The presidency has become much more powerful and less benign than it was designed to be. In recent years, the president has become lawmaker in chief, eclipsing Congress in many arenas of national life. He employs his new powers unabashedly for partisan purposes. His traditional, irreplaceable function as head of state and national leader has fallen by the wayside.
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President Biden has taken extra-statutory lawmaking to extremes that would have been unthinkable in earlier administrations—canceling $430 billion in student loans, ordering Covid vaccinations throughout the private sector, and extending a Covid-lockdown legislative ban on apartment evictions. The point of his “all of government” initiatives—to promote “diversity, equity and inclusion” and to suppress fossil fuels—is to commandeer agency mandates for his own purposes. They put the Securities and Exchange Commission and Federal Reserve Board on the climate-change beat, and charge the FDA and National Weather Service with promoting “equity” for favored identity groups.
Presidential lawmaking hasn’t been a seizure of power like a military coup. It might be described as the opposite—legislative abdication. When I was working for President Richard Nixon on environmental policy in 1970, he asked Congress to enact a national tax on sulfur-dioxide emissions. We couldn’t find a single lawmaker of either party to introduce the bill we had helpfully drafted. The congressional preference was to vote for clean air in the abstract and leave the hard, costly choices to the executive.
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Restoring the presidency to its proper role will likely require leadership from the president himself. This will sound quixotic. Presidents are power-hungry politicians—that’s how they got there—and they have come to relish the role of lawgiver. Messrs. Obama, Trump, and Biden have staged photogenic ceremonies for signing executive orders and even routine memorandums. The events resemble legislative signing ceremonies where presidents are surrounded by representatives and senators who shepherded the bill to passage. But in the new ceremonies, presidents are surrounded by their own staffs and appointees, who applaud his signing a document that they wrote, addressed to themselves.
Vance’s economics expressly reject free market principles by designating them as “neoliberalism”—a pejorative term that, until recently, was, mainly deployed by the far-left to attack Reaganomics. The result looks more like Bernie Sanders’s misguided economic vision plus a dash of nativism; and, although there has always been internal debate among conservatives about military interventionism, Vance adopts a selectively isolationist stance ranging from indifference to Ukraine to beating the war-drums on Iran.
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An obvious concern of Americans right now is inflation and how expensive everyday goods have gotten in the last few years. The New Right claims to recognize that concern, and it is something they need to address if they want to alleviate the main source of the public’s economic anxiety. Unfortunately, many other sentiments driving New Right economic policy run into conflict with that goal. As noted, Vance wants to deport millions of illegal immigrants, and apparently even some legal ones (e.g., Haitians in Springfield, Ohio). The U.S. economy could perhaps better withstand the deportation of millions of immigrants—however inhumane and impractical that is—if it could replace the same goods produced by immigrants by means of trade with other countries. But the populist New Right also supports the policy of increased tariffs across the board to encourage the purchasing of American products.
Deportations combined with tariffs will therefore make things even worse. On top of that, many of the immigrant workers deported provide services such as housekeeping and childcare—often services the native population is not too fond of providing. Therefore, New Right populists such as Vance will have to make a choice between deportations, tariffs, or lower prices. I would suggest they drop the first two and focus on the third through policies that free up trade and allow production, but that would be a free-market conservative approach (as well as a market liberal approach), not a populist one.
Michael Peterson ponders the rise of modern populism.
“Trump floats tax break for carmakers hurt by his own trade deal.”
Arnold Kling reviews the fate of the reputations of several 20th-century thinkers. Two slices:
An example of a Faller is John Kenneth Galbraith, who was known for claiming that the American economy had come to be dominated by large corporations. He described them as able to use advertising to ensure demand for their goods. He thought that the leaders of these giants cultivated a myth of entrepreneurship to hide their immense power and quasi-permanent status. In his prime, his books were bestsellers and many educated Americans were familiar with his line of thinking. Today, he is little read, and the business world has experienced considerable disruption.
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I would say that Camus and Sartre are clearly Fallers. Who today brags about being an existentialist? Lots of people did in the 1950s and 1960s.
I thought that Rawls was way over-rated in the 1970s. Philosophers still swoon over him, but the rest of educated America has moved on. Faller.
Nozick and Rothbard are Fallers. By even more than Rawls. 1970s libertarianism, including Friedman’s, is mostly a pincushion these days.
Vance Ginn makes the case that government is an inappropriate tool for strengthening families.
Juliette Sellgren talks with Tawni Hunt Ferrarini about teaching Hayek.
