The Republicans, you have to admit, know what they want. It’s all spelled out in the pages of Project 2025, but even if it weren’t, it’s been lodged in the reptilian brains of GOP partisans for as long as anyone can remember.
What the Republicans’ attitude boils down to is this: a visceral hatred of government and everything it does, from its regulatory and investigative powers to its taxing and budgetary powers. And the solution, whether committed to paper or eating away at the brain cells of the party faithful, amounts to an urgent commandment: Destroy government, especially the federal government, and all its works, cripple and immobilize it in every way possible, so that Republican minds can rest easy at night and sleep the sleep of the comfortably deluded.
The GOP has been an ideologically consistent party for literally decades; its beliefs have followed a straight, undeviating line from the Social Darwinism of the late 19th century through the New Era of Coolidge and Hoover, the somnolence of the Eisenhower years, the Goldwater revolt, the Reagan Revolution, the Tea Party uprising, and, lastly, Donald Trump’s MAGA movement of today.
Nothing of significance changes: taxes are bad and so are labor unions; profit is good and so are corporations; laissez-faire is the economic ideal; rugged individualism is the mythical little engine that can; and liberal government is the wasteful, inefficient worm in the apple. Looking abroad, isolationism is the goal and militant nationalism the means of guaranteeing it.
A looming expression of the GOP belief system in action is the incoming administration’s phantom Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which Trumpian true believers Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are poised to introduce to Washington. These two members of the Billionaire Boys Club would slash federal regulations to the bone, shrink the public sector by $2 trillion (or fully one-third), and cut the government workforce by 25%, supposedly balancing the federal budget without revenue enhancements.
Such workforce reductions, according to the sympathetic but dubious center-right think tank the Manhattan Institute, would actually reduce Washington’s real spending by barely 1%, since keeping the government open would necessitate replacing fired workers with expensive private contractors, whose cost would simply be moved off the books. In theory, however, classic Republican budgetary austerity would be maintained.
It’s been said that President-elect Trump is an exception to the long, unvaried history of Republican conservatism. It’s true he moves to the beat of his own drummer, but his drummer leans heavily right; it’s why Republicans back him. On all the essentials - - hatred of taxes, opposition to government spending, antiregulation, xenophobia - - Trump follows the GOP script.
It’s a script based on an essentially negative view of human nature; that is, people are basically greedy, selfish and mean-spirited, and any (liberal) attempt to redirect their inbred instincts will prove foolish, counterproductive and, most of all, a waste of taxpayers’ money - - meaning the taxpayers who have most of it under the plutocratic American system.
There’s always been a counter to this conservative conception of the world, one represented by the Democratic Party’s more humane and positive worldview, but the Democrats, as often happens, are presently offering an enfeebled response. The more liberal of the two parties is weighed down by constant kowtowing to its multiple minority interest groups, which pull in several directions at once, and by an ideological split personality that regularly produces an inability to unite around a philosophically progressive approach to politics. Call it the big-tent syndrome.
It’s necessary to go back multiple generations, back as far as the 1930s and the Roosevelt administration, in fact, to find a common progressive core capable of mounting a defense against a surging conservatism. It’s known as New Deal liberalism, the fundamental political persuasion that created the modern Democratic Party, but that has been under attack, both within and without, since its inception. The best articulation of this embattled doctrine was contained in a barely remembered speech from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s initial campaign for the presidency.
On Sept. 23, 1932, at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, the Democratic candidate delivered a groundbreaking address on progressive government that concluded his tour of the Western states; it was still regarded years later as the high point of his maiden run for the White House. To Howard Zinn, who included it in his collection New Deal Thought (1966), the speech represented the essence of the Roosevelt creed. Other notable historians (Richard Hofstadter, Arthur Schlesinger Jr.) placed it in the forefront of FDR’s public pronouncements.
The speech, primarily drafted by New Deal brain truster Adolph A. Berle Jr, a renowned foe of corporate concentration leading to oligopoly, argued for a new “economic constitutional order” that would enlarge the federal role and introduce national planning to better balance economic risks and rewards. Starting with a survey of America’s historical development, Roosevelt acknowledged the part played by “ruthless, ambitious” men, the entrepreneurial speculators, manipulators and financiers who had built the country, but whose expansionary excesses had now led to uncontrolled business monopoly, waste, exploitation and corrupting power. “Put plainly,” he added, using a nautical analogy, “we are steering a steady course toward economic oligarchy, if we are not there already.”
The result was a growing diminishment of equal opportunity, an inability to accommodate large immigration flows, distribute wealth equitably, and provide for an adequate national standard of living. A new social contract, involving corporate business, was needed to ensure “enlightened administration” of the American economy that would control inflationary booms and recessionary busts. Private economic power was a public trust that, if not observed by America’s big business establishment, would have to be enforced by government.
What’s remarkable is that the San Francisco address, aimed at a country convulsed by the Great Depression, adapts so readily to the present era. The avaricious millionaires of FDR’s time were little different from the rapacious billionaires of our own - - the Musks and Bezoses. The destructive unemployment of then differed only in degree from the debilitating inflation of now. The psychic hopelessness of the 1930s varied little in its impact from the optimism gap of the 2020s.
For the moment, those who fail to see the comparison, dismissing it out of hand, are in charge and will be for a while yet. But the rejoinder is out there in the form of a past leader who was the catalyst for a different viewpoint. His little speech deserves a re-reading.
Wayne O’Leary is a writer in Orono, Maine, specializing in political economy. He holds a doctorate in American history and is the author of two prizewinning books.
From The Progressive Populist, February 1, 2025
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