Trump could be the new Nixon – and that might not be a bad thing

Sholto Byrnes argues the case for big government in Donald Trump's America

President-elect Donald Trump speaks during a rally in New York. Evan Vucci / AP Photo

Big government is back. That is one inescapable conclusion to be drawn from Donald Trump’s election.

Mr Trump has said that America needs a trillion-dollar programme to rebuild infrastructure. He has promised to leave social security as it is, rather than reform it, and has also implicitly endorsed the welfare state and universal health care. He wants to build his wall with Mexico. He has promised to intervene to stop companies offshoring and to force universities to lower fees for students. As The Atlantic magazine put it back in March, Mr Trump has been “promising to make America great again by having government do big things again”.

This is not conventional conservative thinking as it has been defined in America this century. But it does reach back to another strand of Republicanism – the big government approach of presidents Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. The National Review’s executive editor, Reihan Salam, recently made a lengthy comparison with Nixon, noting that he believed America had been “betrayed by feckless, out-of-touch elites … he effectively exploited both racial desegregation and crime as wedge issues … he promised to use the power of government on behalf of decent, law abiding people”. Concluded Salam: “If all of this sounds vaguely Trumpian, it should. Donald Trump is Nixon’s obvious heir.”

Given how Nixon’s administration ended, the parallel may not be considered either flattering or welcome. But that would be to allow Watergate to overshadow his achievements, most famously the opening to China, but also his assistance in the peaceful desegregation of schools in the American South, the civil liberties work of his housing and urban development secretary George Romney and Nixon’s executive order that federal agencies must adopt affirmative action programmes for equal employment. These were unambiguously statist actions under a president who was aware that some things require government not only to take the lead but also not to shrink from a continued executive role. As Mr Salam noted, had Nixon not been impeached, that approach might well have dominated for the next decade. Instead, GOP thinking became infused with an idea summed up by Ronald Reagan’s promise to “get the government off the backs of the great American people”.

Regardless of the fact that Mr Reagan governed a great deal more pragmatically than his self-proclaimed heirs seem to believe today, the notion that government is the problem, not the solution, became ingrained. From the mid-90s until the 2008 crash, most Left-leaning parties shied away from statist-sounding programmes. In 1996, Bill Clinton declared :“The era of big government is over.”

This insistence that the private sector will necessarily outperform the public sector has always struck me as odd. It asserts the primacy of profit, as though a common good might not be a rather better foundation for a health service. Moreover, getting government off the people’s backs doesn’t make sense. In any functioning society, government is the people: it is the expression of their will and should enjoy both their consent and their mandate. The promise is akin to saying “I want to help you get off your own back”. And in any case, in a democracy, if you don’t like the people you have sent to govern in your interests, you send another lot in who you think will do a better job.

The government is there to be a guarantor. It is there to empower and protect. To make the automatic assumption that its influence will be malign seems both a sort of madness, and betrays a lack of belief in the mechanisms that provide governments with legitimacy, from tribal ties in some monarchies, to universal suffrage in democracies. This is an idea that has had, in any case, much more influence on American and, to an extent, western European thought than elsewhere. If, on independence, anyone had told the leaders of developing countries that minimising the role of government would be the best way to prosper, they would have laughed at them; and not just because socialist or paternalist conservatism dominated their countries’ politics for decades.

States need structures, institutions and bureaucracies, not just to have the capacity to act but in part also to unify. They don’t spring up on their own. And where the state fails to regulate, oligarchs and robber barons tend to proliferate. The private sector is important too, of course, and it is true that building a more entrepreneurial culture is a problem that many developing nations are working hard to address.

But a government big enough to be a country’s driver, not a hapless pedestrian buffeted by the swirling traffic of the free market, is crucial. And if we recognise that in a properly functioning state, the government is us, we should certainly welcome it back – and wonder why so many people ever wanted it go away in the first place.

Sholto Byrnes is a senior fellow at the Institute of Strategic and International Studies, Malaysia