whole lot more money). The ideology got him elected for years. It sounds good. It makes good soundbites. It won elections. The bill always comes due.