How “conservatives” became radicals — and learned to love big government

Beneath and beyond the Trumpian populist surge that captured the White House and Congress in 2024, American conservative thinking is taking some confusing turns. Some conservatives are sidelining their familiar dogmas about free trade, small government and the free market and moving instead to use the formerly dreaded "administrative state" to impose "order" and virtue on Silicon Valley technocratic elites, "radical lunatics" and other enemies within.

Even Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency aren't really destroying the administrative state but rather reconfiguring it as a leaner, meaner tool for a dictator. This can only be confounding to old-line anti-government crusaders such as Grover Norquist, founder of Americans for Tax Reform, who said years ago, to widespread conservative acclaim, "I don't want to abolish government. I want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub."

Such libertarian-sounding pronouncements may seem bizarre to non-Americans who've lived with authoritarian state capitalism for decades, as in Singapore and China. But now Trumpian populism seems to be edging closer to a statist (and Catholic-tinged, for some of its champions) “common good constitutionalism,” as favored by Harvard Law professor Adrian Vermeule, or to an old-school Ivy League "good shepherd" administration of the republic.

But the Roman Catholic church itself is changing, and new Pope Leo XIV may seek to push American followers away from the ethno-nationalist welfare-state politics pioneered by Otto von Bismarck in the late 19th century, and then adapted by a well-known German political party under the label of "national socialism."

America’s conservative sea change is complicated, but let me try to make it comprehensible. I explained some of this for the History News Network in 2022, when a Republican "red wave" seemed poised to win that year's midterm elections. It didn’t quite happen that way, but, since Trump’s return to power in 2024, that wave has been coming down hard upon all of us. People everywhere who need to deal with America as trading partners, visitors, immigrants or refugees need to know what they're getting into.

“We Need to Stop Calling Ourselves Conservatives,” warns John Daniel Davidson, an editor of the Federalist, a conservative publication (not affiliated with the right-wing Federalist Society). Davidson praises an argument by Jon Askonas, a professor of politics at the Catholic University of America, who writes at Compact, another rightward site, that “the conservative project failed” because it “didn’t take into account the revolutionary principle of technology, and its intrinsic connection to the telos [or over-determined trajectory], of sheer profit.”

Davidson and Askonas want a conservative counterrevolution against a corporate technocracy whose fixation on maximizing profit has trapped Americans in a spiderweb of come-ons that grope, goose, track and indebt us, bypassing our brains and hearts on the way to our lower viscera and wallets. But are they truly rejecting “free market” conservatism, or is this just a tactical shift in their strategy to support the scramble for sheer profit and accumulated wealth, glossed over with religious rhetoric?

Davidson, Askonas and their ilk have been warning that conservatives undermine their own republican virtues and freedoms by conceding too much to “woke” liberal efforts to redress income inequality, sexual and racial grievances, and markets’ amoral reshaping of society. They warn that not only liberals but also libertarians and free-market conservatives have disfigured civic and institutional order.

Once upon a time, Davidson explains, "conservatism was about maintaining traditions and preserving Western civilization as a living and vibrant thing. Well, too late. Western civilization is dying. The traditions and practices that conservatives champion… do not form the basis of our common culture or civic life, as they did for most of our nation’s history.”

In this reading, conservatives must seize power to restore moral and social order, even if that requires using big government to break monopolies and redistribute income a bit to some of the Americans they’ve claimed to champion while feeding the plutocracies that leave them behind. Davidson and Askonas blame fellow conservatives for buying into “woke” corporate capital’s intrusive, subversive technologies, which treat citizens as impulse-buyers whose “consumer sovereignty” suffocates deliberative, political sovereignty.

Yet profit-crazed conservative media, like Fox News and the rest of Rupert Murdoch’s empire, assemble audiences on any pretext — sensationalistic, erotic, bigoted, nihilistic — in order to keep us watching the ads and buying whatever they’re pitching. Even worse, conservative jurisprudence has declared that corporations that accelerate such manipulative marketing are merely exercising the First Amendment-protected speech of self-governing citizens. That hands the loudest and largest megaphones to CEOs and their PR flacks and leaves actual citizens with laryngitis from straining to be heard above the profit-making din.

