Plato called it the ship of state. We are currently having a bit of a problem with determining just where we want to steer it. A hopeful thing to remember is that the bigger the boat the slower its reaction to the wheel. Think of tons of steel and cargo pushing straight ahead on a set course, moving aside equal numbers of tons of water with every ship’s length advance. Newton couldn’t ask for a better example of inertia. It takes an enormous force to change its direction. The delay can be excruciating. Ask the captain of the Exxon Valdez.

The US economy is a pretty big ship. The effect of a change in electoral politics or a new set of twitter-activated guidelines by a self-designated populist king is bound to prove a daunting task right from the start. It will be difficult to produce even a minor deflection from the steady course established by FDR and the New Deal eighty years ago — a course that has led the country gradually closer to the ideal of reciprocal social obligations between the rich and the poor — one that was also slowly being embraced by all the other the industrially and intellectually advanced nations of the world. The incoming administration does not yet seem to have appreciated just how difficult that change of course will be.

Let’s look at some numbers. (They will be approximate, since the sources vary in their degrees of up-to-dateness, and seldom agree completely with each other in any case. I will unapologetically round off — up or down — and use plausible approximations*.)

Official number of people on federal payroll	2,800,000	1% of US workforce
People in the military	1,600,000	7/10 of 1%
People on state & local tax-funded payrolls	19,500,000	8%
Subcontractors paid with taxpayer dollars	7,600,000	3%
Courts system	66,000	less than 1/10 of 1%
Total government employees	31,566,000	13%

*Some sources put these numbers as high as 17 percent. I am being conservative.

The accuracy of the numbers is not the issue here. The point is that somewhere between one in every six and one in every eight American workers works for the government and is paid from the public purse and is dependent on the government for his or her economic security, prospects for the future, and eventual retirement.

By contrast, the number of elected politicians (federal, state, and local) on the public payroll is approximately 550,000. Add on a total of 90,000 registered lobbyists and you get to 640,000, still well below 1% of the total workforce for the count of policymakers — about one quarter of one percent. Politicians make no direct contribution to the economy (they don’t produce any tangible goods like shoes, or automobiles) but make their indirect contribution by making the rules for the actual producers.

The policymakers are thus the brass up in the wheelhouse of our ship of state. The workers on the federal payroll are the crew, and their combined efforts will have to be enlisted to effect a change of course. “Hard Right!” or to continue the nautical metaphor, “Hard to starboard!”

But what if the crew members look out through their portholes (or into their pay envelopes) and notice that the new course is not having the effect they were told it would have — what if they discover that the old familiar cycle of tax cuts, deregulation, and dismantling of the safety net and economic collapse is producing just the opposite effect (as it always has before) : boom and fat profits for the rich; bust and taxpayer financed bailouts by the poor to rescue the rich and restore some equilibrium to the system — and realize that this new course is headed to the same old rocks? Is there something those 31 million on the public payroll can do about it?

To borrow a phrase from a recent would-be steerslady who didn’t have great success in her own attempt, “You betcha!”

When the orders come down through the speaking tube — “More steam!” “Rudder hard right!” — or to the galley — “More caviar up here!” “Cut the crew’s rations!” — the sailors can suddenly turn out to be deaf, or stupid, or sick, or just plain confused. They can stop oiling the gears, start short-sheeting the beds in the officers’ quarters, start tossing the garbage over the windward instead of the leeward rail, and accidentally misread the compass. They can rely on the passengers to eventually understand that the problem is with the brass; not with the crew. They can vote out (but admittedly only after two years) what they mistakenly voted in. They can set the ship back on the course it had been following for eighty years, and hope that the damage inflicted when the misguided brass had their brief turn on the bridge was not too great. Time is on the crew’s side. It takes a long time to actually change course : the bigger the ship, the longer the time : and the US economy is the biggest in the world. There’s hope.

But what about those rocks? How close might we get to them? There is no doubt they exist, and no doubt that they constitute a danger. Some of them harbor colonies of sirens, singing seductive songs about alternative rules of the road, if not outright alternative facts. We need to give the brass bigger cabins. We need to squeeze the crew into smaller hammocks. Can that agenda be delayed long enough to fend off catastrophe? Can the rocks be avoided for the length of time it will take for the new course to be recognized as self-defeating? One can only trust to luck. Or take up golf and learn to dig as many “accidental” divots in the boss’s greens as possible. (How’s that for mixing metaphors?)

Interpretation of the orders coming down the tube is up to each of us, individually. We are the Resistance. Vive la Résistance!