What kind of government did conservatives want

T he past few years have put the size and role of government at center stage of our national politics. But the raging debates about how much Washington is doing and spending have involved almost exclusively yes-or-no questions about the left's vision of government.

The right has been very clear about what government should not be doing, or should be doing much less of, but it has not had nearly enough to say about just what government should do. It is not hard to see why. The Obama years have set a high-water mark for the size and reach of the federal government, including a post-World War II record for federal spending as a percentage of gross domestic product at Prior to Obama, no president had submitted a budget with a trillion-dollar deficit; he has submitted four of them.

And even as the administration's projections for the coming years promise smaller deficits, they also promise a larger and more expensive government than Americans have ever seen. The president's defenders maintain that the circumstances he inherited — an epic financial collapse that drained revenue from the Treasury and exploded the federal deficit — meant he had little choice but to spend our way out of trouble. They are surely right that Obama faced enormous economic challenges, many of which persist.

But the president did not simply respond to an economic crisis: He leveraged that crisis to pursue longstanding goals consistent with his liberal ideology. Along the way, he extended the power of the federal government to an unprecedented degree, pushing through the largest stimulus package in history and, in a crowning act, a federal regulatory takeover of health insurance. And the president has always insisted that he would not be satisfied with half measures — that "the danger of too much government is matched by the perils of too little.

What might be enough for him? Recall "The Life of Julia," an interactive infographic released by the Obama campaign during the presidential race. It followed a fictional woman through every stage of her life from shortly after birth to just after retirement.

Each cartoon image demonstrated, and celebrated, her utter dependence on government. Atomized, defenseless individuals sustained by the enfolding embrace of the state: Such, it would seem, is the Obama vision of Americans' appropriate relation to their government.

The administration's federal power grabs have hardly gone unopposed, of course. Channeling public alarm, particularly regarding the stimulus and health-care legislation, the Republican Party scored a historic victory in the mid-term elections. Since then, the Republican-controlled House has sought to restrain and re-limit government, including championing key reforms to Medicare.

And Republican lawmakers have provided an effective counterweight to presidential overreach — significantly restraining spending since and preventing further leftward legislative leaps.

Republicans have argued that unrestrained spending, and particularly unreformed entitlements, will burden the nation with unmanageable levels of debt in the coming decades and starve the budget of funds for other essential purposes. They further contend that a large, meddlesome, intrusive state not only undermines the private economy but also crowds out civil society and enervates civic character. They have therefore been fairly clear, and quite emphatic, about what they believe the government should not be doing.

But if it is true, as they have argued, that the Democrats' vision is a travesty of American government, then what is the proper and appropriate extent and purpose of that government? Conservatives in recent years have not done enough to answer this question, and as a result have offered voters an oppositional view of government that, while perhaps stoking worry and resentment, is insufficient to build public trust in the prospect of a conservative government.

And such a negative approach to the question of the role of government is not only electorally insufficient — it is unbecoming of conservatism and of the deep commitment that conservatives claim to the nation's founding ideals. Among some conservatives, the problem at times seems to run deeper than a failure to articulate a vision of government. Particularly among libertarians and some of those conservatives who identify with the Tea Party movement, government overreach has found its mirror image in fierce anti -government fervor.

That impulse is itself nothing new on the American right; what is different today is both its intensity and its widening appeal within conservative ranks. It involves a rhetorical zeal and indiscipline in which virtually every reference to government is negative, disparaging, and denigrating. It is justified by an apocalyptic narrative of American life: We are fast approaching a point of no return at which we stand to lose our basic liberties and our national character.

Perhaps not surprisingly, this prominent wing of the conservative coalition seems to regard conservatives who demur from its approach as themselves part of the problem, if not the main obstacle to its solution.

Unwilling to see the extremity of the moment, and declining to support the all-out effort to confront it for example, by shutting down the government in an effort to defund Obamacare , such conservatives and Republicans are accused of having objectively joined the other side.

