It's No Surprise that Conservatives Have Rediscovered Their Love of Federal Power

It's no surprise that conservatives have rediscovered their love of federal power by Ryan MacMacon.

While not surprising, it has nonetheless been remarkable how quickly American conservatives

have been convinced to ignore or make excuses for virtually everything the regime does

so long as Donald Trump is in the White House.

This includes the administration's runaway deficits spending, inflationary monetary policy,

ramping up of foreign wars, a growing disregard for federalism, and even higher taxes.

Policies that would have been denounced by conservatives under Barack Obama or Joe Biden

are reframed as virtuous under the current administration.

Especially notable is conservatives' current enthusiasm in opposing decentralization

and local control. Conservatives now champion the use of federal police and federal troops

in any city where the local government runs a foul of the administration's agenda.

Calls for more aggressive federal power have been especially loud on the matter of

immigration in recent weeks, but conservatives have also called for the administration

to ignore legal limits on the use of federal troops in domestic law enforcement overall.

Similarly, conservatives have cheered new federal powers to override state regulation of AI

and now are calling for the nationalization of all election law.

At this point in history, however, highlighting the ideological inconsistencies of Americans

is about as necessary as saying the sky is blue. For anyone who has been paying attention

for more than just a few years, there is no reason to be surprised or scandalized

by the total lack of commitment to any ideological standards, nor is there any reason to expect

anything better. This is simply how the dog and pony show that is American electoral politics

functions. Very few Americans care anything at all about ideological consistency or about sticking

to principles. For the average American ideology log, what's really important is settling

scores with perceived enemies by any means available. The long-term consequences are of little

importance. Mass democracy and inflation culture has taught Americans to think only in the short

term and to demand immediate gratification in all areas of life, especially when gratification

means getting that emotional high of feeling like you've gotten the better of political opponents.

This short-term thinking requires supporting the use of political power through whatever tools

are immediately available. In modern America, political power is lopsidedly in the hands of the

federal government. Those who are freed from the burdens of intellectual consistency

will be perennially attracted to the use of federal power as the perceived solution

to every political problem. This is why the same people who claim to want restraints on federal

power invariably end up demanding these restraints be dismantled when the right people

get elected. While it is found on both left and right, this contradictory behavior is most

obvious in conservatives because conservatives so often claim to want limited government.

One might say it is part of the conservative brand, yet conservatives reverse themselves on

this position whenever they believe themselves to be in power. The current conservative fondness

for deficit spending, easy money, regime change wars, untrammeled federal police power,

and higher taxes, that is tariffs, is simply the current manifestation of a long-established

phenomenon. The current situation is merely the latest repetition of the same cycle that has

been in place for decades and which is hardly unique to the Trump years. After all, 25 years ago

during the George W. Bush years, conservatives embraced federal power, federal spending,

and the ongoing destruction of federalism. Conservatives then again pretended to be against

federal power during the Obama and Biden administrations. Now the cycle is repeating as expected.

This phenomenon is a wonderful thing from the perspective of the actual ruling elites in the deep

state, the Silicon Valley Surveillance Cabal, and the banker class. As the nominal political leaders

that is the elected partisan figureheads, who supposedly oversee the administrative state,

rotate in and out of their positions of ostensible political power, each side gets the opportunity

to taste the benefits of being in power. The occasional stint, as the Dejuro ruling party,

provides lucrative opportunities for doling out benefits to political supporters,

and also scoring political points against public adversaries. Sure, each party sometimes has to be

the out of power group in the scheme, but this is all the more helpful to the ruling elite,

because the changes in party rule give the impression that there has been a true change.

In practice, however, no change takes place in the de facto governing class.

Policy changes are allowed to take place in fringe areas that have little impact on the overall

ability of the political class to govern. These involve changes in policies that are relatively

inconsequential from the ruling elite's perspective. Dei at universities, tariffs, which are only a

small sliver of federal revenue, taxes on tips abortion, and the smaller details of where welfare

dollars are spent. The policies that are truly core to maintaining the ruling elite's power,

on the other hand, never change substantially. These include the central bank's monetary powers,

overall control of the multi-trillion dollar welfare state, and control of the national security

apparatus. The lack of any true division in the ruling elite's policy agenda can be seen in how

the policy responds to emergencies, alleged military threats, pandemics, and financial crises,

is always essentially the same regardless of which party is in power. So, with every emergency,

we witness an increase in federal pressure on media, vast new amounts of federal spending,

new innovations in expansive monetary policy, and more focus on surveillance.

It is in the face of these emergencies that the ruling elite ensure there is no departure

from those policies that reinforce state power. As political scientist Carlo Lotieri has reiterated,

the real sovereign is the political group that has the final decision about the critical situation

in the state of emergency. The real sovereign isn't constrained by either Republicans or Democrats.

With Trump and the White House, his rank and file supporters now rather fancifully believe

they are in power, that their preferred policies will be implemented, and that these policies will

somehow make a lasting change to the ruling regime, under which so many Americans have seen their

standard of living decline and their freedoms disappear. This will prove to be a false hope.

Trump could deport 10 million people, a number that few expect him to achieve, and this will not

substantially threaten the ruling elite in any way. Their methods for retaining power most certainly

do not require large numbers of immigrants. If that were the case, the American political class

would have become weaker during from the 1930s through the 1950s. Quite the opposite happened,

in part because the government class does not rely on any single political party to stay in power.

Each new emergency only brings new powers and new riches to the governing elite that exercises

the real sovereign power. With the Trump administration treating large-scale immigration,

as yet the latest emergency, the cycle will repeat. The long-term consequences of this will become

all the more apparent the next time the political parties switch places and the new political

figureheads who are in power will shift priorities to their own coalition of political clients

and interest groups. The new powers ready for the ruling regime during the Trump years will make

it all much easier. For more content like this visit meises.org.