On this blog, we have long discussed the debates within the conservative movement between “small government conservatives” and “big government conservatives.” President Trump has usually been associated with the latter, and yet here he is, loosing the DOGEs of war against the entrenched federal bureaucracy.
Slashing spending, eliminating leftwing grants, and shutting down whole agencies fills small government conservatives with joy. But now the big government conservatives are proposing an alternative.
Notre Dame professor Patrick Deneen, a leading intellectual voice of “postliberalism,” tweeted this, occasioned by the prospect of eliminating the Department of Education:
The right has correctly concluded that such institutions have been captured by the left and have successfully advanced a leftist agenda throughout the nation and the globe. DoE, USAID, NPR, all part of fostering a worldwide cultural revolution. But if they have been so successful, why get rid of them? Why not turn them to better purposes?
Small government advocate Jack Butler disagrees. He writes this in National Review:
Let us not follow Deneen. To do so would increase the likelihood that the second Trump administration “more resembles the failures of the Bushes than the successes of Reagan and Trump.” There is a specific Bush failure enabled by the conciliatory mindset Deneen’s logic promotes: the expansion of the Department of Education by No Child Left Behind, which President George W. Bush spearheaded. The consistent disappointment of academic outcomes in the intervening decades ought to dispel the notion that it’s necessary. Even those who have attempted to use the department to good ends, such as Betsy DeVos, Trump’s secretary of education in his first term, have concluded that the agency is one we “will be better off without.” The Department of Education was not simply “captured by the left,” as Deneen writes. It was created by the Left, to serve its aims. Curtailing or — better yet — destroying it outright would weaken the Left.
Which view do you think is correct? Is it better to shut down big government operations or try to use big government operations to impose the conservative cause?
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In