This view is intensely felt — understandably, given the provocations of the last five years. It is, however, not only an incomplete understanding of the situation but a distortion of it, and an obstacle to achieving a properly conservative governing vision that will command the respect and win the support of a majority of the American people. For conservatives who want to regain that support, and for Republicans who want a chance to govern, a crucial first step is to see the inadequacy of the oppositional and negative approach to the question of the government's purpose and role.

It is inadequate not simply because it fails to give Republicans enough to offer voters. It is inadequate because it does not amount to a conservative vision — on historical, philosophical, or practical grounds. At the heart of the oppositional view of government espoused by some libertarians and Tea Party leaders is a particular version of American history.

Our national recovery, they insist, depends on returning to the governing philosophy of the American founders as it is embodied in the Constitution. Many self-described leaders of the Tea Party movement seem to share the view expressed by Dick Armey and Matt Kibbe, authors of Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto , that "[f]irst and foremost, the Tea Party movement is concerned with recovering constitutional principles in government.

A recovery of constitutional ideals is, to be sure, a worthwhile endeavor — but it does not point quite where these leaders and activists often suggest. The federalist founders were indeed wary of the concentration of power in the federal government. At the same time, however, they did not — unlike some anti-federalist opponents of the Constitution — view government as an evil, or even as a necessary evil.

Indeed, the most influential of the founders scorned such a view, referring to the "imbecility" of a weak central government in the form of the Articles of Confederation compared to a relatively strong central government which is what the Constitution created. In their view, government, properly understood and properly framed, was essential to promoting what they referred to as the "public good.

It was in order to approximate this public good that James Madison, the key figure in the drafting of the Constitution, believed in a limited national government with requisite and adaptable powers. Citing in Federalist No. A "good government," he added in Federalist No. The Constitution did not simply create limits on government, as some of today's conservative rhetoric seems to imply; it created a strong if bounded central government.

It is important to speak up when those boundaries are breached, but it is important, too, to remember the aims of that government. Madison acknowledged the positive need for a national government.

This government was not meant to be frozen in amber. It would have the ability to adapt as necessary to meet citizens' needs as those needs were expressed through representative government.

Some made this case more explicitly than did Madison who nevertheless went so far as to support the Virginia Plan, which would have granted the central government the right to veto all state legislation. Hamilton, for instance, envisioned a strong commercial republic whose growing needs would require the federal government to promote the general welfare not only through those powers that were expressly stipulated but also those that were implied.

For the most part, Washington endorsed Hamilton's more expansive view of a government that would need to act as Hamilton put it in a "vast variety of particulars, which are susceptible neither of specification nor of definition" in advance. Even Thomas Jefferson, who was more skeptical of a strong federal authority, eventually made his own "convenient modifications. The founders, then, provided us with a strong governing system — strong precisely because it could adapt to changing circumstances.

The government created in the late 18th century by the inhabitants of a coastal, agrarian republic was designed to accommodate the development of a more spacious and ambitious nation: an eventuality that many of the founders foresaw and embraced. John Rutledge told his colleagues that "[a]s we are laying the foundation for a great empire, we ought to take a permanent view of the subject and not look at the present moment only.

In pursuing this inquiry, we must bear in mind that we are not to confine our view to the present period, but to look forward to remote futurity. Constitutions of civil government are not to be framed upon a calculation of existing exigencies, but upon a combination of these with the probable exigencies of ages, according to the natural and tried course of human affairs. Nothing, therefore, can be more fallacious than to infer the extent of any power proper to be lodged in the national government from an estimate of its immediate necessities.

There ought to be a CAPACITY to provide for future contingencies as they may happen; and as these are illimitable in their nature, so it is impossible safely to limit that capacity. It was in this spirit that they were able to leave to future leaders the resolution of certain inconsistencies in the American system, the gravest and most poisonous of them being the issue of slavery.

This is hardly to say that the founders, magically transported to the age of Obama, would approve of the current size and scope of the federal government. Nor is it to say that the founders were unconcerned about concentration of power; to the contrary, they were deeply concerned about it, which is why they created a system of checks and balances and the separation of powers.

