Andrew Varsanyi

The Reagan Effect

Ronald Reagan famously called the government the problem. When he did so, in 1980, he was channeling what was already a more than thirty-year legacy of right-wing talking points and positioning. Since the New Deal, Republicans had increasingly become more and more anti-government. Even after Dwight Eisenhower inaugurated what historians now call “the New Deal order” by acquiescing to the general ideas that government systems and institutions should support the elderly, poor, and unemployed, the right continued to work in opposition to the expanded government brought by America’s reaction to the Great Depression.

Many on both sides of the partisan divide think Reagan’s belief was true and that the government’s over-involvement in the economy and general life was a primary cause of the stagflation of the 1970s. For the most part, both economists and historians have debunked much of this claim. Indeed, Reagan’s own actions in office suggest it wasn’t accurate. Despite many claims to the contrary, Reagan didn’t really shrink government at all. He increased spending and re-oriented government towards corporate support rather than middle-and-lower income people support. But it’s the myth that’s important; it’s what continues to harm us all.

The myth of government as problem continued to grow since Reagan, both in the Republican and even in many parts of the Democratic Party. And now we are at the apotheosis of this ideology. Pete Hegseth as Defense Secretary, Kash Patel at the FBI—all of these are the endgame of nearly eighty years of anti-government rhetoric from the right.

It was always going to end this way. Starting in the 1930s in response to the New Deal, the wealthy pushed this myth that more government always meant communism and inefficiency. They did so for straightforward and rational reasons: they wanted lower taxes. They didn’t want to pay for the system that made the poor less likely to take even the lowest paying job if it meant not starving.

At best, the myth was unintentionally misleading; at worst, it was always a deliberate lie perpetuated by the wealthy and powerful. State expansion without democracy and control is what leads to authoritarianism and death, that’s at least a big part of the story of Soviet (and Chinese) communism. It was the Soviet seizure of the state and its expansion and use without any democratic restraint or control that led to the horrors of Soviet communism. And that was never where the United States, or any other nation was heading under FDR, despite the claims of the wealthy elites who, for the entirety of the Cold War, kept saying.

Perhaps some of the folks on the right that claimed the New Deal was communism or socialism or fascism or totalitarianism (or, somehow, all four at once) were in earnest. I tend to believe that those on the economics side of things were often true believers that government control led to communism. Friedrich Hayek, I think, actually believed it when he said…. I think the rest of those who claimed the government was bad were a mixture of those captivated by a kind of motivated reasoning (they were wealthy and seized on ideas that let them stay that way) or were outright liars. Someone like William F. Buckley springs to mind here — I am convinced that Buckley knew precisely what he was doing. He thought the wealthy (and the white) deserved to stay in power, and the rest existed to service them.

Whether intentional lies or not, the damage is now evident for all to see. Manifestly unqualified, malicious, and, frankly, outright silly humans in charge of massive parts of the government. Pete Hegseth, whose claim to fame after time in the military is that he appeared on TV bemoaning changes to the military and American life since the 1950s, is in charge of the largest division of the US government. Elon Musk, without any government experience, is in charge of the crazy DOGE project, an illegal and undefined pseudo-department dedicated only to burning down the federal government from the inside out. Kash Patel, who has no law-enforcement background at all, is now in charge of the FBI — his qualifications apparently being that he was a pro-Trump troll on Twitter who was insistent on the stolen election myth and prided himself on ignoring facts and evidence.

In the absence of any strong argument to the contrary over the last forty years — government can be a force for good and has been for most of the last hundred years — this is the ideal that has captured American politics. Democrats in the nineties and since have largely granted the premise that government is inefficient and gets in the way of American progress. Of course, government action is how we ended up with safe food to eat, organized and effective research into new medicines, technology programs that gave us the internet, satellites, and so much more. Indeed, I would venture that the reason we live almost a quarter-century longer on average than humans did in the 1920s is because of government action.

Democrats and the Left need to rediscover the power of government and make the case for it. Without that, this will only get worse, and in a few years, we may very well see something even more insane… though it’s hard to think what that could look like.