The aggressive actions by President Trump’s newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) startled many commentators. But Elon Musk’s frenzied assault on the federal civil service reflects the popularity of anti-government ideas that have gradually gained a wide acceptance among Americans in recent decades. Talk radio and, more recently, cable news, and social media have been highly effective platforms for spreading libertarian ideas.
Some libertarian ideas have an ancient American pedigree. American political culture has long nursed a deep suspicion of powerful government. The hostility could be traced as far back as the American Revolution. Then, patriots saw individual liberty as unavoidably at odds with a muscular state: a strong government would inevitably undermine individual freedoms and vice versa. Accordingly, the first attempt at a federal constitution, the benighted Articles of Confederation, was more of a treaty among thirteen sovereign states than a consolidated national government. Its structural weakness and its lack of a robust executive were not accidental.
Two hundred years later when the requirement for equal time on the public airwaves (the so-called ‘fairness doctrine’) was repealed during the Reagan administration, conservative radio hosts discovered a megaphone to spread a more extreme version of anti-statist thought. Rush Limbaugh and numerous others took what had been decidedly fringe ideas and moved them into the ideological mainstream. “I have an institutional fear of big government,” Limbaugh boasted. Conservative talk radio often sounded as though the government they were decrying was that of Louis XIV’s absolutist France. It didn’t appear to matter that U.S. citizens lived in a representative democracy where the state could serve the common good. “If Thomas Jefferson thought taxation without representation was bad,” Limbaugh observed, “he should see how it is with representation.” It was very simple, Limbaugh wanted “Big Government… to fail.”
Sometimes, the rhetoric sounded good humored and folksy. For example, Ronald Reagan liked to joke that, “the most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’”
But the underlying message was actually pretty serious. As Reagan put it in his first inaugural address: “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” Perhaps most ominous was libertarian Grover Norquist’s disturbing 2001 declaration that “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I could drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” Peter Stromberg, writing for the libertarian Mises Institute, stakes out a radical position that has recently gained broader acceptance. Stromberg asserts without argument or evidence that “the state is evil, that taxation is theft, and that politics is the vilest game ever invented. The proposal is to shut down the state and not replace it with anything.”
Accordingly, we shouldn’t be startled by the fierce animus directed at the federal civil service in the early weeks of the second Trump administration. In many respects, the President is simply riding this now sizable libertarian wave. Although billionaires like Musk have benefitted enormously from federal government largesse, they correctly perceive that the frantic, chainsaw-wielding assault upon the regulative state would not only serve their own business interests but resonate powerfully with many average Americans. Thus, an extreme anti-statism has become central to the new populist version of the Republican Party.
Yet none of this was inevitable. Earlier forms of American populism did not view government as the enemy. One should take care to distinguish late nineteenth-century populism from its recent right-wing variety. The Populist Party of the 1890s did not demonize an activist state. Indeed, the original Populists saw government as a duly elected but potent popular agent to battle huge concentrations of private corporate power. As long as the government faithfully represented America’s majority producer class, these populists weren’t afraid of the state asserting its authority. Their influential Omaha platform of 1892 put it bluntly: “the power of government—in other words, of the people—should be expanded… as rapidly and as far as the good sense of an intelligent people and the teachings of experience shall justify….”
Of course, Trump tapping into this libertarian impulse is deeply ironic. After all, strict libertarians today eschew key elements of Trumpian populism. They adhere to an older, consistent libertarianism that always promoted free trade, denounced tariffs, celebrated open borders, and decried a powerful executive. Ever the unprincipled opportunist, Trump recognized how a certain kind of libertarian anti-statism could still be useful. Decades of unanswered anti-state propaganda furnished Trump a handy weapon.
Prior to Donald Trump’s return to the Oval Office, one might have been tempted to dismiss libertarianism as not a unified and well-organized movement. But as Benjamin Wallace-Wells noted in the New Yorker in 2023, “the laissez-faire credo still suffuses much of the political spectrum…On the right, a colloquial libertarianism is everywhere.” Indeed, it is the gasoline powering DOGE’s chainsaw.
