Is Shrinking The Government A Lost Cause?

The modern expansion of the federal government has been proceeding in fits and starts, since the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930’s. Some presidents—and it has nearly always taken presidential action to successfully resist the encroachment of government—have been more successful at slowing the growth of government than others. But it seems as if none, in the eighty years since Roosevelt took office, have been able to reverse this expansion. Ronald Reagan was a particularly successful conservative president, but even he on managed to slow the tide. The Department of Education, newly formed under Jimmy Carter, survives to this day. In recent years, conservatives hoped that unified Republican control of government would bring a full repeal of Obamacare, marking the first time in American history that an entitlement program had been successfully rolled back after its enactment. But now, even a partial repeal faces an uphill battle in Congress.

It’s enough to make any conservative give up on politics in anger and despair. It’s a depressing thought, that even though we can still win some isolated victories at the state and federal level, the march of liberal ideas could inexorably continue through Congress and the general public. But there are a couple of positive thoughts that should be remembered, as well.

First, fighting to reduce the size of government is simply the right thing to do. It helps to ensure the security and freedom of all American citizens, both present and future. On that basis alone, the fight should never be abandoned, because the stakes are too great.

And second, if the past few years have taught us anything, it is that no one can possibly imagine what the future will bring. Today’s setbacks become tomorrow’s opportunities, and there is no single “arc of history” bending toward a predetermined endpoint, as much as Barack Obama would like us to believe otherwise. The odds of a large-scale rolling back of the federal government, and restoration of the Constitution, may seem bleak at times, but neither success nor defeat is ever guaranteed. It is up to conservatives to make sure that no chance at liberty is ever wasted, and remember that no victory, however small, is worthless.

Changes Since 1992: California

Following Donald Trump’s victory, the dominant media narrative on the two major parties has quickly gone from “Republicans are nearing extinction” to “Democrats are no longer a national party,” and understandably so. Just about the only thing we heard in all election coverage of the past four years, from the end of the 2012 campaign until last month, was how Republicans were facing demographic ruin. The minority, Democratic coalition was ascendant. The GOP must embrace identity politics or be washed away by ever-growing numbers of liberal Hispanic voters.

Now, of course, the demographic focus is all on how the Democrats have abandoned the white working class. But just as those voters were wrongly ignored during the Obama years, it would be a mistake to think that just because Republicans won this election, changing demographics are no longer an issue for them and vital swing states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin will ultimately trend in their direction. Many states are trending red, as I’ve written about over the past month, but states are also trending blue, far more dramatically than Virginia.

Many people forget that California, the home of both Nancy Pelosi and Ronald Reagan, was once a Republican stronghold. And many of those who remember this fact, don’t realize that the state was still widely competitive for Republicans, even conservative ones, as recently as 2000. The transformation of California from conservative stronghold to battleground state to liberal bastion should be a warning that, just as Democrats ignored the white working class at their peril, Republicans ignore Hispanics and other minorities at theirs.

Although California has voted for the Democratic presidential nominee in every election since 1992, it is an interesting fact that before 2008, the nominee consistently won by less than thirteen points—and that margin was falling:

1992	1996	2000	2004	2008	2012	2016
Clinton +13.4	Clinton +12.9	Gore +11.6	Kerry +10.0	Obama +24.0	Obama +21.0	Clinton +28.8

These were all still convincing victories, to be sure. But the trend in favor of Republicans, post-Obama, is intriguing. And for comparison’s sake, Kerry’s ten-point margin in 2004 is almost identical to Bush’s concurrent 9.8% margin in… Arkansas.

Statewide races paint an even more interesting picture. Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein have served as California’s two U.S. Senators since 1992 (Feinstein won in a special election that year, and won her first full term in 1994). Both have been would I would term fairly generic liberal Democrats, so one would expect them to regularly win California by fairly wide margins. And indeed, they have generally won reelection handily, but there have also been interesting exceptions.

In 1992, Feinstein won her Senate seat by more than sixteen points, but Boxer won by less than five points. Two years later, when Feinstein was up for election to her first full term, she won by less than two points. And in 1998, Boxer won by ten points.

That year marked the last time either faced a truly competitive reelection fight until 2010, when Boxer won another term (against Republican nominee Carly Fiorina) by just 9.6 points. This year, Boxer retired, and under California’s new “top-two”, all-party primary voting system, two Democrats advanced to the general election—Rep. Loretta Sanchez and state Attorney General Kamala Harris, who won by a twenty-five point margin.

