The Anti-Government Campaign
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The Targets: Social Programs and Regulations
Of course, not even the most strident anti-government zealot hates government across the board. Most conservatives, for example, are more than happy to spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year on national security and defense programs, or to use the power of government to prevent abortions. So when they are attacking “government,” what they really are aiming at are the two main pillars of the modern democratic state: social programs and regulatory efforts. “Too much government” really means too many social programs and too much regulation. These are the two activities that have become more and more central to government since the New Deal, and it is these activities that anti-government activists want to curtail.
Small government policymakers have been targeting virtually every aspect of the social safety net; and their continuing tax cuts have made it increasingly difficult for the federal government to adequately fund its social spending in areas like healthcare, welfare, education, and retirement. But as Paul Krugman has pointed out, nothing epitomizes more the hostility of many conservatives toward the New Deal legacy as the effort to partially privatize Social Security. He has noted that anti-government activists have made it clear that they are not so much interested in “saving” Social Security, than they are in weakening it and striking a blow against government and social programs in general. One high placed Bush White House official argued that the ultimate goal of overhauling Social Security was to cut benefits and to “help the nation move away from dependency on government.”8 And as another conservative ideologue explained, the real agenda was to attack the whole notion of government social welfare spending: “Social Security is the soft underbelly of the welfare state. If you can jab your spear through that, you can undermine the whole welfare state.”9
Conservatives are also making progress in their quest to “deregulate” American society. They are not only trying to roll back current regulations on business, they are also busy handing over federal regulatory agencies to the special interests they are supposed to be regulating. Among the typical administrative appointments of President Bush has been a mining industry executive to head the Mine Safety and Health Administration and the naming of a lawyer who specialized in representing corporations seeking to block environmental regulations to be a top administrator in the Environmental Protection Agency. Right-wing administrators who are supposed to be protecting workers, consumers, and the environment are quietly dismantling current regulations, delaying the development of new ones, and downplaying enforcement efforts.