Ever since I participated in the Economic Policy Semester at American University in the Fall of 1980, I have been interested in the role of government in American society. As a 21-year-old college student, studying in Washington during the 1980 elections was an exciting time. As one of several hundred students from around the country with politically diverse viewpoints, I engaged in many lively conversations that continue to resonate with me today. My classmates and I debated the social worth of government, the importance of regulatory agencies, the benefits of public housing, job training, and poverty programs, the need for U.S. foreign aid, and whether myriad other federal programs benefited society.
Forty-five years ago, Republicans and Democrats were frequently but not always on opposite sides of these debates. The two parties each had a healthy mix of liberals, moderates, and conservatives so the lines were not always clearly delineated. Most of the arguments were between self-identified liberals (including me), who believed that the role of government was to facilitate a better and more equitable society while protecting individual liberties, and conservatives, who wanted less government and advanced the virtues of unfettered free markets and rugged individualism.
In college, these liberal-conservative debates were mostly about the means to achieving common goals that we all shared. Although a few classmates on the left wanted to overthrow the chains of capitalism and a few on the right wanted to dismantle the federal government and return to an agrarian economy of the 1700’s, most of us fell within a reasonable centrist sphere of liberal to conservative thought.
Of course, American politics has always had fringe elements on the Right and Left. Other than the first three years of LBJ’s Great Society in the mid-1960s when the governing coalition leaned left on social and economic issues, since World War II, American presidential administrations from Truman to Carter have governed from the pragmatic center. During most of this era, conservative public intellectuals ranging from William F. Buckley, Jr., to George Will and Irving Kristol, and publications like The Public Interest and The National Review, protested from the sidelines what they viewed as the excesses of the New Deal and Great Society. They argued for a smaller, less bloated federal bureaucracy and advocated private solutions to the nation’s ills. And yet, they understood and did not dispute that government provided many essential services for people in a complex and dynamic economy.
As President Kennedy stated at a 1962 press conference, although Americans had been “conditioned for many years to have a political viewpoint—Republican or Democratic, liberal, conservative, or moderate,” most of the nation’s problems are “technical problems, administrative problems” that “do not lend themselves to the great sort of passionate movements which have stirred this country so often in the past.” When it came to preserving and protecting the institutions of our democracy, the Liberal Establishment was a pretty conservative bunch.
Back then, the Republican Party expressed concern for fiscal responsibility and used phrases like “sensible limits,” “shared sacrifice,” and “common ideals.” They discussed the balance between “mutual obligation” and “individual responsibility.” But that is no longer true. Today, so-called conservatives are mostly silent on these concepts – in fact, it is not unusual for the Right to accuse as socialist anyone who utters “common ideals” or “shared sacrifice.” In President Trump’s recent address to a joint session of Congress, we heard no such phrases and instead listened to boastful praise for the massive dismantling of the federal government led by Elon Musk and his band of 20-year-old technocrats. How did we get here?
In The Death of Conservatism: A Movement and Its Consequences (Random House 2010), Sam Tanenhaus asserts that today’s increasingly polarized politics and radical rightward shift within the Republican Party that led to the rise of the Tea Party (where his book ends)—and, by logical extension, to Trumpism—originated during the advent of the Cold War in the late 1940s, when talk of the “enemy within” and congressional witch hunts into allegedly “secret” Communist cabals within the federal government were the regular subject of news reports.
Starting in 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin led a series of high-profile investigations into the Truman and Eisenhower administrations in a failed attempt to expose subversive elements in the upper echelons of government, including the U.S. Army, State Department, and CIA. Along with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which investigated subversive elements in Hollywood and among the ranks of American artists, professors, writers, and intellectuals, a lot of people were harmed and some ruined with scant evidence of Communist infiltration. By the time McCarthy had been exposed as a drunkard and a fraud, the John Birch Society (JBS) picked up where McCarthy left off, even accusing President Eisenhower of being a Communist agent. On the day President Kennedy visited Texas in November 1963, former General Edwin Walker, a prominent JBS member, printed and distributed thousands of leaflets all over Dallas accusing the President of treason against the United States.
