The incoming administration seems torn between two very different outlooks on government.
The incoming administration seems torn between two very different outlooks on government.
A llowing for the fact that people are infinitely complex fractals who contain multitudes, there are roughly two kinds of Republicans these days.
The classic iteration of the typical GOP-leaning American is skeptical of the state. He regards the unwieldy leviathan as an obstacle to his flourishing, to say nothing of the public in aggregate, and he looks askance at the motives of those who would appropriate its power for themselves. He would prefer to see federal and state governments do less — to diffuse authority across competing power centers and shrink the federal budget to the point that it might approach something resembling sustainability.
The second sort of Republican is far more at ease with governmental authority. She sees the state as a tool to engineer preferable outcomes at scale. While she hasn’t entirely shed her distrust of public sector authority, she also does not see an inviolable distinction between private and public conduct. She has less regard for the voluntary principle insofar as plenty of voluntary behaviors have deleterious effects on the public good. While power must be managed with care, the unilateral abdication of power once entrusted to elected officials by voters is its own sort of negligence.
These two outlooks can exist in the same head, but they do not synthesize well in practice. Over time, a government inclined toward both will find these two incompatible dispositions are at odds with one another. One will rise to the fore and supplant the other.
At first blush, the incoming Trump administration 2.0 exhibits the second outlook more than the first. The president-elect and, even more so, the vice president–elect are hardly allergic to big government. Both pledged to take a hands-off approach to the largest drivers of America’s public debt: popular entitlement programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. They seem to see a lot to like in the ham-fisted (and often failed) efforts by Biden administration Federal Trade Commission chairwoman Lina Khan to break up private sector interests if those interests are in the hands of their political adversaries. They don’t seem to see anything wrong with using the tax code to engineer the ideal society, and that is a charitable way of putting it. “Raise their taxes and do whatever else is necessary to fight these goons,” J. D. Vance wrote in 2021 of the corporate scions Biden tried to cajole into supporting his initiatives. “We can have an American Republic or a global oligarchy, and it’s time for choosing.” Government is a cudgel as well as a ladder.
For a while, those Republicans who saw a future for themselves in party politics mimicked this affectation. To them, “Wall Street” is a slur. The answer to what they saw as the uneven application of justice wasn’t the even application of justice but an unevenness that benefits their tribe. Protectionist trade barriers may result in the inefficient allocation of capital, but they’re a vital tool for the preservation of domestic industries that cannot compete in the global marketplace — comparative advantage be damned. And so on.
Vivek Ramaswamy was once one of these people. Now, he’s not.
Shortly before the election, Ramaswamy began emphasizing the libertarian aspects of his brand of “national libertarianism” over and above the nationalistic elements. The sense of betrayal among his boosters in the national-populist wing’s cheering section was palpable. Now tasked with joint oversight of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency — the laudable mission of which is to “dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies” — Ramaswamy has cast himself as the vanguard of the “small-government revolutionaries” who would bring Washington, D.C., to heel.
His co-consul on the DOGE, Elon Musk, seems similarly infatuated with libertarian icons such as Argentine president Javier Milei. “Deregulation and reducing government spending leads to prosperity,” Musk recently opined. The tech billionaire has long mouthed small-government slogans, but they conflict with his support for federal interventions into the private economy aimed (ostensibly, at least) at mitigating the effects of climate change and with his presupposition that population growth must be a federally subsidized enterprise.
Again, people are complicated. Whether owing to personal growth or ideological inconsistency, Team DOGE is on board with the goal of forcing the government down to a more manageable size. That is good news! But the administration of which they are a part has not communicated the philosophical basis that explains why shrinking the size and scope of government, even at the risk of threatening J. D. Vance’s priorities, is a valuable mission. Indeed, elsewhere in the administration, that seems not to be the goal at all.
If Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s nomination to helm Health and Human Services is any indication, the GOP owes Michael Bloomberg and Michelle Obama an apology. “President Trump and I are going to stop the mass poisoning of American children,” Kennedy averred — tapping into a potent strain of distrust of and discontent with the ingredients that make up mass-produced shelf-stable food products.
An earlier iteration of the GOP would scoff at the condescension on display in his assumption that the drooling mid-wits who make up the general population just don’t know that Cheez-Its and Cap’n Crunch aren’t the most healthful options available to you. A more modern Republican who “knows what time it is” is likely to welcome an imperious intervention into private affairs, if only to save the public from itself. They know not what they consume, the poor fools. If only there was some benevolent bureaucratic sherpa to hold their hand and lead them in the direction of government-approved best practices.
The same cognitive dissonance is on display whenever the capital-management class tries to separate the promise of Trump 2.0 from the reality. The second Trump administration will slash red tape, dispense with onerous regulations, and unleash the promise of American innovation as we rush headlong toward the second American century, the CNBC crowd maintains. But not when it comes to the pharmaceutical industry. Or the automotive sector. Or commercial retail, technology, and power tools. Or really anyone who takes part in the global marketplace. “All studies consistently find that Trump’s proposed tariffs would have a negative impact on the United States economy,” the non-partisan Tax Foundation recently observed:
Many of the same studies also included estimates of the economic effects from Trump’s first term trade war, which range from a reduction in real output of 0.2 percent to 0.7 percent. The economic literature reports a similar range of effects on US output from the first trade war, from -0.17 percent to -0.50 percent.
Our first sort of Republican would not see this as a desirable tradeoff. The second sort is willing to absorb inefficiency and limit the competitiveness of American enterprise to achieve a variety of other objectives, most of which are social in nature.
For now, the incoming administration seems torn between these two outlooks. In the afterglow of victory, the mutual exclusivity of these two perspectives can be minimized and the conflict between them postponed. But soon enough, the administration will have to find an identity for itself. Is this a pro-growth party or a big-government (but our big government) party? We’ll soon find out.