For almost 50 years, we Americans held common purpose with our government. From the early 1930s and Franklin D. Roosevelt through seven presidents, people believed that aggressive government made a positive difference in their lives.

That belief was shared by both Republican and Democratic administrations. Eisenhower created the massive, job-producing interstate highway system; Nixon enacted vigorous federal wage-and-price controls to slow near rampant inflation, encouraged the National Environmental Policy Act, Endangered Species Act, and clean air and water; Ford, in his shortened term, vigorously negotiated the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, SALT II.

Under Democratic Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson and Carter, Americans embraced federal efforts from the New Deal through the New Frontier. Those efforts, astonishing in their boldness and success, created the American middle class, held the Wall Street money-changers at bay, spread freedom around the world, and vastly improved educational attainment for our citizens.

However, during the past 17 years, Americans have found ourselves oddly separated from our own government. We have become timid about the uses of government. Beginning on Jan. 21, 1981, when, in his inaugural address, President Reagan assured us the government was the problem, we began to doubt and later distrust government.

Both Democrats and Republicans began to both campaign against and belittle the very government they led. Even while trying to appropriately expand the government's efforts to improve our lives, President Clinton cleverly but falsely assured a joint session of the U.S. Congress that "the era of big government is over."

From Reagan through both Presidents Bush, the federal government has refused to keep pace with our nation's growing domestic needs, and for a time that drift was supported by a majority of our citizens. The results are now obvious — crumbling infrastructure, including collapsing bridges; an antiquated railroad system; dangerous sewer systems; lack of health care coverage; levies and dikes that can't contain either the spring run off of our rivers or the fury of hurricanes.

And, as is now so tragically obvious, our federal government quietly watched as unregulated Wall Street and corrupt money mangers ran amuck.

While we Americans dozed off in our timidity, our government failed to properly assist in even our most basic public needs of energy, transportation, safety, health and education. We have now lost two decades of our vital private–public partnership.

During those years we could and should have had the same vigorous public leadership that we enjoyed in the previous half century. Instead we succumbed to leadership by slogans such as "fraud, waste, and abuse," "tax and spend," "unfunded mandates," and "deregulation."

We seemed to distrust everything and anything governmental. We were wrong, but the hangover from our two decades of excessive timidity still lingers. Even now, some of our citizens resist the very change that the majority voted for last November.

We and President Obama entered this year with calamity on the horizon — an economy so weak it threatens to widen into a black hole pulling the world's economy into it; two wars — neither of which are winnable; our nation's larger banks near collapse; an automobile industry in peril; and 20,000 people a day losing their jobs. This country once again needs solutions every bit as big as our problems.

As America had proven from the 1930s to 1980, we are a people who can move boldly to overcome our greatest threats, but to do so we must once again believe in our ability to act in common, through government, to resolve our greatest difficulties which can be solved by neither the private sector or the states.

That, after all, is what our founders envisioned when they created a federal government and called for a federalist partnership.

Pat Williams served nine terms as a U.S. Representative from Montana. After his retirement, he returned to Montana and is teaching at the University of Montana.