Although they lacked legitimate power, McCarthy’s and the Birchers’ true accomplishment was to fuel the Right’s antigovernment crusade and hatred of “Washington bureaucrats” that continues to this day. That the government was perceived as the “enemy” of the people would increasingly become a staple of Republican politics over the next half-century. Respectable conservatives like Buckley, Will, Kristol, and other philosophically minded types understood that such denunciations primarily came from “crackpots” and amounted to an attack on America itself. Indeed, Buckley tried to purge the Birchers from the conservative movement and, post-McCarthy, thoughtful conservatives rejected extremism and sought a more pragmatic and realistic examination of government.
Politicians who attempted to upset the consensus politics of the time did not fare well. When Barry Goldwater was nominated as the Republican candidate for president in 1964, the outcome proved that far-right conservatives were out of touch with most Americans. Through his book, The Conscience of a Conservative (ghostwritten by Brent Bozell, a strong supporter of Joseph McCarthy and a member of the John Birch Society), Goldwater promised a total dismantling of the welfare state. “I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size,” wrote Goldwater. “My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them.” Voter’s rejected Goldwater’s candidacy by huge numbers. Lyndon Johnson won the 1964 presidential election by a landslide, winning 44 states to Goldwater’s six (the electoral college tally was 486 – 52 in favor of LBJ) and the popular vote by 61.1% to 38.5%. (Unlike 2024, that was an actual landslide and mandate.)
Goldwater’s humiliation at the polls temporarily moderated the Republican Party and helped elect Richard Nixon in 1968. Nixon came to fame during his HUAC days and was known for playing dirty politics. But as William Safire noted, Nixon was a politician “willing and even eager to surprise with liberal ideas” in the tradition of former British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, a Conservative Party leader who outmaneuvered his opposition by governing with liberal innovation. As Tanenhaus explains, “Nixon consistently departed from movement antigovernment doctrine.” He created the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, instituted affirmative action programs, and endorsed expansionist Keynesian economic stimulus programs, all things that are anathema in Republican circles today.
Ironically, Nixon’s downfall at the behest of Watergate may have helped spark the Right’s burning suspicion of the “dark liberal forces” and media elites arrayed against Nixon. “The argument that political power emanated from an alliance of liberal government bureaucrats and a sympathetic press,” writes Tanenhaus, “became a favorite theme in the movement’s next phase.”
Over the next decade, a growing antigovernment animus broadened within the Republican Party that reached a pinnacle in the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s. Reagan was the first president in my lifetime who ran and won on an explicitly antigovernment platform. Photogenic with an amiable personality, Reagan preached that government was the enemy and not the solution. He represented a strain of conservatism that wished to upset the New Deal coalition that had retained power for the previous 50 years.
Reagan gave voice to a long-standing belief among the more conservative wing of the Republican Party that an elite corps of salaried, mid-level managers and government administrators had amassed unprecedented authority and shifted power from private business interests to an unelected administrative state. It would not be long before terms like “good vs. evil” began to emerge on the Right when discussing social programs, environmental regulations, foreign aid, and many areas of federal governmental action. Reagan was particularly skilled at exploiting a pent-up anger towards government programs that Reagan charged took money from hardworking Americans and re-distributed it to the undeserving poor through entitlements and welfare programs.
But although Reagan promoted an antigovernment philosophy, he did not actually govern that way. As David Frum, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush, has noted, “not one major spending program was abolished during the Reagan presidency.” Although Reagan promoted the virtues of the private sector and free markets, he understood, as George Will has written, that government, “unlike an economic market, has responsibilities” that included aiding those for whom the market does not provide through “policies that express the community’s acceptance of an ethic of common provision.”
According to Tanenhaus, “conservatism entered its most decadent phase” during the 1990s, when the Right went all in on the “culture wars.” Rush Limbaugh replaced George Will as a spokesperson for the conservative cause. Republicans started to place loyalty to the “movement” above civic responsibility. They began rejecting notions of the common good and consensus politics. Republican politicians who dared to compromise or find common ground with the “enemy” were shunned. When the country elected Barack Obama in November 2008, Republicans made it their mission to limit Obama to one term (it failed) and uniformly opposed his major initiatives, even though many of Obama's proposals adopted conservative ideas.
