In the aftermath of President Biden’s State of the Union address, some elements of conservative opinion have granted Biden a kind of grudging respect. His speech was replete with a populist, almost-Trumpian message, full of promises not to reform entitlements and to employ protectionist measures to Americans’ alleged economic advantage, for example. At the American Conservative, Curt Mills wrote that “Biden slyly attempted to eat Trumpist Republicans’ brunch by co-opting many planks favored by ‘economic nationalists’ (I say let the man co-opt).” In the New York Times, columnist (and National Review contributor) Ross Douthat argued that “Biden just gave a State of the Union speech whose key themes and most enthusiastic riffs could have been lifted—albeit with more Bidenisms and fewer insults—from Trump’s populist campaign.” Douthat warns it’s “a message whose potency Republicans underestimate at their peril.”
The gist seems to be that Biden has figured out that Republicans are increasingly open to big-government tools and has decided to box them out by employing those tools and the message that goes with them instead, stealing some arcane insight from the Right. But this leaves out an important point: Biden and Democrats haven’t changed. Central planning and statism have been central to the Democratic agenda for decades — indeed, now more than a century. In this magazine’s 1955 mission statement, William F. Buckley Jr. called the growth of government “the dominant social feature of this century” and announced that National Review would fight it “relentlessly.” It is Republicans who have, of late, expressed a greater fondness for bigger government.
The reaction of some conservatives to Biden’s expressing again the Left’s innate tendencies compels a reminder: Republicans will never be able to out-statist the Democrats. Conservatism in the American context, rightly understood, abhors centralization and intervention and draws its strength politically and culturally from its accord with a political tradition designed to do the same. The Left is fundamentally at ease with deviating from and undermining this tradition and therefore will always be more comfortable with and more willing to enact the kinds of policies Biden outlined earlier this week. Right-wing statism will always have difficulty competing with the left-wing variety, which can easily outbid, outdo, and out-promise it. Freedom is the better bet. Conservative would-be tinkerers suffering from mild Biden envy right now ought to remember that.