The new conservative party

Since the passing of the Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare), American conservatives have cast aside their traditional roots and instead adopted a revolutionary spirit. The transition began with the Tea Party, the donning of colonial costumes and animated protests. After that, there were Trump tattoos, energized Republican campaign rallies, and the president’s inauguration pledge to champion the “just and reasonable demands of righteous people and a righteous public.” Now, over 100 days into his presidency, Trump and his supporters continue their rally against what they term the “establishment.”

In the 1700s a similar debate took place over evolutionary and revolutionary approaches to political change. In Yuval Levin’s book, The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left, Levin juxtaposes the more revolutionary philosophy of Edmund Burke who, like the Republican Party, espoused more evolutionary development of free societies, to Thomas Paine’s ideas of radical change and advocacy of the French Revolution.

{mosads}The idea of revolution was later embodied by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and has become associated with the left-wing ideology and movements that ushered in the occasionally romanticized uprisings in Russia, China and Cuba. We now often associate the revolutionary style, untamed enthusiasm, and more radical demands for change with the left and the new left that emerged most noticeably in the 1960s.

While socialism has waned since the Cold War, the less extreme leftist movements have prevailed in the West through the burgeoning of central governments. In the 1920s, government spending in the U.S. was about 10 percent of GDP; it has since quadrupled to close to 40 percent , over half of which is federal. Similarly, in the United Kingdom, government spending was almost 43 percent of GDP in 2015 and 57 percent of GDP in both France and Finland.  

This continuing shift to the political left is not the outcome of radical change or revolutions; instead, it has been incrementally fashioned through existing institutions in the image of Burkean conservatism, but in an opposing ideological direction.  

In the United States, the transformation began with two political fault lines: First, the 16th Amendment established the federal income tax (prior levies were either taken from tariffs and excise taxes or apportioned among the states). Second, in what historians term “the constitutional revolution of 1937,” Franklin D. Roosevelt threatened to pack the Supreme Court to pass the New Deal; thereafter sanctioning federal regulation of commerce within states, and not just between states and Indian tribes and with foreign governments.

These cracks in American institutional foundations enabled central government to swell. Today, in Washington, D.C., less than one percent of the population controls about six and one-half trillion dollars — an amount valued at over 20 percent of everything produced each year, and federal borrowing is over 100 percent of GDP.  

Regulation has also metastasized. From 1940 to 1965, the number of pages in the code of federal regulations rose from about 5,000 to over 15,000 and, following the 1965 publication of Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed and crusade against the Chevrolet Corvair, regulation proliferated to over 170,000 pages — some of which are major rules that impose annual costs of $100 million or more.  

Few would have approved such a radical centralization of power a century ago; but without appropriate laws to constrain governments, each election justifies another new tax, a slightly higher debt, and another federal regulation or program.  

This slow rise of federal power fuels the reformist energy in the Republican Party. For free market conservatives, the foundational cracks have leaked to the point of high water — resulting in lost economic liberty, immeasurable inefficiencies, unmanageable public debt, and cronyism. As such, the Republican Party has shifted from the traditionalist conservatism of Edmund Burke to the revolutionary zeal of Thomas Paine. Behind this transformation is a century-long incremental growth of the centralized government and its power that has driven conservatives to become the party of reform.

Curtis Alexander Ohlers, Ph.D. is a former senior analyst for the U.S. Department of State and the founding director of International Human Development Corporation.  

 The views of contributors are theirs and not of The Hill.