The Right’s shared disdain for government, combined with a distaste for compromise, has only metastasized with the rise of Trump. They are more interested in destroying, rather than conserving, the institutions, traditions, and mutual obligations of civil society. As recently as three decades ago, moderate Republicans formed a sizable and influential segment of the party. Today, the party’s House and Senate caucuses are firmly committed to the politics of polarization and destruction – a pro-Trump orthodoxy that does not allow dissent or independent thought.
“Therein lies the paradox of the modern Right,” writes Tanenhaus. “Its drive for power has steered it onto a path that has become profoundly and defiantly un-conservative—in its arguments and ideas, in its tactics and strategies, above all in its vision. . . . Classical conservatives have all either deserted the Right or been evicted from it.” This has become most prominent in the resurgence of the John Birch Society and its legacy of conspiracy theories that has become a dominant strain on the Right. Opposition to big government has become opposition to government itself, and the social institutions that sustain democracy. The current White House Deputy Chief of Staff, Stephen Miller, has publicly equated federal workers with “radical left Communists” and “criminal cartels.”
Although Trump personally has no firmly held political convictions other than a fervent belief in his own aggrandizement, the movement he leads has finally, after many decades in the political wilderness, attained true power. While most of its proponents identify as conservative, the policies being enacted are anything but conservative in the classical sense. Trumpism is a non-ideological movement, consisting of right-wing evangelicals, isolationists, America Firsters, Christian nationalists, an assortment of libertarians, and a large collection of conspiracy theorists and alternative reality types who reject traditional news reporting. They perceive the institutions of democracy, government, education, media, and international diplomacy as hostile forces out to destroy the “real America,” which under Trump's worldview includes only Trump loyalists.
In just six weeks, Trump and Elon Musk have sought to eliminate dozens of long-standing and essential federal programs and agencies. Little thought is put into the proposed cuts other than personal revenge. The whole purpose seems to be to radically dismantle the federal government and reverse all the progress we have made over the last 100 years in civil rights, the environment, workplace safety and health, the social safety net, diplomacy, and the building of the post-War alliance.
Trump also seeks to impose a rigid orthodoxy within government that puts fealty to Trump above the Constitution. He is radically eviscerating the independence of all executive branch agencies. He has openly politicized and imposed loyalty tests on traditionally non-political, independent institutions such as the Department of Justice, the FBI, and the CIA. He fired 18 Inspectors General whose job was to independently monitor federal agencies and ferret out actual waste, fraud, and abuse. Although the courts may yet have their say, the Trump administration intends to eliminate the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Education Department, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, and numerous other departments. He has fired thousands of government workers in every agency throughout the government and has vowed to drastically reduce the size of the IRS, the Social Security Administration, and the Veterans Administration. He repeatedly attacks the country’s most elite universities and wishes to eradicate diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives from public and private life.
None of these actions have included careful study and debate, for they are designed to produce random chaos and destruction. The result will predictably wreak havoc on the economy and detrimentally impact the lives of millions of Americans, many of whom voted for Trump.
We have always had strands of far Right, antigovernment extremism on the fringes of American society. As a lone senator, McCarthy could only do so much damage and the Eisenhower faction soon controlled the Republican Party. The Birchers, the conspiracy theorists, and other peripheral elements made noise, but they existed on the sidelines. That is no longer the case. The antigovernment extremists are currently in power, and the damage they are doing to the country, the economy, and the social fabric of America, is profound and potentially unlimited. We are living in dangerous times.
The need for responsible government, which used to be a high ideal of conservative philosophy, has never been greater. The current crop of spineless Republicans who used to claim allegiance to our democracy now slavishly support an authoritarian patriarchy akin to monarchy. Now is the time for true conservatives to stand up to speak. It may be the only hope we have to preserve the Constitution and the foundations of our Republic.
