(Photo: AP/Carolyn Kaster) Members of the media gather for a news conference at the Capitol Building in Washington, DC, on November 18, 2014, announcing the start of repairs in the Capitol Dome Restoration Project. Below is an excerpt from American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Prosper , by Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, published by Simon & Schuster on March 29. A t the beginning of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting , Milan Kundera’s narrator describes a snowy 1948 scene in Prague, with leading communists addressing a crowd. One, Vladimir Clementis, places his fur hat on the head of his bald companion, Klement Gottwald. When Clementis is later purged and executed, the Party’s propagandists erase him from the photograph. All that is left is his fur hat. The enabling role of government is like that fur hat. Today, we see only tiny reminders of a much bigger reality. We know government built a road or a school but too often fail to...