Conservatives hate government. Their rallying cry and driving force is their desire to shrink the federal government “to the size where (we) can … drown it in a bathtub,” in the words of anti-government activist Grover Norquist. To conservatives, government is the boogeyman, the bad guy who must be reined in at all costs.
The recently enacted “Religious Freedom Restoration Act” in Indiana was designed, in the words of Gov. Mike Pence, not to discriminate against the LGBT community — as the law’s critics charge — but rather to protect people who “feel their religious liberty is under attack by government action” and is actually “about empowering people to confront government overreach.”
The most famous of the anti-government conservatives, President Ronald Reagan, put it more directly.
“The most terrifying words in the English language are,” he said, “‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’”
Ever since 1981, when Reagan inaugurated his presidency with the mantra, “Government is the problem,” conservatives have mindlessly repeated his chant. The first and last words in any conservative’s speech are about how much they dislike government and how they, like their idol Reagan, are determined to dismantle as much of it as they can.
Tea Party darling, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, recently kicked off his presidential bid by vowing to abolish the IRS and the Education Department and to curtail “federal regulators descending on businesses like locusts.”
Who can forget that iconic moment in 2012 when, during a Republican presidential candidate debate, then-Texas Gov. Rick Perry stated his intent to abolish three agencies of the federal government. He could not remember which ones they were, but he was going to abolish them all the same.
That same year GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney, using time honored tactics of divide et impera, told supporters he was not concerned about the 47 percent of the American people who, according to him, mooch off the government because they feel entitled, by that government, to do so.
But within this government-is-evil philosophy lies a strange conundrum: Why would someone want to be part of something they despise so intently? It’s as if one of the leaders of the Occupy Wall Street movement went seeking a job with Goldman Sachs. If government is indeed the boogeyman of boogeymen, his home is in Washington, D.C., a place no conservative wants to be identified with.
Conservatives pitch themselves as Washington outsiders, nonpoliticians.
“If you see a candidate who Washington embraces, run and hide,” Cruz recently told a group of supporters. Yet he, like so many others of the anti-government conservative movement, is determined to continue living and working there, right in the midst of what he sees as a modern-day Sodom or Gomorrah. Those conservative candidates who run for national office are just as eager to take up residence in this whirlpool of villainy.
There is a strange inconsistency in someone who wants to be part of something simply in order to destroy it, a mystifying irony in someone who claims to despise a profession — politics — but is willing to raise and spend millions of dollars to become or remain part of that profession. There is a whisper of “something-doesn’t-add-up-here” when someone claims to love their country, as conservatives proclaim over and over, but hates the government elected by the people of that country. Something doesn’t smell right.
The disconnect between talk and reality becomes stronger still when you remember that under the last three Republicans to occupy the White House, government grew with quantum leaps, far faster than it did under Democratic Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
In Reagan’s first term, government spending grew by 8.7 percent per year, and by 4.9 percent in his second — hardly “washing down the bathtub size.” It grew by 5.4 percent under his successor, President George H.W. Bush, while under President George W. Bush it grew by 7.3 percent in his first term and 8.1 percent in his second.
By contrast, spending grew only 3.2 percent in Clinton’s first term and 3.9 percent in his second. In Obama’s first term that rate was only 1.4 percent.
Even more startlingly, in Reagan’s eight years in office, the number of federal workers grew to 5.3 million from 5 million. During Obama’s first term, the number of government employees only increased by 100,000 — a difference of 200,00 people. Reagan may have left office mouthing the words, “Man is not free unless government is limited,” but his actions did not live up to them.
Perhaps it comes down to this: conservative politicians talk their talk but do not walk their walk. During the era of President Lyndon B. Johnson, this became known as the “credibility gap” because of LBJ’s distressing habit of saying something that clearly flew in the face of reality (such as a claim that the Vietnam War was about to end with a U.S. victory).
It appears conservative politicos have found that by telling their constituents what they want to hear, they’ve discovered a secure, comfortable and well-paid niche that they can keep as long as they keep on repeating words they have no intention of living up to.
This contradiction was conspicuously on display during the 2013 shutdown of the federal government. The lawmakers responsible for it continued to be paid while hundreds of thousands of federal workers were either sent home or saw their paychecks delayed.
A conservative congresswoman, Rep. Renee Ellmers, R-N.C., was asked how she justified receiving her annual salary of $174,000 from the federal government even though she had voted to shut down that very government.
“The thing is,” she said, “I need my paycheck. That’s the bottom line.”
A loud explosion was heard immediately after. It was the hypocrisy meter blowing up.
— Mark James Miller is a teacher and writer, and has been a part-time English instructor at Allan Hancock College in Santa Maria since 1995. He is president of the Part-Time Faculty Association of Allan Hancock College, California Federation of Teachers Local 6185, and is an executive board member of the Tri-Counties Central Labor Council. Click here to read previous columns. The opinions expressed are his own.