George Will: The Trump administration is pure progressivism in action

Originally published in The Washington Post

Actual conservatives thinking about the 2028 presidential election should begin with this counterintuitive but correct proposition: Today’s administration is the most progressive in U.S. history. Consider progressivism’s nine core components.

1. Combating the citizenry’s false consciousness by permeating society, including cultural institutions, with government, which is politics. 2. Confidence in government’s ability to anticipate and control the consequences of broad interventions in modern society’s complexities. 3. Using industrial policy to pick economic winners and losers because the future is transparent, so government can know which enterprises should prosper. 4. Central planning of the evolution of the nation’s regions and the economy’s sectors, especially manufacturing. 5. Melding governing and party-building by constructing coalitions of government-dependent factions, as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal did with the elderly (Social Security, 1935), labor (the 1935 National Labor Relations Act favoring unions) and farmers (the 1933 Agricultural Adjustment Act). 6. Rejecting conservative growth-oriented tax simplification — lowering rates by eliminating preferences — to use taxes (including tariffs) as tools of social engineering. Bypassing the appropriations process, the tax code can transfer wealth to favored constituencies. 7. Limitless borrowing from future Americans to fund today’s Americans’ consumption of government goods and services. 8. Presidential supremacy ensured by using executive orders to marginalize Congress. 9. Unfettered majoritarianism, hence opposition to the Senate filibuster.

Has any administration exceeded the current administration’s progressivism regarding any of these nine matters? Today, statism seeps into everything, from universities to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Government confidently unravels the fabric of world trade and uses tariffs to fine-tune personal consumption. Tax exemptions (on tips, on Social Security benefits; a subsidy for automakers via the deductibility of car loan interest) to placate discrete constituencies. Regarding debt, Democrats praise and practice what Republicans denounce and practice: The theory that our government, source of the world’s reserve currency, can create/borrow unlimited dollars to finance public appetites or purchase political advantages.

Today’s torrent of executive orders presages an insistence that, a 1974 law notwithstanding, the president can, by impounding (refusing to spend) appropriated funds, treat Congress as a timorous expresser of mere aspirations. And, the administration’s congressional supporters are using a parliamentary maneuver (“reconciliation”) to marginalize filibusters, lest one prevent enactment of the president’s foremost desire, which is to add $5.2 trillion to the national debt over the next decade.

The administration’s never-equaled progressivism should shape actual conservatives’ thinking about 2028 by concentrating their minds on this: Vice President JD Vance — like vice presidents Walter Mondale (1984), George H.W. Bush (1988) and Al Gore (2000) — probably will win his party’s nomination. He shares the current president’s comprehensive hostility to actual conservatism: government limited by respect for its Madisonian architecture — the separation and enumeration of powers, and judicial review.

The Democratic Party is consciously, candidly progressive; its next nominee will be, too. If Vance is nominated, the GOP will offer voters an echo, not a choice: a (slightly different) flavor of president-rampant, government-everywhere, everything-politicized progressivism, fueled by the seething animosity that such high-stakes politics begets.

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