Have Republicans finally accepted the New Deal?

Jonathan Chait, a perceptive Republican-watcher, thinks he has detected something new in the party: They’ve given up on reversing the New Deal. It’s a good piece, but I’m not so sure.

Mr. Chait’s evidence is that the party’s heart doesn’t seem to be in opposing the current large-scale Democratic relief bill; they don’t seem to be aggressively fighting the restoration of earmarks; and many Republicans discovered during Donald Trump’s presidency that even their own voters don’t actually want to return the size of government to where it was in 1960, let alone 1930.

It’s true that their efforts to turn discomfort with large deficits into enthusiastic attacks on entitlements have lately fizzled. It’s also true that those efforts have always run into trouble when general rhetoric has turned into specific proposals to cut Medicare and Social Security, which are the (incredibly popular) programs that would need to be slashed, if not eliminated, to really make progress on that objective.

So I’d say three things.

One is that many conservatives never really took their own rhetoric about this seriously. Ronald Reagan, for example, certainly tried (and sometimes succeeded) in cutting spending on programs Republicans disliked, but he never really attempted to dismantle the Great Society or attack the New Deal. In fact, Reagan — a fan of Franklin Roosevelt, after all — fully accepted the fundamental New Deal belief that presidents were responsible for the economy; he just thought that the way to boost growth was by shrinking the size of government.

The most serious effort to reverse anything was George W. Bush’s short-lived attempt to modify Social Security, but that’s the same George W. Bush who helped expand Medicare.

Second, the people missing from Mr. Chait’s piece are Federalist Society lawyers, and especially judges. Many of them certainly seem to want, as they see it, to rescue the Constitution from how it’s been interpreted since FDR pressured the Supreme Court into accepting the New Deal. It may be that Republican ideologues have given up on achieving these goals through the elected branches of government precisely because they think they can advance them without direct fingerprints.

Of course, if Mr. Chait is right about the politicians, and the judges they’ve put on the courts aren’t going along, we could have some very interesting conflicts between activist Republican judges and a party that’s no longer interested in their ideas.

Finally, I’m not sure how much intention we can ascribe to the current group of Republicans in Congress, some of whom seem more interested in baiting liberals than anything else.

At any rate, the conservative policy agenda in practice over the past few decades has mostly consisted of cutting taxes on the wealthy, not tearing down the New Deal. I suspect that if Republicans win in 2022 and 2024, that’s pretty much what they’ll try to do again.