For this week’s Fault Lines column, Jon Allsop is filling in for Jay Caspian Kang.
Not long ago, I was reading the newsletter TheRighting, for which the journalist Howard Polskin combs through the right-wing mediasphere so you don’t have to, when a back-to-back pair of links jumped out at me. The first, from Townhall, announced that it was “Time for Trump’s DOJ and FBI to Deal the Pain.” Republicans “control federal law enforcement right now,” an excerpt pulled out by Polskin read. “That means we get to set the agenda, and we need to ruthlessly and brutally use the law to defeat our enemies’ outrageous and disgraceful attacks upon patriotic Americans.” The second, from The American Spectator, focussed on the role that Elon Musk’s company SpaceX played in bringing home astronauts who had been stranded on the International Space Station, arguing that the supposed rescue reinforced the earthly premise of Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE: that the government is riddled with waste and other actors can perform its functions better. “If the private sector can recover astronauts,” the subheading read, “it can do anything.”
One of these links leaned into the idea that the government should be smaller; the other that it should be bigger. This juxtaposition—and apparent contradiction—seems to be everywhere at the moment. While catching up on the news on a Sunday in early April, I came across stories that attested, respectively, to significant forthcoming job cuts at the Internal Revenue Service and to the Trump Administration’s unprecedented plans to use the agency’s data to go after undocumented immigrants. The same day, Kristen Welker, the host of “Meet the Press,” asked Scott Bessent, the Treasury Secretary, about tariffs that have been called “the biggest tax hike on Americans in decades”—and then about the Administration’s plans to extend President Trump’s 2017 tax cuts. More recently, I read a story in the Times about a root-and-branch push to slash regulations across government, which Trump described as the “deconstruction of the overbearing and burdensome administrative state.” (A notice published as part of this effort, at the Federal Communications Commission, was literally titled “DELETE, DELETE, DELETE.”) I then clicked through to the paper’s live blog for that day, which led with Trump threatening to strip Harvard of its tax-exempt status should it not bend to his will.
Perhaps the two overarching themes of Trump’s first hundred or so days back in office have been that he has brazenly pushed the boundaries of executive power—over Congress, the courts, universities, law firms, the media, former bureaucrats who have slighted him, migrants disappeared without due process to a mega-prison in El Salvador—while, at the same time, empowering Musk and DOGE, among others, to pare back the federal government and withdraw it from long-standing areas of activity. At least at a glance, these narratives seem to channel a classic political divide, between those who think the government should stay out of people’s business and those who think it should take a more hands-on role. That Trump finds himself on both sides of the divide surely reflects, at least in part, the chaos of his approach to governance; whether he pursues a particular policy often seems guided less by philosophical rigor than by naked self-interest. There’s also the issue of execution. Some of his early policies—not least his tariffs—have been implemented in messy ways, and have at times appeared to be driven by incompatible impulses.
At the same time, the Trump Administration seems to be trying to appeal to a broad coalition that runs from traditional small-government Republicans to Silicon Valley techno-libertarians and the nationalist hard right. The latter’s priorities, in particular, involve expanding executive power in ways that are frequently at odds with an instinct to cut costs. The Administration’s breathtakingly ambitious deportation goals are perhaps the clearest example; Tom Homan, Trump’s “border czar,” has been prodding Congress for more funding. (“Our level of success depends on the resources I have,” he said in February.) This is before we even get into Trump’s desire to take over Canada and Greenland, which would expand the government in a very literal sense.
Moves that might appear to shrink or to grow the government, however, are not always as contradictory as they seem. Oren Cass, a prominent policy commentator who serves as the chief economist at American Compass, a conservative think tank, told me that “the simple small-government-versus-big-government dichotomy that dictated most of our political fights in the nineteen-nineties and two-thousands isn’t the right axis on which to understand a lot of the conflicts and a lot of the opportunities” of this moment. In part, he is right; we are in the midst of a political realignment that muddies old dichotomies. But evaluating exactly how government is getting both smaller and bigger under Trump 2.0—and, in some ways, getting bigger by getting smaller—is a revealing lens through which to view where this Administration, the country, and, perhaps, our broader political world may be headed.
During the Obama years, Jonathan Havercroft, an academic who teaches political theory, and who is now at the University of Glasgow, was reading Nietzsche in preparation for a lecture when he came across a reference to “misarchism,” a world view that combines aversion to government, as the entity that regulates social life, with support for a robust state that enforces order and traditional morals. Havercroft wondered if the concept might help explain the rise of the Tea Party, the Republican movement that emerged in furious opposition to Barack Obama and advocated for a mix of both libertarian and authoritarian policies. (The Tea Party was broadly anti-tax, as its name suggested, and opposed big-government programs like the Affordable Care Act, but many adherents seemed to favor stronger immigration enforcement and an aggressive approach to counterterrorism.) Havercroft and a colleague tested his hypothesis against data from the American National Election Study, found support for it, and predicted that this world view would continue to shape Republican politics long after Obama.