But no electoral analysis of California would be complete without looking at attorney general and gubernatorial elections, and that’s where things really start getting interesting. Several times since 1992, California has seen competitive, high-profile races in which a Republican has either won or come close to winning—most recently in 2010, when Kamala Harris was elected Attorney General by just two-tenths of a point.

California Gubernatorial Elections, 1994-2014:
1994	1998	2002	2006	2010	2014
Wilson +14.9	Davis +19.6	Davis +5.0	Schwarzenegger +16.9	Brown +11.4	Brown +18.8

California Attorney General Elections, 1994-2014:
1994	1998	2002	2006	2010	2014
Lungren +14.4	Lockyer +9.1	Lockyer +11.0	Brown +18.2	Harris +0.2	Harris +13

Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger also won a special election for governor in 2003, by a margin of 17.1%.

This is where Democratic dominion of California begins to look much less permanent. Schwarzenegger’s candidacy was obviously a special case; there were many voters who would presumably have voted for a generic Democrat over a Republican, but the possibility of having the Terminator as governor was just too good to resist. But some of the other recent Democratic margins are shockingly low (looking at you, Kamala Harris), and every single Democratic victory over the last twenty years has significantly underperformed the margin we’ve come to expect from Democrat presidential candidates in the state. Obviously, a governor who enters office with a five-point margin of victory is just as powerful as one who enters in a landslide. But only one will be looking over his shoulder as reelection looms, and seek to reach out to independents and Republicans accordingly, at the risk of upsetting his own party.

Overall, however, and particularly at the presidential level, California is a warning that in politics, nothing is eternal—and today, Democrats in Arkansas and Republicans in California find themselves in almost identical positions. Neither state is permanently out of reach for the minority party, but they will have to fight for every inch of what they once took for granted. New coalitions will have to be formed, new outreach efforts aggressively pursued, and new strategies tested, because just as the current electoral map began to take shape in 1992, so to could the winner of the 2032 presidential election be decided by actions taken by the California Republican Party in 2017.

Defining Down Conservatism

The values which conservatism seeks to preserve are timeless—ideals of individual freedom, equal opportunity under the law, and market-based competition—but what I would call the Modern Age of conservatism really began in 1964, with the nomination of Barry Goldwater and the normalization of the Republican Party as the nation’s major conservative party. It brought the Founding-era ideas of classical liberalism into the 20^th century, rejuvenating them after decades of nearly unanswered assault by progressives, and largely codified what it meant to be a conservative. Conservatives, overall, supported a limited government of enumerated powers, as defined by the clear text and meaning of the Constitution; a strong national defense; and a respect for free enterprise. This general definition changed somewhat over the succeeding decades, most notably with the addition of the Religious Right to the conservative coalition, but stayed basically constant through the Reagan and Clinton years.

To be sure, there have always been arguments about what exactly defined a conservative, and who exactly got to define such things. But a generally agreed-upon definition remained in place until the presidency of George W. Bush, when some conservatives gradually began to believe that a “conservative” policy was whatever a Republican president defined it to be. Medicare expansion became conservative. Harriet Miers became a conservative Supreme Court nominee. Increased federal spending and a strengthening executive branch became key to “conservative” victory, as long it was a Republican president doing those things.

When Barack Obama took office, conservatives retreated and reassessed. Many—though not all—recognized their mistake in putting party allegiance ahead of principle. Many recommitted to the conservative vision espoused by Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. Again, there were differences over the exact definition of that vision, and who precisely defined it, but these differences seemed minor while liberals controlled the White House.

Which brings us to today. The Republican Party has now nominated a man who never misses an opportunity to blast free trade, who says that Planned Parenthood “does wonderful things”, who openly discusses the possibility of withdrawing from NATO, and who says of the nation’s many problems, “I alone can fix it.” A vision of constitutional, limited government this is not.

But yet many of Trump’s backers attempt to defend it as the very embodiment of conservatism. They attempt to shape principle to conform to the short-term agenda of a political party and a single man, forcing the principle to fit the candidate, rather than forcing the candidate to adhere to the principle.

There are similarities to the defense of George Bush’s every policy as conservative, but there is a massive difference as well. No one, not even his opponents, doubted that Bush was a man of great faith and decency, who respected life in all its forms and closely adhered to his own principles, even when they differed from standard conservatism. He was a strong conservative in some areas, particularly in the pro-life arena, and a moderate in others.