It is to say, however, that they would have little toleration for politicians who are committed to abstract theories even when they are at odds with the given world and the welfare of the polity — who fail to differentiate between conserving the system by adapting it to changing circumstances and undermining the system by breaking with its fundamental aims and outlook.

The case against the aggrandizement of federal power must be made in the context of the case in favor of appropriate federal power — not in the service of a theory that leaves far too little room for genuine self-government. In important respects, Abraham Lincoln continued the philosophical arc of the framers of the Constitution. No president revered the founders as much, spoke about them as often, or read them as closely as did Lincoln.

His presidency "undertook no permanent reconstitution of the federal government on Leviathan-like proportions," writes the scholar Allen Guelzo — but Lincoln insisted, as the founders did, that government adjust to shifting circumstances.

And he believed, as they did, in a federal government strong enough to achieve large national purposes. For Lincoln, those purposes included the transcontinental railroad, "land-grant" college legislation, the National Banking Act, tariffs, and the imposition of temporary federal personal income taxes to cover the cost of the Civil War.

He also believed the federal government should play a key role in promoting ownership and entrepreneurship: the foundations of a free economy. Most famously, and in direct continuity with Washington and Hamilton, he believed the federal government should be powerful enough to protect itself from dissolution in the name of state sovereignty.

Lincoln's governing philosophy, however, ran even deeper than that, extending beyond that of the founders in a direction that prefigured some of the policy developments of 20th-century America. In what is known as his "Fragments on Government," he wrote:. The legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all , or can not, so well do , for themselves — in their separate, and individual capacities.

Among the things requiring the "combined action" of government in Lincoln's view were "public roads and highways, public schools, charities, pauperism, orphanage, estates of the deceased, and the machinery of government itself. Lincoln therefore understood the role of government though of course not necessarily the federal government to be to help those who cannot individually do for themselves, to advance justice in an unjust world, and to lift up the weakest members of society.

Lincoln would later say that "government is not charged with the duty of redressing or preventing all the wrongs in the world" but that it "rightfully may, and, subject to the constitution, ought to, redress and prevent, all wrongs which are wrongs to the nation itself.

It speaks well of conservatives that they want to be thought of as the defenders of the Constitution. But at a minimum, "constitutional conservatives" should recognize what both the federalist founders and Lincoln actually envisioned for the republic they created and preserved.

They were, on the whole, rigorous, empirical, modern thinkers, as well as sober and skeptical heirs of the Enlightenment, who believed they were fortunate to inhabit an age of progress. Far from being constrained by the prevailing physical, political, or economic arrangements of America in , the founders fully expected America to spread across a continent, undergo economic and social change, and emerge as a global actor. And they purposely designed a constitutional system that could accommodate such ambitions.

Of course, this does not answer the question of how big the federal government should be, or what precisely it should and should not do.

But it does warn against short-circuiting that discussion with overly simplistic and legalistic appeals to the Constitution as a purely limiting document. Our debates about what government ought to do must be debates about what we take our constitutional order to be and what we think are appropriate national goals. Such questions should be addressed through the political process established by the Constitution; we cannot expect them all to be settled in detail simply through direct interpretation of the Constitution's text.

These national questions require a governing vision. As political scientist James Ceaser of the University of Virginia has put it:. Many conservatives need to resist the temptation to "ideologize" the Constitution by imagining that their political theory is not just permitted under it, but dictated by it. It cannot be forgotten that the Constitution was instituted to replace the Articles of Confederation in order to allow for the exercise of broad powers in certain areas.

How such powers are to be used is left to the winners of elections, who are entitled to promote their ideas of good government within the boundaries of the supreme law. If conservatives believe that some of these powers are being exercised in an undisciplined way, it is for a conservative party to make this case.

The Constitution cannot do all the work that a party must do on its own. To think otherwise, and to hold that courts could enforce most conservative doctrines, amounts to legalistic thinking with a vengeance.

