Republican Voters Care More about ‘Intrusive’ Government than ‘Big’ Government

The rise of conservative populism has triggered yet another round of soul-searching in the conservative movement about the proper size and scope of the federal government. As my colleague, Jim Geraghty, notes today, most Americans seem just fine with big government. In fact, that’s been the case even of core tea-party supporters at the very height of the movement. How easily we forget recent history, but in 2011 FreedomWorks “crowdsourced” a deficit-reduction plan and found that 40,000 core tea-party activists were reluctant to make any financially meaningful changes to Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

Combine those entitlement programs with national defense — which conservative voters are loathe to cut — and even classical tea partiers aren’t willing to touch 70 percent of the federal budget. Throw in interest payments on the debt, and three-quarters of the world’s largest budget is not just off-limits but set to grow considerably. After all, the American population is aging, decades-old weapon systems need replacing, and national-security threats persist. Big government isn’t going anywhere.

But in the real world, there’s an experiential difference between “big” and “intrusive” government. For example, let’s contrast Social Security with, say, Common Core. It’s the rare American who would say that Social Security is oppressive. The federal government’s largest single program is experienced as a modest payroll tax and a (for now) modest but important check for older Americans. Common Core, by contrast, represents an utterly insignificant budget outlay at any level of government but is causing parents and kids enormous anxiety from coast to coast.

Even a program like Medicare — which is certainly experienced as “intrusive” by doctors and other health-care providers — is less oppressive to everyday Americans than the complex regulatory superstructure that makes it more difficult to do everything from start a business to add a room to your house. Indeed, far from experiencing the Roosevelt-Johnson entitlements as oppressive, millions of Republican voters see Social Security and Medicare as indispensable in enabling their lifestyles.

Obamacare, by contrast, uniquely motivated the Republican coalition because it represented the perfect storm — big and intrusive. Health-insurance premiums and deductibles spiked in many states (intruding dramatically on the pocketbook) and people who liked their doctor couldn’t keep their doctor, intruding on their freedom of choice.

#share#Again and again, small and inexpensive government mandates intrude deeply on individual choice or require costly private-sector adjustments that ruin industries and wreck lives. Gun control? Intrusive. Federal land management? Oppressive. Environmental regulations? Job-killing. Selective IRS audits? Terrifying. How much money did it cost the government in its attempt to implement the HHS abortion-pill mandate under Obamacare? Yet that microscopic expenditure — backed by the full force and authority of the federal government — represented a direct threat to the First Amendment.

And looming over it all — at least in the GOP primary so far — is the intrusion caused by the government’s failure to expend resources — its failure to protect the border and enforce immigration laws. The government-encouraged and enabled flood of illegal immigrants is experienced as an intrusion in the most tangible of ways, compounding crime problems, overwhelming social services, and depressing wages for the most economically vulnerable class of Americans.

Following the nuclear detonation of the Cruz-Trump alliance, constitutionalists and populists find themselves snarling at each other, and there’s credible talk of a Republican crackup. But a Republican party that combines constitutionalists with populists can unite — for now — against government overreach, against the intrusions that are costing Americans their constitutional rights and depriving them of economic security and opportunity.

Yes, that kicks the entitlement can down the road yet again, and it will alienate an establishment element that is committed to comprehensive immigration reform, but the fight against intrusive government can unite a base that is urgently concerned about our loss of liberty and about middle-class economic insecurity.

Entitlement reform will come because it has to. We will have to look big government straight in the face and define our fiscal reality for the next half-century (or longer). And — make no mistake — that will be a fight, with progressives and conservatives both battling for the hearts and minds of tens of millions of populists. The class warfare will be brutal, but it’s better to begin the battle with populist allies rather than a mass of bitter enemies.

The urgency of stopping and reversing Obama’s version of the “fundamental transformation” of America has to take priority over dealing with Roosevelt and Johnson’s. Yet unless and until we take on the New Deal and Great Society, America will remain the land of big government. Indeed, it will have the biggest government of them all.