Trump, on the other hand, has demonstrated himself to be nothing more than an opportunist in every conceivable area of policy. He changes positions on a weekly basis, and does not apologize for his personal failures. And all the while, his surrogates defend his every action as consistently conservative, making a mockery of themselves, their political master, and the very term “conservative” in the process.

If Trump loses in two weeks, there will still be a chance to mitigate the damage. But if he wins, it will only continue and become even worse. Conservatism will continue to be defined ever downward, until it ceases to have any meaning at all.

Rounding Up Hillary Clinton's DNC Speech

I thought Clinton’s speech last night was fair, for what she was trying to accomplish. Not as good as it could have been coming from any of several other speakers, Democrat or Republican, but then Hillary Clinton has always been more wooden and worse at public speaking and campaigning than her husband, or Barack Obama.

First, these acceptance speeches also need to be shorter, for both parties. This is a key opportunity for the candidates to reach undecided voters who may be tuning in just to see what all the fuss is about, but aren’t normally engaged. When the speeches run more than an hour by themselves, many of these voters will just as quickly tune out. In 2012, both Romney’s and Obama’s speeches were kept under forty minutes. Future nominees need to follow that example.

But the most interesting aspect of the speech was not the delivery but the content. Predictably, Clinton found time for a laundry list of liberal policies and reforms she hoped to achieve in office, from a constitutional amendment overturning Citizens United to raising the minimum wage. But interspersed with these hallmarks of major Democratic speeches was a continuation of Obama’s speech from Wednesday night, when he targeted Republicans dissatisfied with Trump.

For the first time in a long time, it is the Democrats who are nominating a candidate who is tough on Russia, supportive of NATO and other American allies, and openly talk about how great America currently is, rather than a need to make it great again. When it is the Democratic nominee who more frequently talks about the uniqueness of the American experiment, the greatness and optimism of Ronald Reagan, and the importance of freedom, liberty, and opportunity, the election has truly taken a strange turn.

I appreciate the outreach, but it won’t make me any more likely to vote for Clinton. Even counting the few ways in which she is better than Trump, including her opposition to Russia and support of NATO, she is too far to the left, too untrustworthy, and has too many scandals under her belt already to win my support. For every moment last night that sounded alluring to conservatives on the sidelines, there was a moment that reminded us why she would not be a faithful guardian of limited constitutional government. Just as Trump has proven himself manifestly unfit for high office, so too has Clinton by her conduct during the decades she has spent in the public eye.

Thanks, but no thanks.

Reagan Couldn't Win the Presidential Primary Today

Many Democrats, as well as more than a few moderate Republicans, like to say that Reagan wouldn’t be able to win a modern GOP primary—the thinking being that the party has moved so far to the right that even Reagan would no longer be conservative enough for many primary voters. And those Democrats and moderates are right, but not for the reason they think. Ronald Reagan would apparently be too conservative and principled for today’s Republican Party.

How else to explain the success of Donald Trump, now the party’s presumptive nominee, which by extension signifies the abandonment of many principles and policy ideals which many believed Reagan had in effect made mandatory for GOP presidential nominees. An ironclad commitment to pro-life values; a strong and outward-looking foreign policy; a dedication to cutting spending and the size of government, and pursuing meaningful entitlement reform—all these and more Trump has either abandoned since clinching the nomination or never claimed to support in the first place.

And, judging by his success, a plurality of primary voters hold no meaningful commitment to these issues either. Voters were given a clear contrast in Ted Cruz, the embodiment of virtually every Reaganite principle across the board, and more chose the man who ridiculed a female opponent’s looks and engaged in 9/11 trutherism.

Some of Trump’s most ardent Republican defenders attempt to draw parallels between him and Reagan, such as both men’s distrust of the party establishment and pre-political careers on television. But where Reagan was private and thoughtful, Trump is loud, careless, and conceited, to say the least. While touring GE plants as part of his GE Theater hosting contract, Reagan would spend time discussing important policy issues and the virtues of limited government. On The Apprentice, Trump would say of a female contestant, “[It] must be a pretty picture, you dropping to your knees,” and discussed having a season in which teams would be segregated by skin color. Can you imagine Reagan standing on the stage of a televised presidential debate discussing penis sizes?

Reagan would have been mortified and embarrassed for his party by the antics of its current standard-bearer. But many of the voters of 2016 would have sided with Trump against Reagan, because a plurality just sided against the man who is essentially Reagan’s ideological twin.