The Anti-Government Campaign
There is a political movement dedicated to denigrating and radically reducing American government. What is it and how did it come to be?
Every Wednesday morning, a group of conspirators meets to plot out how to most effectively attack the federal government. This is not a group of rag-tag terrorists – they wear $2,000 suits and occupy powerful positions in society. But their ideas are politically radical and they do pose a real threat to the normal workings of government in the U.S. They are a group of leading conservatives who believe that government is a malevolent force in society and they have a fierce determination to drastically cut it back. They are convinced that the central problem in our country is too much government – too many social programs, too many regulations, and too much taxation – and they are committed to doing something about it.
They get together every week at a breakfast meeting hosted by Grover Norquist at the headquarters of Americans for Tax Reform on L Street in Washington, D.C. Norquist is widely considered to be one of the most powerful leaders of the conservative movement in the United States and the foremost advocate of slashing taxes and dismantling government programs. This meeting serves as one of the informal nerve centers for the anti-government campaign in the United States. The attendees of the invitation-only affair normally include members of Congress, corporate lobbyists, Republican national committee representatives, the House and Senate leadership staff of the GOP, conservative media editors and reporters, conservative think-tank intellectuals, and prominent grassroots activists. For many years, one frequent guest was Karl Rove, President George W. Bush’s most influential advisor. During the Bush years, the agenda included such things as which tax cuts to push next in Congress, how to ensure that nominees to the federal bench are sufficiently right-wing, which federal programs and federal agencies should be targeted for cut backs, and the progress of local grassroots campaigns to rein in taxes and government spending. Norquist has always made it clear what the ultimate aim of all of this activity is: “My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub."1
This goal of a radically reduced government is not simply the dream of small-state activists within the Beltway in Washington D.C. Consider the 2008 platform of the Republican Party in Texas. It called for the elimination of every federal agency not mentioned in the original constitution – including the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Departments of Energy, Housing and Urban Development, Health and Human Services, Education, Commerce and Labor. Programs like Social Security and policies like the minimum wage would also be abolished. And Texas Republicans believe that not only should taxes never be increased, but that most current taxes should be abolished, including income taxes, inheritance taxes, capital gains, corporate income taxes, payroll taxes, and property taxes.2 In short, this GOP platform is a blueprint for how to cripple the federal government.
These days, with President Obama in the White House, the strategy of this anti-government campaign has changed. In Norquist’s weekly meetings, instead of talking about how to shrink government, the topic more often is how to prevent its growth. Norquist and his colleagues have become dedicated to derailing any Democratic effort to create new public programs to deal with our pressing problems. They have urged Republican lawmakers to vote against every new initiative from the Obama administration, from the economic stimulus program, to universal health care, regulation of the financial industry, and global warming legislation. For Norquist and his friends, the only good government program is a dead government program.
Some people had hoped that the election of Obama would signal a reduction in the relentless government bashing that has come from the political right. But the President’s attempt to create new public sector programs has actually lead conservatives to dramatically escalate their attacks on government. In recent years, the anti-government rhetoric has reached near hysterical levels. Former Bush Assistant Secretary of State, Ellen Sauerbrey, called the Obama program to rescue the auto industry a form of “fascism.” On Fox News, Glenn Beck has repeated accused the President of being a “closet communist” and warned of the coming of a “totalitarian state.” For the conservative political activist Alan Keys, Obama’s policy initiatives show that he is clearly a “radical communist.” And the right-wing media pundit, Michael Savage, has described the Obama administration as a “fascist dictatorship.”
The Tea Party movement is another manifestation of this virulent backlash against active government. This grassroots effort has sought to whip up public anger and resentment and channel it directly at “big government.” Many of the core organizers of this movement are rabid tax-haters; and they believe that virtually any new government program, whether it be the fiscal stimulus package or health care reform, is a grave threat to their individual freedom. One indication of the virulence of their fear of government was a sign at one anti-big government rally in Washington that read: “National Socialist Health Care: Dachau, Germany – 1945” and included a photo of a pile of naked Jewish corpses at the Nazi death camp.
Clearly, the anti-government movement is alive and well in the United States. But where did it come from?
The Evolution of the Modern Anti-Government Movement in America
To understand this intense hostility toward government we need to understand its history. The roots of the modern anti-government movement can be traced to the 1940s and 50s. It was largely a reaction to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, which introduced many of the policies and programs that now define the modern state: federal mechanisms to manage the economy, large social programs like Social Security, the increased regulation of business, and progressive taxation. These liberal policies created a conservative counter-reaction which condemned FDR’s programs as “creeping socialism.” Right-wing critics called for a return to the laissez-faire days of the 1920s, when businesses and financial institutions were largely unregulated, taxes were low, and people were free to deal with social and economic problems on their own.
However, the New Deal programs proved widely popular among most Americans and few had any real interest in returning to the “bad old days” of the 1920s and 30s. This meant that during the 1940s and 50s, the anti-government movement remained small and largely intellectual – kept alive by a handful of conservative writers. In 1953, for instance, Russell Kirk published The Conservative Mind, still considered a seminal work in right-wing anti-state ideology. In it he condemned federally sponsored school lunch programs as a “vehicle for totalitarianism,” and labeled Social Security as a form of “remorseless collectivism.” Another writer, Ayn Rand, was also promoting a radically pro-individual/anti-government vision of society in her novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.
In 1955, William F. Buckley founded The National Review, widely considered to be the first serious intellectual journal of conservatism in the U.S. Buckley and his colleagues were heavily influenced by libertarianism – a radical anti-state ideology that had few adherents among the public, but was attractive to conservatives fighting an uphill battle against growing government. Libertarianism maintains that individual freedom is the highest political value and that virtually all government activity inevitably impinges on that freedom.3 In this view, the only legitimate purposes of government are to maintain order and protect individual rights, particularly property rights. Governments should not run schools, regulate business, or establish any social welfare programs. Government funding of armies, police, and the courts are considered necessary evils – all other government activities are just evil.
In the 1950s, most mainstream Republican politicians, like President Eisenhower, wanted nothing to do with the libertarian-tinged anti-state ideology of Buckley and his cohort. They believed that they had little choice but to accept New Deal economics and social programs – these were simply a given of modern government. Other leading Republicans in the 1960s and 70s, like Nelson Rockefeller, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, also accepted many of the basic tenets of New Deal liberalism. They were political moderates who at times actively supported the expansion of government programs and responsibilities.
The one exception to this trend was Barry Goldwater, who ran for president on the Republican ticket in 1964. Among other controversial stands, Goldwater made his anti-government hostility perfectly clear. He often stated that his primary goal was to shrink government, not expand it. As he put it at the time:
“I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them. It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones that do violence to the Constitution or that have failed their purpose, or that impose on the people an unwarranted financial burden.”