Donald Trump is striking at the heart of the left’s mythology. No wonder leftists are panicking.
One of the reasons why Democrats are reacting with such fury to Trump’s efforts to end wasteful government spending is because this has simply never happened before. Republicans and even some Democrats — remember Bill Clinton proclaiming that “The era of big government is over” — have railed against the out-of-control growth of the federal government, but even the strictest fiscal conservatives only managed to slow down that growth, not reverse it.
And even worse for leftists, in reducing the size of government, Trump is directly challenging the left’s core dogma that government can and should fix all the problems of human beings. This idea dates back to the Great Depression, when the Democrats first formed the coalition that made them the majority party for decades. The disparate groups that originally made up that coalition, including ethnic minorities in the North and segregationists who largely despised those minorities in the South, were held together by a shared assumption that whatever was wrong, government could solve it.
This was and is the fundamental myth of the American left. Born in the Great Depression that began in Oct. 1929, this myth claims that Herbert Hoover, the Republican who was president when the Depression hit, did nothing, leaving the American people in misery rather than expand the size of the government and tackle the problem head-on. After the electorate decisively rejected Hoover in 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt saved the nation, creating a dizzying array of federal programs that pulled the American people back from the abyss.
And so, you see, in our complex and multifaceted society, we need big government. That’s why Trump and Elon Musk are so irresponsible, you see, to take the pruning shears to government spending. Nancy Pelosi even recently claimed that Trump was suffering from a “lack of sophistication in terms of intelligence” that prevented him from seeing the damage that his efforts to control government waste was causing.
This central leftist myth, however, is wholly false, from beginning to end. Hoover’s inaction didn’t exacerbate the Great Depression. Big government didn’t end it. And we don’t need it today.
As “Rating America’s Presidents” shows, Hoover wasn’t inactive at all. He actually oversaw the massive expansion of the federal government in response to the Great Depression. Government intervention didn’t end the Depression; it prolonged it. Hoover’s programs only added to the burden ordinary Americans had to carry, especially when he increased taxes in 1932. The tax increases were unavoidable, however: contrary to the assumptions of many Americans today, big government programs don’t magically pay for themselves.
Hoover’s programs didn’t accomplish anything. They didn’t prevent banks from going out of business: over five thousand closed between 1929 and 1932. Hoover’s programs didn’t put Americans back to work: unemployment rose from 3.3 percent in 1929 to nearly 25 percent in 1933.
The popular perception that Hoover was responsible for the Depression was largely correct, but his failure was in doing too much, not in not doing enough. Yet after resoundingly defeating Hoover in 1932, Roosevelt didn’t reverse his predecessor’s policies; he continued and expanded them.
Raymond Moley, a charter member of FDR’s “Brain Trust” of key advisors aiding him to develop the New Deal, recounted that “when we all burst into Washington after the inauguration, we found every essential idea enacted in the 100-day Congress [the Roosevelt administration’s first flurry of activity to end the Depression] in the Hoover Administration itself.” Another member of the “Brain Trust,” Rexford Tugwell, noted that, in his policies, Roosevelt bore an “amazing resemblance to Hoover” and observed that “practically the whole New Deal was extrapolated from programs that Hoover started.”
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In February 1939, nearly six years after leaving office, Hoover boasted that the Republicans, not the Democrats, pioneered big government: “It was the Republican Party that first established the concept that business must be regulated by government if the freedom of men was to be preserved. Indeed, it was the Republican Party that first initiated regulation against monopoly and business abuse in the states. Over the last fifty years it created seven out of the ten great Federal regulating agencies of today. It was Republicans who created the income and estate taxes that fortunes might not accumulate so as to oppress the nation and that there might be relief of tax burdens upon the poor.”
See? Hoover just wanted the rich to “pay their fair share.” The political debate has hardly since Hoover’s day. We do, however, have the benefit of nearly a century of experience to show that big government doesn’t work, and stifles human freedom. Good thing Trump and Musk have, at long last, started the cutting.
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