FDR-era programs treated coverage as a right of citizenship. You were entitled to help because you were a citizen, not because you had made yourself a sympathetic character.
GoFundMe operates on a different theory of justice. You receive help if you can make the proper appeal, hold attention, move strangers. If you cannot perform — or will not — you do not get help. The illness is the same. The capacity to win an audience is what changes the outcome.
The Information Economy requires us to perform. To get attention. To provoke emotions. To compete on the stage of politics as theater.
FDR and LBJ's bureaucracies were impersonal but reliable. Those generations did not have to perform. They were citizens, and citizenship was enough. Now you have to be more than a citizen. You have to be a story worth telling.
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