This article was originally published by Connor O’Keeffe at The Mises Institute.
One year ago, as the 2024 election entered its final weeks, Donald Trump’s campaign focused its entire operation around one final objective: to drive home its “closing argument”—the one basic vision that the whole campaign had been built around. At a flurry of rallies from Madison Square Garden to the site of the attempted assassination in Butler, Pennsylvania, Trump repeated his fundamental promise: that, if elected, he and his administration would “help America heal.”
That was evidently a powerful message to a population who had just lived through the political establishment’s insane response to the COVID pandemic, only to be slammed with the worst price inflation in decades and all the cultural chaos that entails, along with the outbreak of two brutal foreign wars that the American people were forced to bankroll.
But making promises in speeches is a lot easier than actually enacting those changes in a meaningful way. And when it comes to fighting back against progressivism, socialism, globalism, interventionism, or whatever you want to call the ideology of the political establishment, the American right has long struggled to do so meaningfully.
The reason was best explained in a 1938 pamphlet by the Old Right writer Garet Garrett, called The Revolution Was. Garrett witnessed a conservative movement that was similarly staring down a powerful coalition of New Deal Democrats, crony business leaders, and outright socialists who were seizing on the craziness of the times to agitate for greater and greater government control over the economy and all aspects of American life.
The conservatives were therefore attempting to prevent those various factions from imposing what amounted to a revolution in the United States, but with little luck.
In his pamphlet, Garrett argued that the fundamental problem with the conservatives of his day was that they were looking in the wrong direction. The revolution that they were trying to prevent had already happened with the passage of the New Deal.
Garrett rigorously walked through dozens of seemingly innocuous institutional changes made with the New Deal to demonstrate that, even though many of them had not immediately resulted in the kind of big government power grab the right was worried about, they combined to create an institutionally protected federal bureaucracy in Washington, DC that made the eventual growth of government virtually inevitable.
The takeaway from Garrett’s pamphlet was that, as long as the American right ignored the institutional changes that had already happened and, therefore, allowed them to remain in place, it was effectively a certainty that they would lose. That what they were advocating against would come to pass.
The right, obviously, did not learn this lesson. In the ninety-plus years since the New Deal was enacted, the federal government has grown larger and more powerful than any government in history, with terrible results for everyday Americans.
And every step of the way, conservatives continued to advocate for keeping the current institutional set-up in DC in place while only trying in vain to prevent the next big inevitable power grab from happening.
The only exception came when the conservative right found itself in control of the White House and/or both Houses of Congress. When that happened, conservatives tended to convince themselves they could steer the federal Leviathan to push their preferred social and cultural values. But, again, as Garrett wrote, the New Deal and post-New Deal federal power grabs were designed and implemented in part to siphon power away from the local, religious, and familial institutions that the right champions.
Expanding that federal power in the name of reversing the national trends it was partially designed to bring about was not only ineffective, it was counterproductive because all that new federal power right-wing Republicans helped bring about then got handed over to left-leaning Democrats like Carter, Clinton, and Obama, who would accelerate the trends conservatives were trying to slow.
Garet Garrett’s insights did not disappear. Murray Rothbard gave a speech in 1992 calling for the right to reject conservatism and instead embark on a reactionary counterrevolution to take the country back from the interventionist elite that had already been ripping the American people off for decades by that point. In many ways, Pat Buchanan’s third-party campaigns for the presidency reflected a faction on the right recognizing the need to move away from the pure conservatism of establishment Republicans.
However, the dominance of the neoconservatives in the wake of the 9/11 attacks did much to isolate the more radical parts of the right. That is, until the chaos of the Great Recession brought those elements back out in the form of the early TEA Party movement and the Ron Paul campaigns in 2008 and 2012.
That is the sentiment that Trump picked up on as he ran for president in 2016. Unfortunately, while his rhetoric was far more reactionary than his opponents’, Trump mostly governed like a typical conservative in his first term.
But, as Trump rode a new wave of fury with the political establishment to victory in 2024, there was hope among some members of the non-conservative right that Trump and his closest confidants had learned the lessons of his first term and truly intended to bring the kinds of sweeping institutional changes to the political system itself that he had run on from the beginning. Trump’s apparent embrace of DOGE and his claimed hostility to neoconservative war hawks even seemed to back that up. However, genuine or not, that effort was short-lived.
As DOGE fizzled out, Trump’s priorities shifted to—like previous Republican presidents—expanding federal power while leaving the federal bureaucracy he had, rightly, been demonizing almost entirely in place. He has kept the regulatory state at its current size while enacting a few new, easily-reversible rules of his own. He’s left the brutal federal income tax system in place and added new import taxes on top of it. He’s left the national security state untouched while trying to end a few current wars and start a few others. And he’s left the Federal Reserve with all its power over the economy and pushed for it to accelerate its inflationist policies.
In other words, so far, Trump and his team have chosen to preserve virtually all the federal institutions responsible for creating the economic, geopolitical, and cultural chaos he campaigned on stopping to instead expand federal power even more. These new power grabs will, at most, bring some temporary Republican wins that will easily be reversed when the reins to the—now even more powerful—federal government are handed back over to some left-leaning establishment administration.
MAGA is missing the opportunity to enact meaningful institutional changes that will outlast this presidency. If Trump and his movement are serious about helping America heal, they must reject the conservatism that helped get us here, avoid the siren-call of expanding federal power while they temporarily control it, and act—with urgency—to finally roll back the progressive-interventionist revolution that has already taken place.
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