It’s No Surprise That Conservatives Have Rediscovered Their Love Of Federal Power – OpEd

By Ryan McMaken

While not surprising, it has nonetheless been remarkable how quickly American conservatives have been convinced to ignore or make excuses for virtually everything the regime does, so long as Donald Trump is in the White House. This includes the administration’s runaway deficit spending, inflationary monetary policy, ramping up of foreign wars, a growing disregard for federalism, and even higher taxes. Policies that would have been denounced by conservatives under Barack Obama or Joe Biden are reframed as virtuous under the current administration. 

Especially notable is conservatives’ current enthusiasm in opposing decentralization and local control. Conservatives now champion the use of federal police and federal troops in any city where the local government runs afoul of the administration’s agenda. Calls for more aggressive federal power have been especially loud on the matter of immigration in recent weeks, but conservatives have also called for the administration to ignore legal limits on the use of federal troops in domestic law enforcement overall. Similarly, conservatives have cheered new federal powers to override state regulation of AI, and now are calling for the nationalization of all election law. 

At this point in history, however, highlighting the ideological inconsistencies of Americans is about as necessary as saying the sky is blue. For anyone who has been paying attention for more than just a few years, there is no reason to be surprised or scandalized by the total lack of commitment to any ideological standards. Nor is there any reason to expect anything better. This is simply how the dog-and-pony show that is American electoral politics functions. 

Very few Americans care anything at all about ideological consistency or about sticking to principles. For the average American ideologue what’s really important is settling scores with perceived enemies by any means available. The long-term consequences are of little importance. Mass democracy and “inflation culture“ has taught Americans to think only in the short term and to demand immediate gratification in all areas of life—especially when “gratification” means getting that emotional high of feeling like you’ve gotten the better of political opponents. 

This short-term thinking requires supporting the use of political power through whatever tools are immediately available. In modern America, political power is lopsidedly in the hands of the federal government. Those who are freed from the burdens of intellectual consistency will be perennially attracted to the use of federal power as the perceived solution to every political problem. 

This is why the same people who claim to want restraints on federal power invariably end up demanding these restraints be dismantled when the “right people” get elected. While it is found on both Left and Right, this contradictory behavior is most obvious in conservatives because conservatives so often claim to want “limited government.” One might say it is part of the conservative brand. Yet, conservatives reverse themselves on this position whenever they believe themselves to be “in power.” 

The current conservative fondness for deficit spending, easy money, regime-change wars, untrammeled federal police power, and higher taxes (i.e., tariffs) is simply the current manifestation of a long-established phenomenon. The current situation is merely the latest repetition of the same cycle that has been in place for decades and which is hardly unique to the Trump years. After all, 25 years ago during the George W. Bush years, conservatives embraced federal power, federal spending, and the ongoing destruction of federalism. Conservatives then again pretended to be against federal power during the Obama and Biden administrations. Now the cycle is repeating as expected. 

This phenomenon is a wonderful thing from the perspective of the actual ruling elites in the deep state, the silicon valley-surveillance cabal, and the banker class. As the nominal political leaders—i.e., the elected partisan figureheads who supposedly oversee the administrative state—rotate in and out of their positions of ostensible political power, each side gets the opportunity to taste the benefits of being “in power.” The occasional stint as the de jure ruling party provides lucrative opportunities for doling out benefits to political supporters and also scoring political points against public adversaries.

Sure, each party sometimes has to be the out-of-power group in this scheme, but this is all the more helpful to the ruling elite because the changes in party rule give the impression that there has been a true change. In practice, however, no change takes place in the de facto governing class. Policy changes are allowed to take place in fringe areas that have little impact on the overall ability of the political class to govern. These involve changes in policies that are relatively inconsequential from the ruling elite’s perspective: DEI at universities, tariffs (which are only a small sliver of federal revenue), taxes on tips, abortion, and the smaller details of where welfare dollars are spent. 

The policies that are truly core to maintaining the ruling elites’ power, on the other hand, never change substantially. These include the central bank’s monetary powers, overall control of the multi-trillion-dollar welfare state, and control of the national-security apparatus. 

The lack of any true division in the ruling elite’s policy agenda can be seen in how the policy response to emergencies—alleged military threats, pandemics, and financial crises—is always essentially the same regardless of which party is in power. So, with every emergency we witness an increase in federal pressure on media, vast new amounts of federal spending, new innovations in expansive monetary policy, and more focus on surveillance. It is in the face of these emergencies that the ruling elite ensure there is no departure from those policies that reinforce state power. As political scientist Carlo Lottieri has reiterated, “the real sovereign is the political group that has the final decision about the critical situation, in the state of emergency.” The realsovereign isn’t constrained by either Republicans or Democrats. 

With Trump in the White House, his rank-and-file supporters now rather fancifully believe they are in power, that their preferred policies will be implemented, and that these policies will somehow make a lasting change to the ruling regime under which so many Americans have seen their standard of living decline and their freedoms disappear.  This will prove to be a false hope. Trump could deport ten million people—a number that few expect him to achieve—and this will not substantially threaten the ruling elite in any way. Their methods for retaining power most certainly do not require large numbers of immigrants. If that were the case, the American political class would have become weaker during from the 1930s through the 1950s. Quite the opposite happened, in part because the government class does not rely on any single political party to stay in power. 

Each new emergency only brings new powers and new riches to the governing elite that exercises the real sovereign power. With the Trump administration treating large-scale immigration as yet the latest emergency, the cycle will repeat. The long-term consequences of this will become all the more apparent the next time the political parties switch places and the new political figureheads who are “in power” will shift priorities to their own coalition of political clients and interest groups. The new powers readied for the ruling regime during the Trump years will make it all much easier. 

• About the author: Ryan McMaken (@ryanmcmaken) is editor in chief at the Mises Institute, a former economist for the State of Colorado, and the author of two books: Breaking Away: The Case of Secession, Radical Decentralization, and Smaller Polities and Commie Cowboys: The Bourgeoisie and the Nation-State in the Western Genre. He is also the editor of The Struggle for Liberty: A Libertarian History of Political Thought. Ryan has a bachelor’s degree in economics and a master’s degree in public policy, finance, and international relations from the University of Colorado. Send in your article submissions for the Mises Wire and Power and Market, but read article guidelines first. 
• Source: This article was published by the Mises Institute