Strong leader, small government?

[Physics Guy]

I'm no expert on American politics, but my impression is that the Republican Party always used to be about shrinking the federal government, reducing its power, and generally not expecting government to solve many problems.

The snippets I couldn't help hearing from Trump's inauguration speech, however, seemed to emphasise using the vast powers of the state to achieve things. The MAGA movement seems to expect that all the greatness is going to be made by none other than the federal government, now that it's a Trump Republican government.

I haven't noticed Trump or any of his sidekicks doing much leading in the sense of motivating citizens in general to do things, other than voting for Trump. Instead Trump seems to me to have campaigned on promises of what he would do for everyone, once they gave him the Presidency. In Trump's case, "strong leadership" seems literally to mean "powerful state". That seems to be diametrically opposed to what I always thought was the Republican creed.

I wonder how Trump voters got turned around like that. I think it requires more explanation than just assuming that Republican ideology has never been anything but a cynical tool for pursuing power. Whether for good or for ill, I think the ideology of small government and rugged individualism really has been a big American meme. I think it at least was a sincere belief, even a fervent cause, for a long time.

Did those small-government Republicans spend so long complaining about how the government was too powerful that they finally convinced themselves it was too powerful not to use? Did Frodo put on the Ring?

Or was the small-government creed, even if sincere, always tribal, in the sense that what Republicans hated about big government was never just that it was big, but that it was big and not theirs?

My other curiosity is about how this is going to work out now. I think that the old small-government Republican creed had some truth to it. Governments can't just solve everything. The vast powers of the state aren't going to be enough to do all Trump has promised. He's a Great and Powerful Oz, with a big screen, but no actual magic.

So it seems as though the Republicans will soon have to face their own paradox and decide whether they want government to be big or small, after all. If they really want to try to make Trump's Golden Age happen, they're going to need more resources: more government employees, more laws, and more taxes. Will they turn that corner and become the party of Big Government? Or will they insist that small and cheap government could still do it all, but find some scapegoat to blame for their inability to deliver what they have promised while controlling the government?

[Gadianton]

Good observations and questions, and I certainly don't have all the answers. I don't have a great knowledge of American history or especially American political history.

However, I was brought up as a "small government" conservative and educated that way, and there is certainly a tide change as you've pointed out.

First, there is a lot of ambiguity in what the word "government" means. If you fired all of Washington and made Trump dictator, wouldn't that make for a smaller government?

Most of the time, "big government" seems to have meant government providing goods and services that crowd out private investment, or government regulating private investment. It's not really used in the context of whether America should be expansionist or in the context of personal rights, or in the context of a cult of personality. Er, I don't recall ever hearing we shouldn't have a personality cult leader or that we shouldn't conquer other countries; these things never came up.

Complaining about government overreach, especially on the rights of religion did come up, and that's a tacked on problem with big government, but I think the purity of the idea is with regulations and government provided services. But what about Tariffs, you say? Well, the Heritage Foundation, the architects of Trump as dictator, are pretty consistent with talking about "big government" in context of regulator/service provider. If I look up "Heritage foundation tariffs" I get articles like, "Eliminating Tariffs on Manufactured Goods is pro-growth," "Tariffs are NEVER a good idea", "Do no Harm: Tariffs and Quotas Hurt the Homeland". So how does this jive with making Trump a dictator, who is obsessed with imposing tariffs? Well, all of these articles were written before 2021. The recent articles are like, "The Art of the Tariff Deal," "Trump's targeted Tariff Proposals are Notable," "How I learned to stop worrying and love (the bomb) this Tariff-Like". It just means Heritage, like most right-wingers, are a bunch of spineless fuckwads. They've chosen to abandon their beliefs and kiss Trump's ass in the hope of riding the power grab. In this case, the contradiction you note is huge.

I have a couple more comments though. The first is that there has long been a bizarre relationship between authoritarian "dominionist" Christians and libertarianism. I can't say that I fully understand it. Christian Reconstructionists are literally obsessed with the libertarian economist Murray Rothbard (who Dan had dinner with once). This is all way, way before Trump. Rothbard was an atheist who believed it doesn't matter how many people die from alcohol-related deaths, prohibition is absolutely immoral. Reconstructionists believe the country should be under Levitical law where adultery is punished by stoning to death. Reconstructionists worship Rothbard as secondary to Jesus, and his book, America's Great Depression is secondary to the Bible. How? Well, Rothbard bucked the trend and didn't like the way secularism diminished the role of religion in history and society. And so he's quoted extensively as an atheist who valued religion, Christianity in particular. They even find snippets of things he said that indicate Christianity is the light of an otherwise secular society; Christianity leads, specifically in enlightened industry and trade.

