Limited Government Is Back in Fashion. Can Republicans Make the Most of It?

By Noah Rothman

Monday, December 13, 2021

 

In 2019, First Things magazine published an open letter that captured a dominant sentiment on the American right. “Against the Dead Consensus” sought to bury the “warmed-over Reaganism” that passed for conservative thought and policy in favor of something more muscular. That something was and remains elusive, but what the letter rejected was plainly specific: the “fetishizing” of “individual autonomy.”

 

Thus, the American right joined the left in the race to get ahead of what seemed like an emerging bipartisan sentiment in favor of activist government. As New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait noted, forces were at work that would “eventually render abstract appeals to small-government conservatism obsolete.” More and more voters were tempted by the promise of an expansive, overweening public sector that imposed itself on American lives—even if they disagreed on the forms that imposition should take. The era of big government was back, and it was here to stay.

 

What a difference a pandemic makes.

 

We’re now closing in on the start of the third year of the global coronavirus outbreak and, with it, the continuation of all the extraordinary interventions into private life that are starting to feel terrifyingly normal. Couple that with unified control of government in the hands of a party that is perfectly willing to use the crisis to advance its long-sought but entirely unrelated policy objectives, and you have a recipe for a political backlash. At least, that’s what the polling suggests.

 

Gallup’s polling in 2019, which had indicated to Chait that an irreversible shift against limited governance was underway, has already reversed itself. In that year, only 41 percent of adults said the government was “trying to do too many things” while 54 percent said the public sector “should do more to solve problems.” Today, the tally has flipped to a more historically familiar form; 52 percent of Americans say government is doing too much while just 43 percent disagree. A complimentary ABC News/Washington Post poll published last month found that six-in-ten Americans are concerned that Joe Biden is doing too much to increase the size and role of government—a figure that includes roughly 30 percent of Democrats, 60 percent of independents, and nearly all Republicans.

 

At the moment, these voters are woefully underserved by both major political parties. The American political establishment has abandoned the “dead consensus” around limited government at a time when that political orientation is desperately needed and sorely missed.

 

Today, checks on overreach at the federal or state level are largely left to the courts to mete out. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which interpreted its Trump-era congressional mandates so broadly that it thought it could abrogate the rights of property owners, was tossed aside by the federal bench. If the Supreme Court follows the precedents established in lower courts, the Biden administration’s vaccine mandates for federal workers and medium- to large-sized employers will meet the same fate.

 

Judges have compelled the chief executive to enforce the laws he doesn’t like and to pare back his attempts to legislate from behind the Resolute Desk. Judicial efforts to save liberty from the designs of imperious politicians have been even more vigorous at the state level—a condition that led Vox’s Ian Millhiser to mourn the ways in which the judiciary is “destroying America’s ability to fight pandemics.” This crucial impediment to the ambitions of heedless politicians cannot survive if American political culture does not support it. It’s fortunate that polling suggests voters do still believe in limited government, even if their representatives don’t.

 

Meanwhile, if the voting public sought to send a message to the activists in American government last November, the message was not received. The schools are still closing—ostensibly to protect the least vulnerable demographic from the ravages of COVID, but also to preserve “mental health” and promote “kindness, community, and connection,” largely in service to the demands of public-sector unions. The country’s most panicky governors are still imposing onerous burdens on employers to stem the tide of a pandemic that can now be mitigated by highly effective vaccines and antiviral therapies.

 

The federal government is still desperately trying to tack several trillion dollars onto the national tab. That ambitious agenda includes provisions that would require banks to provide the IRS with data on accounts that receive more than $10,000 per year in deposits outside wages and tips. It would seek to block the provision of grants to child-care providers that are primarily houses of worship or that provide sectarian education—essentially, an effort to starve religious institutions and force them out of the childcare business. Its own advocates promote this legislation as a means by which the government may, at long last, establish a cradle-to-grave welfare state. If ever there was a time for small-government conservatives to stand athwart history, it is now.

 

But some are still in thrall to the shadows that danced across the wall during the Trump years. Sen. Marco Rubio has sought to bridle national conservatism with the aim of riding it back into political relevance. The American Conservative’s Declan Leary highlights yet another speech in service to the senator’s ambitions, describing Rubio’s newfound philosophy as one that “acknowledges that what the 21st Century requires is not an immediate and reflexive conservatism.” Rather, it necessitates “a robust and ambitious activism to rebuild the kind of social-economic order that invites and deserves defense.”

 

In other words, no one is willing to defend the old conservatism anymore. No one cares for modesty, liberty, the entrepreneurial spirt, and the free markets in which it can thrive. Voters don’t seem to agree. They are no longer inclined to reward activism in government, and they’re not making the same careful distinctions between right and left activism the solipsists on the nationalist right prefer.

 

As the Wall Street Journal’s Elliot Kaufman astutely observed, if those on the right rediscovered the virtues of status quo ante conservatism, it would not be because they are a thoughtless lot tethered to “ossified Reaganism.” It would be a logical response to the demands of the electorate amid a spasm of “restrictions on personal liberty.” America needs conservatism; the boring old sort that isn’t revolutionary but preserves that which needs preserving. If trends continue, first principles may win out over First Things, but not if Republicans don’t give voters that option.