The Conservative Case for Limited Government

By Philip Klein

Thursday, November 10, 2022

 

For much of the history of the American conservative movement, limiting the size and scope of government has stood as one of its central goals. But as traditional political alliances have fractured in the earthquake and aftershocks of Donald Trump’s presidency, the standing of limited-government philosophy on the right has been challenged — and this split has already had ramifications for electoral politics. 

 

In previous cycles in which Republicans found themselves in opposition (1994, 2010, and 2014), they made cutting spending, reducing the debt, and shrinking government a key part of their campaigns to retake power. In 2022, such messages were barely anywhere to be found on the campaign trail, beyond ominous warnings from Democrats of secret Republican plans to slash Medicare and Social Security that nobody believes are going to come to fruition.

 

While Republicans have notoriously not lived up to promises to rein in the government when they have held power, in the past conservatives have tried to shame Republicans for not keeping their pledges and pressure them to do better (the Tea Party movement being a prime example). 

 

But conservatives have largely moved on from making the case for reducing the size and power of Washington. In some cases, this shift has been passive. That is, some conservatives would still say when pressed that they support smaller government, but they are simply more concerned about other issues at the moment, or have decided that the battle to restrain government has already been lost and is thus now a wasted effort. Yet another group (who sometimes refer to themselves as “national conservatives,” the “New Right,” or “populists”) is making a more frontal assault on the idea of limited-government conservatism. To them, it is a relic of a past time — a framework that may have served its purpose during the Cold War battles against statism, but that is no longer relevant. The devotion to free markets, they say, has allowed Big Tech companies and other woke corporations to become the enforcement arm of the cultural Left and stifle conservative speech, while free-trade deals have hollowed out working-class communities. They want to use the tools of the state to impose their preferred agenda on the nation and bludgeon those who stand in the way. 

 

Given these trends, as we contemplate the prospect of Republicans’ regaining unified control of Washington after 2024, those of us who still believe in limiting government must make the case to other conservatives as to why this is a worthwhile fight to have — not just because of some abstract philosophical belief, but also because it is crucial to confronting the challenges that the United States will face in the coming decades. 

 

It has become popular in some circles on the right to mock “zombie Reaganism” and insist that while it may have made sense back in the 1980s to argue for smaller government, such a message is now outdated. Yet on the day Ronald Reagan was inaugurated and declared, “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” the total federal debt hadn’t yet reached $1 trillion (or roughly $3 trillion, adjusted for inflation); today, it’s over $31 trillion. It’s difficult to see why the issue of the size of the federal government should have less salience now than it did then, given that the problem has gotten so much worse.

 

During the Covid pandemic, debt held by the public eclipsed 100 percent of economic output for the only time in the nation’s history other than World War II. But there is a major distinction between the two events. After the crisis of World War II ended and spending returned to more normal levels, the federal debt receded, falling to 25 percent of gross domestic product when Reagan took office. But even though we’re on the other side of the pandemic, debt is still expected to remain at elevated levels, according to the Congressional Budget Office, eclipsing the World War II record over the next decade and soaring to a staggering 185 percent of GDP by 2052, when today’s children will be trying to raise families. 

 

Sustaining such a large and growing debt will mean subjecting younger generations to punishing trade-offs from an ugly menu of options: economically crushing tax increases, sudden and severe cuts in benefits, soaring interest rates, chronic inflation, or some combination of the above. 

 

It also doesn’t have to take decades for problems to manifest themselves. The inflation we’re experiencing now was turbocharged by the glut of spending that was injected into the economy in reaction to Covid, especially the $1.9 trillion package that President Biden signed into law after economic growth had recovered. The core Medicare trust fund is projected to run out of money in 2028, meaning that a potential Republican president would have to figure out some way to address the shortfall or face the prospect of an automatic 10 percent cut to Medicare while running for reelection.