The tiniest window I have into this is psychological, and is my last point. And that is libertarians have an odd relationship with authority and government. It's almost as if what you said, government is okay if they are running it. You have these libertarians who buy a couple acres of land and build their own nation state, dress like South American dictators, print their own money and the whole shebang. Millionaires on yachts who form their own floating nation and are obsessed with role-playing as a government. Going so far as to send ambassadors and even monetary aid packages to other pretend libertarian nations (one in Africa) that are poor. So they have these treaties and alliances with these other pretend societies and playing out the politics of this mini world is what's fun for them. In a darker turn, there's a good documentary on Netflix called The Gray State, about a young independent filmmaker who was obsessed with authoritarian regimes and the government colluding to control everyone's lives. The big twist was that he was a tyrant at home who controlled others in his life in these same ways and eventually killed his family.

[Physics Guy]

If you fired all of Washington and made Trump dictator, wouldn't that make for a smaller government?

Yeah, the ultimate small government is an absolutist monarchy, where all power is vested in a single person. Monarchy was the default form of government for a good millennium or so in much of the world. I've always figured it wouldn't have lasted so long, in so many places, without being in some way good for the subjects. I tried to think what monarchy offered the peasants.

The only thing I read that made sense to me was that there was indeed a natural alliance between the monarch and the peasants, against all the intermediate nobles. The big advantage of concentrated power, from the peasants' point of view, is that one person in charge of the whole land is unlikely to do much harm to any one of them in particular. Sure, the big ruler could have some of them tortured to death every day before breakfast, but the odds of any particular peasant getting picked will be low, because there's one ruler and so many peasants. The local nobles, on the other hand, are serious dangers to peasants. They're hungrier than a ruler who already has everything, and above all they're closer.

So I figure that at least some of the reason why a lot of poorer Americans seem eager to give Trump lots of power is just that they're sure he won't use that power to oppress them in particular. They don't have to trust in Trump's character to be sure of that. They just have to make the simple calculation that he can't possibly single them out in the crowd. So instead they're going to get to watch while he bashes their hated superiors.

If that is how any Trump voters unconsciously think, then today it's a fallacy. The US government may be too weak to create any golden age through state power, but a dumb executive whim definitely could make things worse for most working citizens. It would probably happen in a complex and indirect way, though. Many of those keen Trump voters would be able to understand the complex effect clearly if they wanted to understand it, but if what they want instead is to avoid accepting that they made a mistake, they'll be able to avoid connecting the dots.

[Gadianton]

First to clarify other points, I think all of the "big government is evil" talk goes back to Friedrich Hayek. His book The Road to Serfdom is universally loved by intellectual Republicans, not just Austrian nut-jobs like Christian Reconstructionists. Hayek was reacting to the popularity of science-based socialism, where differential equations could be applied to optimization problems for distributing capital. The backdrop was the great depression and the apparent failure of the free market to allocate capital. These fears of "big government" has been corrupted over the years, as in our time, there is no such thing as "socialists" like back then, who wanted the government to control all capital by the dictates of a team of scientists. Keynes was complimentary of Hayek's criticisms, "leftist" Keynesian economics isn't the same thing as scientific socialism or simply "socialism". Republicans have slowly lost touch with the roots of the "big government" talking point, but now have gone completely overboard, as populist Republicans have little connection at all to traditional Republican concerns about government. Rather than anti-intellectual intellectuals like Austrians, they are simply uneducated anti-intellectuals who storm the capitol and then sit back and think, "okay, what was it we're supposed to do now that we've taken pics of ourselves putting our feet on Pelosi's desk?" Places like Heritage I think saw populism and Trump as a way to get the votes and win, but they are losing the war and slowly the new right is morphing into something where older talking points like "big government" don't have much relevance.

[Gadianton]

So I figure that at least some of the reason why a lot of poorer Americans seem eager to give Trump lots of power is just that they're sure he won't use that power to oppress them in particular.

That seems to be true. Trump supporters seem to think that once they've joined his side, they're in on the corruption gravy train; either a) they're going to get hooked up or b) Trump's vengeance and hammer swinging is at least unlikely to hit them, as you say.

But I think there is more to it. The world is a complicated place. I certainly don't understand the moving parts of government even at a superficial level, and I think people are disconnected from reality. It's not easy to see consequences of actions. They don't understand what all those departments do so might as well just get rid of them and save some money.