Many of the functions of the modern-day federal government, including Social Security and other social-service programs, were not envisioned by the framers, nor did the enumerated powers of the Congress specifically comprehend such programs. But neither do these federal roles violate a principle of our system or run counter to the prescient mindset of the founders. The federalist founders created and interpreted a constitutional system that allowed for the emergence of modern America, one in which the federal government would be strong enough to shape global events and to guarantee a minimal provision for the poor, ill, and elderly.

Such federal roles may require examination and reform, but they are not inherently illegitimate. It is a wonder of history, and one of the greatest contributions of America's founders, that they designed a constitution that was, as the University of Pennsylvania's John J. DiIulio, Jr. They did it by embodying in the constitutional system a profound and sophisticated vision of government and of government's relation to the life of the nation and the lives of its people.

The relationship between the government and the lives of its people is a particularly challenging problem in our time. The overreach of the Obama years has given form to the left's powerful desire to manage and manipulate those realms of life that, in our country, have generally been left within the purview of the family, civil society, and local community.

The natural response on the right has been to recoil from the very idea that government should play any role in the moral formation of citizens — which is, after all, what happens in that space between the individual and the state where these institutions operate. Such complete neutrality is impossible, however, because political and governmental institutions are inherently and unavoidably a part of the larger fabric of society.

To insist that federal policy express no preferences or priorities about the moral lives of the people is to consign us to a politics that undermines those moral lives, rather than one that gives them room to thrive. Public policy designed without regard to its moral implications is not neutral but destructive of society's moral architecture.

One need not subscribe fully to Aristotle's belief in the vital role of the state in the pursuit of virtue and excellence to acknowledge that many of our laws have a moral component. By definition, laws shape habits, values, and sensibilities — not every law, not all the time, but enough to play a decisive role in the formation of our national character and the individual characters of our citizens.

Effective legislation often has a moral, or character-forming, component. A concrete example from the recent past is the welfare-reform law, one of the most successful pieces of social legislation in generations.

At the heart of the reform was a moral, not an economic, argument: The wrong sort of welfare had helped to create a culture of dependency, which enervated character, and which in turn harmed individuals, families, and society. The goal of welfare reform, with its work requirements and time limits, was not to save money and it didn't save much ; it was to foster self-reliance and dignity.

It was to replace the wrong sort of welfare with the right sort of welfare. And it worked. In short order, welfare rolls went down and work-participation rates went up. It consists of charters like the Magna Charta, laws, declarations by Parliament, court precedents, and customs.

All these elements of the British Constitution, Burke believed, represented the inherited wisdom of past generations. In , the voters of the seaport of Bristol elected Burke along with one other man as their representatives in the House of Commons. Burke, however, took a principled position on how he would cast his votes. In a famous speech to the Bristol voters, Burke agreed that their wishes "ought to have great weight. Burke insisted that Parliament was a deliberating "assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole—where not local purposes, not local prejudices, ought to guide, but the general good.

The American colonists continued their cry of "no taxation without representation" in opposing the Townshend duties. The duties were taxes on glass, paper, tea and other imports from Britain. In , the unpopular taxes resulted in a violent clash, known as the Boston Massacre, between Bostonians and British troops. To calm things down, Parliament repealed the Townshend duties, except for the one on tea.

When the famous Boston Tea Party took place in , the Tory government then in power decided to punish the Americans. Burke advised the British government to leave the Americans alone to tax themselves. He predicted that they would voluntarily contribute their share for the defense of the empire.

Otherwise, he concluded, the policy of forced taxation would only lead to disobedience, and, "after wading up to your eyes in blood," would result in no revenue from the Americans at all. In March , Burke delivered a speech on the escalating crisis in America. As descendants of Englishmen, Burke declared, the Americans were right to object to forced taxes. Throughout English history, he reminded his colleagues in Parliament, taxation had always been at the center of the English fight for freedom.

English liberty, he said, was founded on the principle that the people must "possess the power of granting their own money" to the government. Governing from dead generations, Paine wrote, "is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies. Paine traced the "rights of man" back to God at the Creation. Echoing Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, Paine stated that "all men are born equal, and with equal natural rights.