As the misarchist framework suggests, the idea of “the state” can be theoretically distinguished from the idea of “government,” wherein government is conceived as an entity that provides services and welfare and the key characteristic of the state is what the sociologist Max Weber called its monopoly on legitimate violence—as Havercroft told me, “what we today would think of as police power, protecting borders, military power.” The two terms have often been used interchangeably, particularly in the postwar era of democratic welfare states. Many countries, though, have combined small-government principles borrowed from neoliberal economics, with its emphasis on free markets as the main driver of social organization, with vicious crackdowns on freedoms of speech and association. Pinochet’s Chile, for instance, both privatized the pension system and disappeared people by dropping their bodies out of helicopters into the ocean. It has been speculated that the scale of Chile’s neoliberal turn would have been impossible without its accompanying authoritarianism. In a 1982 letter to the libertarian economist Friedrich A. Hayek, Margaret Thatcher acknowledged the success of Pinochet’s reforms, but noted that “in Britain with our democratic institutions and the need for a high degree of consent, some of the measures adopted in Chile are quite unacceptable.”
Many neoliberal economies have been premised on the notion that a strong state is needed to create a strong market—though that state, ultimately, might do fewer things. A Ferrari or a Porsche might be smaller than a Jaguar, Ernesto Gallo, an academic who has studied a growing body of literature on what is called “authoritarian neoliberalism,” told me. But the smaller car may be “stronger in terms of power.” Even in the age of Ronald Reagan and Thatcher, the idea of a spectrum running from small government on the right to big government on the left was an oversimplification. (In Reagan’s first Inaugural Address, he declared that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” and then went on, for example, to significantly increase defense spending.) In 2001, a journalist launched the Political Compass, a tool designed to move beyond such simplifications by adding a social scale perpendicular to the economic one, creating ideological quadrants that have since become a staple of political-science classes. Singapore, for instance, is highly economically free but sharply socially authoritarian.
Trump, despite continuing to celebrate Reagan’s legacy, has in many respects moved away from the consensus that defines the former President’s economic policies. In 2019, Veronique de Rugy, a libertarian and senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center, at George Mason University, wrote in Reason magazine that Trump’s first Presidency would “end up being, by a large margin, a very pro-government intervention administration,” citing, among other things, his first-term tariff policy. Now that Trump is back in office, de Rugy told me, he is redoubling his pursuit of that policy in a way that constitutes “an utter abuse of executive powers” and mirrors “the very same arrogance that the far left has always had, that government knows best and can consciously reorganize the economy.”
Indeed, an ascendant wing of the Republican Party has actively pushed for a more muscular government—in the areas of family and industrial policy, for example—after reaching the conclusion that Reagan-style market orthodoxy has hollowed out communities, among other bad outcomes. Cass, who is generally aligned with this wing, accused DOGE of “cutting the things you actually wanted to be building up”; its approach to head-count reduction, for example, slashed an office overseeing subsidies for the domestic manufacturing of semiconductors.
But Cass sees DOGE more as a wasted opportunity than a faulty premise, and he sees spending cuts as a necessary part of realigning the government’s priorities; in his view, for example, it might take less government to enforce universal tariffs than to regulate individual free-trade deals, or to coördinate industrial policy than to retrain and support workers left behind by the market. But “the actual substantive goal of both building some things up while cutting other things down has to be paired to a rhetoric that recognizes that updated reality,” Cass said. And on that front “there’s still a ways to go.” Many figures in the Administration still speak in very classically “small government” terms. The Deputy Treasury Secretary complained to Politico recently that “the government’s gotten larger” and “more involved in people’s lives.” DOGE called for “small-government revolutionaries” to join its team; Musk has said that the U.S. should privatize “everything we possibly can,” and danced around with a chainsaw gifted to him by Javier Milei, the avowedly libertarian President of Argentina. (He also reposted, then deleted, a missive stating that “Stalin, Mao and Hitler didn’t murder millions of people. Their public sector workers did.”) Havercroft told me that Musk is acting like the “misarchist-in-chief.”
And yet it’s also fair to question how much Musk et al. are actually shrinking the government. (Bessent himself reportedly did this recently, during a shouting match with the DOGE head in the White House.) Musk once spoke of wanting to quickly slash two trillion dollars in federal spending, but he has since revised down that figure; so far, the cuts have fallen far short of his ambitious goals—and that’s if you take DOGE’s self-reported claims at face value, which is, erm, ill-advised. And many government workers fired at DOGE’s behest have subsequently been reinstated, because their jobs turned out to be essential or because the courts intervened to clip DOGE’s wings. Over all, spending is actually higher than this time last year, spurred largely by debt interest and automatic increases in Social Security payments, which Trump has promised not to touch, even though they make up a substantial percentage of the federal budget. (Whether you believe Trump’s promise, of course, is a different question; White House officials have suggested that the early cuts targeted “low-hanging fruit” to build political cover for less popular decisions to come.)