 

What’s contradictory about the New Right’s critique is that its adherents spend so much time mocking limited-government conservatives as weak, feeble, and even unmanly for a supposed unwillingness to fight culture-war battles with sufficient ferocity, and yet at the same time they argue that we should simply acknowledge defeat in the battle over the debt and recognize that Republicans are never going to do anything to actually rein in government. Why is it cowardly to express skepticism about weaponizing the administrative state against social-media companies but somehow the epitome of manliness to run from the issue of entitlement reform in fear of Democratic attack ads and the AARP? Why is it unrealistic to advocate reforms to programs that eat up a substantial portion of our budget and yet completely realistic to believe a Republican president is going to end wokeness by replacing the entire federal bureaucracy, issuing anti-woke executive orders, and then ignoring court decisions striking down those orders that exceed presidential authority? In the end, the distinction between the New Right and limited-government conservatives isn’t that one side wants to fight and the other side wants to run away, but that the New Right wants to run away from some fights to prioritize others that they deem more important. 

 

It’s also mistaken to act as if the growth of government has no implications for other issues — the fight for life, culture, family, and religious liberty. It is through Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, and the mammoth Department of Health and Human Services that the Left has sought to expand taxpayer funding for abortion, promote transgender surgeries, and declare war on Catholic hospitals. The subsidized child-care bill that Democrats attempted to pass last year would have effectively excluded many faith-based child-care providers (making them a less financially viable option for parents) and prioritized working parents over those who stay at home to take care of their children. Not to mention that every baby born today will inherit nearly $94,000 in federal debt and all the associated problems — something not particularly conducive to family formation in the long term. 

Advocates of a more forceful embrace of federal power on the right reject the notion that it will embolden the other side by arguing that the Left is going to use any means necessary to impose its agenda regardless of what Republicans do. But this doesn’t truly consider what it would mean to have both parties in an arms race to find new ways to unleash the government on its citizens. During the previous administration, there were a lot of Republicans — including Trump himself — arguing for abolishing the filibuster so that they could get more of their agenda passed. One of the arguments they used was that the second Chuck Schumer became Senate majority leader, the Democrats were going to end the filibuster anyway. In practice, however, Democrats didn’t, and they were significantly constrained in what they were able to accomplish with full control of Washington. Had Republicans pulled the trigger during the Trump administration, much more of Biden’s agenda would have sailed through. 

 

Arguments for deploying the administrative state more aggressively for conservative ends rest on the premise that there is never any hope of reining in federal bureaucracies. But this is an odd argument to make during a period when we finally have a Supreme Court that has shown a willingness to limit executive overreach. Biden has already been rebuked for attempting to extend an eviction moratorium without Congress and to use the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to implement a de facto national Covid-vaccine mandate. He also faces challenges in seeing through his illegal student-loan-relief plan and will likely be further constrained as he attempts to bypass Congress over the next two years. 

 

Finally, the argument that the battle to limit government has already been lost also neglects to recognize that things could always get worse. That is, even though the federal government has gone through extraordinary growth since the New Deal, it would have grown even larger had there been no conservative movement to push back. One need only look at Europe, where conservative parties long ago made their peace with the welfare state, to see how government agencies have crowded out civil society and eroded the role of religious institutions while birth rates have nose-dived. There is little doubt, for instance, that were it not for the stubborn small-government streak within American conservatism, the U.S. would have joined every other Western country and had a fully socialized medical system by now. It is through socialized medicine that, in Britain, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (with the Orwellian acronym “NICE”) makes crude calculations about how much money it’s worth to extend life, and that, in Canada, the country’s euthanasia law will soon be extended to individuals with mental-health issues. 

 

When it comes to the connection between government and large corporations, there are plenty of steps that could be taken to unwind the cozy relationship that has traditionally existed between Big Business and the Republican Party. Conservatives should oppose crony capitalism and the granting of special favors to large corporations (via taxes and regulation) to the disadvantage of smaller businesses. In doing so, they would be more faithful supporters of free enterprise. What they should not do is attempt to mimic (or even surpass) the Left in the use of regulations as a way of rewarding allies and warring against industries they don’t like.

 

There is no way in which a nation with an unsustainable debt and a ballooning welfare state will be an accommodating place for conservatives in the long run, no matter how much some may fantasize about seizing the dragon and precisely aiming its fire at their enemies during the relatively brief windows in which Republicans have power. Conservatives have traditionally shared a modesty about whether powerful people can (or should) organize the affairs of others. They should not abandon the fight for limited government.