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.”
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.
Scapegoating government also has the advantage of not requiring a great deal of analysis to formulate solutions to our complex societal problems. All we have to do is reduce government. If big government is the cause of our problems, then obviously small government is the solution. Saves a lot of time.
Using the government as a scapegoat also appeals to many conservatives because it allows them to ignore the real – and more disturbing – causes of some of our problems. For example, die-hard government bashers have strained to blame the disastrous mortgage crisis and financial meltdown of 2008-2009 on bad government policies. This means they don’t have to acknowledge the numerous failures of the banking and financial sectors that actually precipitated this crisis, and they can thus maintain their cherished illusion that unregulated markets are always good for society. (For more on how and why conservatives scapegoat government, see “Why Government Becomes the Scapegoat.”)
Government-Hating as Political Glue
Disdain for government also serves as much of the ideological glue that holds the Republican electoral coalition together. The groups that make up this coalition are actually quite diverse – well-off suburbanites, gun owners, libertarians, fundamentalist Christians, the wealthy, small farmers, business interests, fiscal conservatives, and anti-tax activists – and they often have very different political priorities. Such a coalition is always in danger of falling apart. Much of what holds them together is their common dislike for government. So while they are all promoting somewhat different issues – the NRA wants the freedom to own guns, business wants less regulation, fundamentalists want prayer in school – what they do share is a common conviction that government often works against their interests and that they would be better off with less of it. As Grover Norquist has explained, this resentment is what binds these different groups into what he has called the “Leave Us Alone Coalition.” “The issue that brings people to politics is what they want from government. All our people want to be left alone by government. To be in this coalition, you only need to have your foot in the circle on this one issue."8
Government Bashing as a Political Smokescreen
The anti-government crusade is also popular among some parts of the right-wing coalition because it provides them with a smokescreen that they can use to obscure their real political goals. Many anti-government activists – especially Libertarians – are sincere in their belief that a minimal state would be good for all of us. But others simply invoke anti-government rhetoric as way of promoting their own self-interest. For example, drug companies and the health insurance industry have constantly exploited people’s misgivings about big government as a way to promote their own economic self-interest. In debates about health care reform, these businesses and their conservative allies have constantly raised the specter of “government bureaucrats controlling your health care decisions” as a way of scaring people away from reform plans that might cut into their corporate profits.
Similarly, when businesses want to reduce regulatory protections for workers, they argue that they are only trying to reduce the government red-tape and bureaucracy. They are not putting their workers at risk; they are simply “opposing unreasonable intrusions of big government into the private sector” and “getting government off the back of businesses.” Who could complain about that? Similarly, conservative consultant Frank Luntz has told business lobbyists and Republican lawmakers that when they are trying to weaken environmental protections, they should describe their activities as “streamlining” and “modernizing” government. They can thus seem to be attacking “excess government,” not the environment.
Anti-government rhetoric also allowed Republicans to avoid the accusation that their policies are a form of “class warfare.” Clearly, most of the benefits of the Republican tax cuts during the Bush administration fell to the rich and to corporations, and the costs of cuts in social programs fell disproportionately on working people, minorities, and the poor – the very definition of class warfare. But such criticisms were blunted by Republican claims that they were only waging war on government. President Bush claimed that his numerous tax cuts were simply an effort to reduce the onerous burden of government taxes – and everyone knows taxes are bad. And cuts in social programs were portrayed as simply “reining in out of control government spending” and “reducing big government.”
This anti-government spin on conservative policies works to obscure the fact that an attack on government is often an attack on those Americans who are least well-off. In reality, reducing government takes away power away from those in society who most need the government to protect their interests – those who are most vulnerable to job layoffs, those who need to protect themselves from workplace discrimination and dangers on the job, or those who need government to ensure equal educational opportunity or a fair minimum wage. As Max Neiman explained in his book, Defending Government, shrinking government not only eliminates programs that aid the less well-off, it also reduces their political power as well.
The attack on government has involved … a focused effort to make it more difficult for the less privileged of society to have access to governing authority. If the assault on public programs and the capacity to produce them is permanently and broadly successful, then making life fairer and better for the least advantaged and less politically connected members of society will be more difficult.9
The basic point is this: the deeply disturbing nature of many conservative policies is being hidden behind a political smokescreen – an effort to portray these policies as mere attempts to reduce government and the “bad effects” it is having on society. The whole anti-government campaign has become a very handy way for some groups to disguise the true intentions of their policies and to deflect likely public opposition.
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Who exactly makes up this anti-government political coalition? And who is funneling billions of dollars into its activities? For answers, see the next article: “The Anti-Government Coalition.”
What are the specific – and disturbing – policy goals of this anti-government movement? For more on its political agenda, see “The Anti-Government Movement’s Radical Agenda.”
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Notes
1. Quoted in Robert Dreyfuss, “Grover Norquist: 'Field Marshal' of the Bush Plan,” The Nation, April 26, 2001.
2. http://www.tfn.org/site/DocServer/GOP_-Final_2008_Platform.pdf?docID=582
3. For a summary of Libertarian philosophy and policy positions, see the Libertarian Party’s website, http://www.lp.org/issues/issues.shtml.
4. Dick Armey, The Freedom Revolution (New York: Regnery Publishers, 1995) p. 304.
5. Urban Institute, “Bush Tax Cuts,” January 16, 2008. http://www.urban.org/decisionpoints08/archive/01bushtaxcuts.cfm
6. Daniel Schoor, “Bush’s Social Security Plan Carries Ideological Underpinnings,” All Things Considered, March 7, 2005.
7. Paul Krugman, “Spearing the Beast,” The New York Times, February 8, 2005, p. A25.
8. William Greider, “Rolling Back the 20th Century,” The Nation, April 4, 2003. www.thenation.com/doc/20030512/greider/3.
9. Max Neiman, Defending Government: Why Big Government Works (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 2000) p. 2.