A Not So Grand Old Party

Spectator

By Stephen Tuttle | Feb. 17, 2024

A balanced budget. A strong national defense. Smaller, less intrusive government. Unambiguous anti-communism. Near isolationist foreign policy.

Those used to be the calling cards of politicians—and their supporters—calling themselves “conservatives.” Their loyalty was to a philosophy rather than an individual, their hero an ideology, not a politician.

Edmund Burke, the 18th century Anglo-Irish philosopher and politician, is considered the original founder of conservatism. But we think more of William F. Buckley as a founder of our modern conservatism and Barry Goldwater’s 1960 book, The Conscience of a Conservative, as a template for mid-20th century conservative politicians.

Things were a bit different then—neither the Civil Rights nor Voting Rights Acts had been passed; abortion was illegal everywhere; despite the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling, public schools in the south were still segregated; birth control was not yet legal; the Cold War was real and threatening; and the environment was a convenient place to get rid of our waste.

When Goldwater’s 1964 bid for the presidency was crushed by Lyndon Johnson, American conservatism took a quick turn away from some of its guiding principles.

Richard Nixon made the federal government bigger, not smaller, and supported the creation of a whole new federal bureaucracy, the Environmental Protection Agency. Far from being isolationist, he expanded our role in Vietnam and opened the door to trade with China. By the standards of today’s Republican party, Nixon was a liberal.

So too was their former standard bearer, Ronald Reagan. According to the U.S. Treasury Department, the national debt almost tripled during Reagan’s two terms in office, and according to the Department of Labor, the federal workforce increased by 324,000 new employees. So, more debt and a bigger government.

George W. Bush, who admittedly had to deal with the aftermath of 9/11, saw more increases in the size of government and spending to fund that growth. The creation of the Department of Homeland Security consolidated 22 federal agencies into a single bureaucratic behemoth, further fattening both the deficit and our debt. Additionally, the Bush administration spent hundreds of billions on ill-fated wars in the Middle East, first to root out weapons of mass destruction that did not exist in Iraq and then to bring western-style democracy and capitalism to a part of the world unfamiliar with concepts they did not welcome.

(The last president to balance the budget or create a surplus was a Democrat. Bill Clinton, working cooperatively with a GOP controlled House, had budget surpluses for fiscal years 1998-2001.)

Today, too many self-described conservatives seem little committed to those original ideals and more committed to an individual whose ideals are…let’s call them flexible.

The current GOP leadership, starting with their putative presidential nominee, is minimally concerned with budget deficits or debt. According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, the Trump tax cuts and pandemic relief programs will add a whopping $8.4 trillion to the national debt by 2026.

Despite all the grousing, the federal government didn’t get smaller, either. According to the Partnership for Public Service, the federal workforce grew by 0.9 percent during Trump’s four years in office. That doesn’t sound like much, but it is three times the federal employee growth rate in Barack Obama’s last four years as president.

We’re not exactly at the head of the anti-communist class anymore, either. Donald Trump has gone out of his way to denigrate our traditional allies while praising many of the world’s leading dictators of some of the most oppressive governments including, but not limited to, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, China’s Xi Jinping, and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.

Trump most recently said he would encourage Putin and Russia, already engaged in an invasion of Ukraine, “…to do whatever the hell they want…” to NATO countries who Trump believes haven’t paid enough to NATO. (Member countries are encouraged to pay 2 percent of their gross domestic product to NATO, but it is not a requirement, nor are there NATO dues.) And it was Trump, not Joe Biden, who made a deal with the Taliban to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan.

Issues have certainly changed over the years, but too many Republicans have abandoned too many of their original ideals. Most leaders of the party that fought totalitarianism now support a presidential candidate who embraces its strongest adherents. The government they wanted to shrink keeps getting bigger and spending more, not less.

A political movement that began more than 60 years ago is now virtually unrecognizable, replaced not by new and vibrant ideals but by ovine fealty to a person who wants to be president so he can punish his perceived enemies. It has nothing to do with any political philosophy at all.

It’s a very long way from Buckley’s conservative philosophy and even farther from Barry Goldwater’s conscience.