Three in four Republicans tell Gallup the federal government has too much power
Tiana Lowe Doescher
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Within the Beltway, the notion of “national conservatism” is ascendant, with top brass at the Heritage Foundation and the Conservative Partnership Institute aligning itself with the push for Republicans to abandon laissez-faire principles in favor of the federal government pursuing the “common good.”
As an example, here is Heritage President Kevin Roberts illustrating the principle in relation to the libertarian legal movement’s success in overturning affirmative action.
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“If conservatives are to win the uphill battle of taking back America’s colleges and universities — and with them, the commanding heights of culture — we must do more than dismantle DEI,” Roberts writes. “We must replace DEI’s corrupt moral vision with a proper understanding of the good. That’s the difference between merely defending ‘free speech’ — which is practically all that conservatives have attempted to conserve on campus for the past 50 years — and giving students a sense of what they should use their speech for: the advancement of the good, the true, and the beautiful.”
The problem with this attempt at populism is that outside of Washington, D.C., think tanks, statism remains increasingly unpopular among Republican voters. As evidence, take the latest Gallup finding that nearly 3 in 4 Republicans believe the federal government has too much power, a staggering 50-point swing from 20 years ago.
It makes perfect sense. The war on terror succeeded insofar as the state running roughshod on our First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendment protections. You can draw a straight line from the precedents set by the security state after 9/11 to the Russia collusion hoax, including the egregious weaponization of FISA surveillance of American citizens such as Carter Page. The emergency suspension of these civil liberties also set the stage for the Draconian COVID lockdowns that involved every level of government continually shifting the goalposts and a dangerous deference to the federal administrative state.
The Republican swing toward near unanimous loathing of federal power is not just a response to Joe Biden’s comically corrupt presidency. Although there was a brief and limited drop in those believing the federal government had too much power at the beginning of Donald Trump’s presidency, it began to rebound in 2019, well before the pandemic. From 2019 to 2021, the share opposing federal power increased from 61% to 82%.
The implications are consistent downstream of this top line. Gallup found that just 3 in 10 Republicans believe the government should ensure everyone has healthcare or enact more restrictive gun laws. The majority of Republicans are now libertarian on the big social issues of yesteryear and favor legalizing same-sex marriage and marijuana. Little more than a third of Republicans believe the income tax we pay is fair, and even confidence in law enforcement has fallen to just 60%.
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In fact, the only issues where Republicans seem in favor of more state action are immigration — though Gallup crucially does not differentiate between legal and illegal immigration — and foreign trade, which could be influenced by national security concerns rather than protectionist impulses.
As the saying goes, age may make us more politically conservative over time, but functionally, the war on terror, wrongthink, Trump 2016, and arguably Trump 2020 have made Republicans functionally libertarian, at least as it pertains to the federal leviathan. Away from the ivory towers of Manhattan and the nation’s capital, conservatives recognize that the federal government, regardless of the figurehead, will never be our friend.