Paine condemned the "hereditary crown," which Burke had praised, and called monarchy "the enemy of mankind. Therefore, revolutions were necessary to destroy this "barbarous system" in order to create the conditions for peace, commerce, lower taxes, and the "enjoyment of abundance.

The American and French revolutions, Paine concluded, opened the way to end tyranny and begin a new "Age of Reason. Burke and the other Whigs introduced resolutions to repeal the tea tax and end the policy of Parliament taxing the Americans without their agreement.

But the Tories soundly defeated these proposals. King George declared the colonies "in open rebellion," and the American Revolution began. Following the Declaration of Independence in , Burke still pleaded with the Americans not to separate from England where the "very liberty, which you justly prize" originated.

As the American Revolution unfolded, Burke increasingly sided with the colonists. Burke pressed Lord North to negotiate an end to the "mercenary and savage war. The Americans would settle for nothing less than full independence. King George rejected the idea of American independence and wanted to continue the war. He held out for victory even after the British disaster at Yorktown. By , Lord North had lost support in Parliament, and his Tory government resigned.

Charles Rockingham was prepared to become prime minister again and form a new Whig government. But first he demanded that King George abandon his opposition to American independence.

The king finally agreed. This series of political maneuvers, largely engineered by Burke, signaled the further decline of royal power in the English government. The new Rockingham government negotiated peace and independence with the Americans. But Charles Rockingham died after only three months in office, and a coalition of parties replaced the Whig government.

Following the American Revolution, Burke took unpopular positions on other controversial issues. The Protestant English government barred the Catholic majority in Ireland from voting, holding public office, establishing schools, and even working in certain jobs.

Burke proposed legislation, easing this harsh discrimination. This reflected his lifelong support for toleration of all religions but not atheism. Parliament ignored him. In , Burke launched a campaign against corruption, greed, and needless wars in British India, virtually ruled by the East India Company. He focused his attack on Governor General Warren Hastings, whom he called "the greatest delinquent that India ever saw.

It lasted, on and off, for seven years before Parliament finally acquitted him. In July , the French Revolution exploded in Paris. Some in Britain applauded the extraordinary events in France for expanding the "rights of man. Burke saw the revolutionary ideas let loose in France as a threat to the British system of government. In , he published his most famous written work, Reflections on the Revolution in France.

In his Reflections, Burke compared France to a noble castle in need of repair. Instead of repairing the castle, he said, a "swinish multitude" had torn it apart to build an entirely new one while despising everything about the old.

He condemned the newly elected French National Assembly for abolishing ancient laws, confiscating the property of nobles and the Catholic Church, and driving aristocrats into exile. Burke also wrote in his Reflections about the superiority of the British Constitution.

In this part of his book, Burke summarized the essence of his political conservatism. A nation, he wrote, is a partnership among "those who are living, those who are dead, and those who will be born. He cited the English Glorious Revolution of Burke celebrated the British Constitution, which contained the inherited "rights of Englishmen," not some theoretical notion about the "rights of man.

He also described the English aristocracy, the landowning nobles, as "the great Oaks that shade a Country and perpetuate your benefits from Generation to Generation. Burke was not enthusiastic about democracy. He defended the English monarchy based on inherited succession.

He consistently opposed expanding the right to vote beyond property owners, who made up only a minority of the English population. Moreover, Burke warned, "democracy has many striking points of resemblance to tyranny," including the "cruel oppression" of the minority.

Burke summarized the British Constitution by saying, "We have an inheritable crown, an inheritable peerage [House of Lords], and a House of Commons and a people inheriting privileges, franchises [voting rights], and liberties from a long line of ancestors. King George loved it. Others, like the American patriot, Thomas Paine, condemned it.

Burke himself warned of the "French disease" of revolution, spreading throughout Europe and even to Britain. Burke split with the leadership of the Whig Party when he spoke in favor of war against revolutionary France. Britain declared war in when it joined other European monarchies already fighting the French army.

But no longer supported by the Whig Party, Burke decided to retire from Parliament the following year. He continued writing about the French threat. He also wrote in favor of the free market setting wages and opposed government support for the poor.