The Welfare State Has Corrupted Both Parties

It’s dépassé these days to quote former President Ronald Reagan, but his decrying of immorality and indignity of government dependency was one of his important and powerful messages. There was no “humanity or charity in destroying self-reliance,” Reagan said at his first gubernatorial inauguration in 1967, because “dignity and self-respect” were “the very substance of moral fiber.”

Some on the New Right claim Reagan as a fellow populist because he supported temporary tariffs to pressure Japan into a better deal in his second term — Trump wants a 10% across-the-board tariff on all imports in perpetuity. The fundamental difference is that the Reagan didn’t play on the economic fears of voters. Rather than satiating the voters’ resentment, he convinced them to dramatically reaccess their relationship with government and free themselves from the constrictions of New Deal thinking. A decade after his presidency, Democrats such as President Bill Clinton were still promising the country that the era of big government was over and voting for welfare reform.

That was a long time ago. Reagan famously joked that the nine most terrifying words in the English language were, “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”  Today, it is, unironically, the unifying message of our politics.