The Anti-Government Campaign
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Goldwater’s views and policies proved wildly unpopular among voters and he lost in a landslide, garnering only 36% of the vote. But even though he lost this political battle, he was to eventually win his political campaign to put anti-government ideology at the center of the Republican Party. Young Goldwater supporters had infiltrated many parts of the party in their successful attempt to get him the nomination. Many stayed on and continued to push his political agenda and to move the party toward more of an explicit minimal government stance.
This effort finally paid off in 1980 with the nomination and victory of Ronald Reagan. Anti-government activists in the Republican Party were able to take advantage of a number of developments that contributed to growing public disenchantment with government, such as the failure of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal. Conservative also played on public resentments, such as the perception by some whites that government policies like civil rights and affirmative action unfairly favored minorities. Finally, Republicans also benefited from increasing public worries about economic insecurity. They offered the appealing argument that it was government that was causing the stagnant economy and rampant inflation of the late 1970s, and that all we need to do to solve these problems was to reduce government and its regulation of business.
Corporations also played a key role in the growing power of the anti-government movement. Stung by many political defeats in the 1960s and 1970s at the hands of environmental groups, unions, and public interest groups, the business community regrouped and began to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into political efforts. Donations to political action committees soared and helped to elect pro-business and anti-government candidates. Large donations to conservative and Libertarian think-tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute helped them to create an elaborate policy agenda for reducing government, and made these organizations into major players in Washington D.C. (For more on the crucial of role of business in the anti-government campaign, see “The Anti-Government Coalition.”)
Ronald Reagan was the first modern Republican president to run on an openly anti-government platform. And he made his “government is bad” perspective clear in a famous sentence he uttered during his first inaugural speech: “Government isn’t the solution; it is the problem.” In the end, Reagan had very little real success implementing his anti-government agenda. He did succeed in pushing through several large tax cuts, but his efforts to cut back on many federal programs were routinely defeated by a Democratic Congress.
What Reagan did achieve was to put minimal-government sentiments at the center of mainstream Republican ideology. Since the 1980s, virtually every Republican candidate (and even many Democratic ones) has made running against government a major part of his or her campaign. And once in office, conservatives have spent a lot of their energy demonizing and denigrating government. Being anti-government – sometimes radically so – has simply become part of what it means to be a Republican.
These anti-government sentiments became particularly clear when the Republicans took over Congress in the 1990s. A central part of the “Republican Revolution” was an immense hostility toward many established government programs – from welfare, to business regulation, to environmental protection. One Republican leader, House Majority Leader Dick Armey, said that one of his political ambitions was “reduce the federal government by half.” He even had a hit list of dozens of agencies to be axed, and the “first to go must be the Department of Education, which produces noting but puffed up rhetoric, while squandering billions of dollars annually.”4
But again, the Republicans were not successful in pulling of this anti-government revolution. President Clinton was successful in blocking most of their efforts to cut back on government programs. And these conservatives also found that they were out of step with public opinion. While most Americans liked the ideas of tax cuts, they did not like the idea of cutting back on programs that they valued – like education, health care, etc. There was a particularly strong public backlash against the Republican effort to severely cut back environmental regulations. Any truly successful effort to implement an anti-government agenda on the federal level would have to wait until the Republicans controlled both Congress and the White House.
When George W. Bush was elected in 2000, the conservatives were finally in a position to effectively promote their anti-state ideology. Of course, they were not hostile to all parts of government. They were happy to spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year on defense programs and foreign wars. And many were quick to endorse the unprecedented expansions of George W. Bush’s presidential powers – all in the name of fighting terrorism.
When Bush and his fellow conservatives talked about reducing government, what they were targeting were the three main pillars of the modern democratic state: social programs, regulation of business, and the taxes needed to support these two efforts. For them, “too much government” really meant too many social programs, too much regulation, and too much taxation. And “reducing government” meant starving social programs, rolling back regulations, and cutting taxes. All three of these were important goals during the eight years of the Bush administration.
Cutting taxes was one of the most successful Bush administration attacks on government. Taxes were seen as the life blood of government; so if taxes could be reduced, then it would become more and more difficult to maintain funding for government programs. George W. Bush pushed through a number of enormous tax cuts during his administration. These tax cuts cost the federal government over two trillion dollars in lost revenue from 2001 to 2010 alone.5 This helped to create huge deficits and a growing national debt – all of which are now used by conservatives to argue that we can’t afford any new government programs.
President Bush also took aim at social programs during his tenure in office. He repeatedly targeted education, housing, job training, community development, Medicaid, food stamps, and children’s services for budget cuts. Probably most emblematic of his hostility to social programs was his push to partially privatize Social Security. As The New York Times columnist Paul Krugman pointed out at the time, administration officials made it clear that they were not as interested in “saving” Social Security as they were 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.”6 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.”7 (For more on Bush’s tax cuts and attacks on social programs, see “Starving the Beast.”)
During the Bush years, conservatives also made progress in their quest to “deregulate” American society. They were not only trying to roll back regulations on business, they were also busy handing over federal regulatory agencies to the special interests they were supposed to be regulating. Under Bush, the United States Department of Agriculture official in charge of regulating the meat packing industry previously worked for a group that lobbied for the National Cattleman’s Beef Association. Bush also named a mining industry executive to head the Mine Safety and Health Administration, and a lawyer who specialized in representing corporations seeking to block environmental regulations to be a top administrator in the Environmental Protection Agency. Officials who were supposed to be protecting workers, consumers, investors and the environment spent much of their time quietly dismantling existing regulations, delaying the development of new ones, and downplaying enforcement efforts. (For more on Bush’s anti-regulatory efforts, see “Stealth Deregulation.”)
The Political Appeal of Anti-government Ideas
To understand the growth and influence of the anti-government movement in the United States, you need to understand the powerful political appeal of government bashing. The idea that “government is bad” serves at least three important political functions for conservatives: (1) it provides a convenient scapegoat for many people’s problems, (2) it serves as a common complaint to unite the disparate parts of the right-wing coalition, and (3) it creates a convenient political smokescreen to obscure the real intentions of some conservative interest groups. Let’s look at each of these things in turn.
Blaming government for virtually all of society’s problems can be very alluring. As the anxieties and insecurities of average Americans mount, the anti-government movement offers them a simple – and simplistic – explanation for who is at fault. Is the economy stagnant? It is because of government over-regulation of business. Are you having trouble paying your bills or sending your children to college on your current wages? It is because government takes so much of your salary in taxes. You didn’t get that job or that promotion? It is probably the fault of government promoted affirmative action programs. Worried about the moral decay of society? Blame government for taking prayer and God out of schools. Don’t have enough money for retirement? It’s the fault of government for not letting you invest your Social Security money in the stock market. Blaming government is a convenient, one-size fits-all explanation that can be stretched to fit just about every problem in this country.