I remember when this was considered essential to being an American Citizen. We had classes on this in K-12.
Sometime in the last decade or so, it's become synonymous with "communist."
Which is pretty rich, considering what's going on, these days.
Both Abe Lincoln and Joe McCarthy are doing 3200 RPM, right now. That's pretty crazy.
So, no, it's not "communist" to advocate a functioning civil sector.
I was raised in the Cold War "Red Menace" days, and Civic Duty was considered "Red-Blooded American." My father[0] was in the CIA. He was a Harvard LLB, and could have been quite wealthy, but chose what he considered his Civic Duty, as a career (which wasn't really rewarded well).
I've never been particularly extreme, myself (very centrist -a vanishing species), but Civic Duty has always been important to me, and to my family, for generations.
That no longer seems to be the case.
And yet every single time Communists (Lenin included) have gotten into power...
(I don't throw the baby out with the bathwater though. There are theoreticians who have added a lot more nuance here, especially Poulantzas)
Nobody refuses free government help even if they hate the government, just as no one pays extra taxes even if they love the government. The point is always to distribute their belief more widely so that everyone has to live with it.
"Gotcha" hypocrisy arguments about personal behaviour I don't think are great taken from either left nor right.
Which, perhaps ironically, shows that welfare works as intended, even for morons that want to see it dismantled.
These are defensible positions based on various world views, but they should not be accepted automatically. But I see here and other places people speaking as if this is just "obvious fact."
This was not the case in the past. Civic duty, the need for a functioning civil service, the notion of a commonwealth and/or social contract, etc are all foundational notions coming out of the enlightenment and were at least formerly mainstream.
The Ayn Rand types have always been around. And they're welcome to their positions. I'm concerned about how we get here now that this is a default position for people to take in North American society. I certainly don't agree with it. And I suspect if you force the majority of "mainstream" people to go through the arguments piece by piece, they wouldn't either.
I'd also argue that decades of corroding the public service's effectiveness through economic and ideological warfare has in fact made the public service look like exactly the thing its enemies claim it is. If you make the civil sector into a partisan battle, and play games with its funding, and spread cynicism about its motives... surprise you're going to get a partisan, inefficient, and cynical public service.