THE NEW YORK TIMES: The Crucial Issue of the 21st Century

The main political argument in the 20th century was over the size of government. On the left, people tried to use government to reduce inequality and offer an economic safety net. On the right, people tried to reduce taxes and regulations to boost growth and social dynamism.

That era is clearly over. Donald Trump is a big-government populist who has destroyed small-government conservatism. He’s using state power to adopt a mercantilist tariff policy that redirects global trade flows. He’s using industrial policy to pick economic winners and losers. He’s using state power to micromanage key universities.

The Trump Defence Department just spent $400 million to become that largest shareholder of a private rare-earth elements company. Mr Trump got himself a “golden share” of U.S. Steel, giving the president sweeping powers over a private company’s business decisions.

Nearly 45 years ago, Ronald Reagan said in his first inaugural, “In the present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”

That seems like an ice age ago. Now we have an administration that’s all about concentrated executive power and relentless federal action.

How did the Republicans move so far, so fast?

Well, the 20th century argument over the role of government happened at a time when people basically thought America was working.

When society seems stable, the individual is seen as the primary political reality: How can we support individuals so they can rise and prosper — a tax cut here, a new social program there.

But today, most people think America is broken. According to recent surveys, public trust in institutions is near its historical low. According to a recent Ipsos survey, about two-thirds of Americans agree with the statement “Society is broken.”

As David Frum pointed out recently in The Atlantic, between 1983 and 2007, the share of Americans who were satisfied with “the way things are going in the US.” hit peaks of about 70 per cent and was often above 50 per cent.

Over the 15 years from 2007-22, the number of Americans who were satisfied with the way things were going was frequently down to about 25 per cent.

America’s social order has fractured, and that has made all the difference.

French mystic Simone Weil once wrote that “order is the first need of all.”

She emphasised that the social order is built on our obligations to one another, the texture of our trustworthy relationships.

To put it another way, all humans need to grow up in a secure container, within which they can craft their lives.

The social order consists of a stable family, a safe and coherent neighborhood, a vibrant congregational and civic life, a reliable body of laws, a set of shared values that neighbors can use to build healthy communities and a conviction that there exists moral truth.

If you want a clearer idea of what a social order is, I recommend reading Russell Kirk’s 1974 book, “The Roots of American Order.” Kirk showed how, over the centuries, certain values, practices and institutions emerged, gradually forming the basis of the American social order.

Kirk wrote that the importance of the social order was best appreciated by imagining its opposite: “A disordered existence is a confused and miserable existence.

If a society falls into general disorder, many of its members will cease to exist at all. And if the members of a society are disordered in spirit, the outward order of the commonwealth cannot endure.”

Millions of Americans believe that this is where we are. They see families splinter or never form, neighborhood life decay, churches go empty, friends die of addictions, downtowns become vacant, a national elite grow socially and morally detached.

We have privatised morality so that there are no longer shared values. The educated-class institutions have grown increasingly left wing and can sometimes feel like a hostile occupying army to other Americans.

When the social order is healthy, nobody notices; when it is in rubble, it’s all anybody can think about. Once the social order was shredded, small government conservatism made no sense.

If your society is in tatters, why would you want a small government doing nothing? If you think society is in moral and civic chaos, why would you think this or that tax cut or this or that government program is going to make a difference?

I’m a big fan of baby bonds. But a recent high-quality study showed that children whose parents received $333 per month did no better over four years than children whose parents received nothing. If a child’s social order is broken, federal money alone will not help.

People who feel that society is fundamentally rigged, unfair and chaotic turn to populists. Populism is an ethos that cuts across the categories of the big government/small government debates. Populists can be very conservative on social issues and isolationist and nativist on immigration issues but very progressive when it comes to redistributing the wealth.

During the 1930s, for example, the Townsend Plan was by far the largest social movement, claiming to have more than 1,000 clubs nationwide.

ome of its supporters were hostile to the New Deal, and its meetings featured frequent denunciations of cigarettes, lipsticks, necking and other signs of urban depravity, but these people also supported subsidies for the elderly that dwarfed those being proposed as part of what was then the new Social Security system.

I recently learned a new word from a Jon Allsop piece in The New Yorker: misarchist. A misarchist is a leader who is hostile to government and the people who run it but is willing to use state power to enforce order and traditional morals.

Misarchists often see a public office as their own personal property, which they can use however they want to take down their enemies.

Mr Trump is a misarchist extraordinaire. He concentrates state power so he can go after the managerial class who he and his followers believe have betrayed America and destroyed the social order — civil servants, university administrators, journalists, scientists and so on. The purpose is to use state power to, in JD Vance’s words, “overthrow the modern ruling class.”

Mr Trump demagogically once called this his retribution. But millions of Mr Trump’s followers see it as their best shot at restoring order.

The central argument of the 21st century is no longer over the size of government. The central argument of this century is over who can best strengthen the social order. In this contest, the Republicans have their champions and the Democrats aren’t even on the field.

Republicans have more quickly understood these new circumstances because conservatives instinctively understand that policy is downstream from culture. They instinctively understand the primary importance of the prepolitical; those covenantal bonds that precede individual choice — your commitment to family, God, nation and community.

They understand, as Edmund Burke argued, that manners and morals are more important than laws. The social order is the primary social reality.

Since the progressive era, Democrats have seen society through a government policy lens that is often oblivious to the prepolitical social fabric that holds or does not hold society together from the bottom.

Democrats have often been technocratic, relying excessively on social science, policy wonkery; they are prone to the kind of thinking that does not see the sinews of our common life — the stuff that cannot be quantified.

Democrats are the party of the elite managerial class, and it’s hard for us affluent, educated types in blue cities to really understand the gut-wrenching disgust, rage and alienation that envelops the less privileged as they watch their social order collapse.

I’ve read dozens of pieces from Democratic pols on how their party can turn things around. Each one — promoting this or that policy — is more pathetic than the last.

These people still act and think as if it’s the 20th century and everything will be better if we can have another New Deal. They aren’t even willing to confront the core Democratic question: How does the party of the managerial elite adapt to a populist age?

The Democratic opportunity comes from the fact that, as always, Mr Trump doesn’t try to solve the problems he addresses; he just provides a show business simulacra of a solution.

If Democrats can come up with an alternative vision of how to repair the social and moral order, they might be relevant in the years ahead.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

© 2025 The New York Times Company