Conservatives can't reconcile their claim to cherish traditional communal and family values with their knee-jerk obeisance to conglomerate marketing and private-equity financing. They've forgotten former Communist-turned-conservative prophet Whittaker Chambers' warning that "You can't build a clear conservatism out of capitalism, because capitalism disrupts culture," as Sam Tanenhaus, a biographer of Chambers, put it in a lecture to the American Enterprise Institute in 2007.

Neoliberal Democrats often serve such conservatives as convenient scapegoats because they, too, stop short of challenging capitalism’s relentless dissolution of civic-republican virtue. They celebrate breaking corporations’ and public agencies’ glass ceilings to install “the first” Black, female or gay chairman, but do nothing to reconfigure those institutions' foundations and walls. Former Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg urged women to “lean in” against sexism in workplaces, but Donald Trump mocks such appeals by installing dubious leaners-in such as Attorney General Pam Bondi, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and Education Secretary Linda McMahon.

Neoliberal Dems who’ve broken glass ceilings have also repealed the Glass-Steagall Act, a key New Deal law of the 1930s that blocked socially and economically destructive rampages by predatory investment banks, private equity barons and hedge fund operators against millions of Americans’ equity and opportunities.

And conservatives, instead of offering viable alternatives to liberals' failures, have devoted themselves almost exclusively to assailing “wokeness” and “diversity” protocols, offering no constructive agendas beyond Trump’s whims.

Some conservatives who've embraced Trump’s demagoguery, only to find themselves soulless, have turned to religion for cover and perhaps succor, if not salvation. But the religious faithful should scourge them, as Jesus did when he drove the moneychangers out of the temple.

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, along with others who embrace religious doctrines to curb the telos of sheer profit in a fallen world, may well discover that if religion tries to seize political power, as some of Trump’s crusaders long to do, it becomes intolerant and intolerable. Genuine religious faith is often indispensable to resisting concentrations of unjust power in a republic, as it was in America's civil rights movement. But when it overreaches, it undercuts what it claims to encourage. Striking that balance requires a different kind of faith and sound judgment that Bible-thumping Trump loyalists lack.

Today's conservative convolutions are sometimes pathetic enough to make me almost sympathize with religious escapism. But none of that justifies Davidson’s claim that "if conservatives want to save the country, they are going to have to rebuild and in a sense re-found it, and that means getting used to the idea of wielding power, not despising it." He continues, "The left will only stop when conservatives stop them," so "conservatives will have to discard outdated and irrelevant notions about 'small government.'"

Davidson concedes that “those who worry that power corrupts and that once the right seizes power it too will be corrupted … have a point.” But when in history have conservatives shied away from wielding power, except when embarrassed or forced into relinquishing it by the civil disobedience of a Rosa Parks or by well-grounded progressive strikes, activist movements and electoral organizing?

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If conservatives really wanted to use power virtuously, they’d do more to enable American working people to resist the “telos of sheer profit” that’s stressing them out and displacing their anger and humiliation onto scapegoats thanks to the ministrations of Trump and Fox News. How about adopting Davidson’s proposal that government offer “generous subsidies to families of young children” — a heresy to small-government conservatives? How about banishing vicious demagoguery from their midst, as they pretend to do by opposing antisemitism? How about disassociating themselves from The Claremont Institute, the hard-right think tank devoted to creating intellectual rationalizations for Trump’s 2021 coup attempt and the imperial presidency?

Davidson even proposes that “to stop Big Tech… will require using antitrust powers to break up the largest Silicon Valley firms” and that “to stop universities from spreading poisonous ideologies will require… legislatures to starve them of public funds.” (That part certainly sounds familiar right now.) Conservatives, he argues, “need not shy away from [big-government policies] because they betray some cherished libertarian fantasy about free markets and small government. It is time to clear our minds of cant.”

Conservatives need to look more carefully into the Pandora’s box that they’re opening. Those who crave a more-godly relation to power should ponder a warning from John Winthrop, first governor of the Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630, in "A Modell of Christian Charity": "It is a true rule, that particular estates cannot subsist in the ruin of the public.” They certainly can’t subsist defensibly in a society that’s being disintegrated by capitalism. “Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, Where wealth accumulates, and men decay,” warned the Anglo-Irish poet and novelist Oliver Goldsmith in 1777. Admonitions like his and Winthrop’s made sense to conservatives such as Whittaker Chambers in the 1950s. Conservatives are now flouting them at their, and our, peril.