“Moderate” Republicans such as Arnold Schwarzenegger like to boast that they’re fiscal conservatives and social liberals. But the social liberalism always ends up burying the fiscal conservatism. As Congressman Mike Pence put it, “To those who say we should simply focus on fiscal issues, I say you would not be able to print enough money in a thousand years to pay for the government you would need if the traditional family collapses.”49
But the collapse of the traditional family is already well advanced—and as part of a conscious Big Government strategy. Big Daddy sings a siren song: a kiss on the hand may be quite continental, but statism is a girl’s best friend. So it is in government’s interest to diminish those men old-fashioned enough to marry women and thereby woo them away from the Big Stash of Big Daddy Statist. Big Government’s bias against marriage and family isn’t an unforeseen quirk of the tax code. It’s in logical, strategic support of its mission—to expand government and diminish everything else. How’s it going? Well, 40 percent of American children are now born out of wed-lock.50 A majority of Hispanic babies are born to unmarried mothers. So are 70 percent of black children. And so are 70 percent of the offspring of non-Hispanic white women with a high school education and an income under $20,000. Entire new categories of crime have arisen in the wake of familial collapse, like the legions of daughters abused by their mom’s latest live-in boyfriend. Congressman Pence’s doomsday scenario is already here: millions and millions of American children are raised in transient households and moral vacuums that make not just social mobility but even elemental character formation all but impossible. In an America of fewer jobs, more poverty, more crime, more drugs, more disease, and growing ethnocultural resentments, the shattering of the indispensable social building block will have catastrophic consequences.
What prevents the “state popular” from declining into a “state despotic”?
As Tocqueville saw it, what mattered was the strength of the intermediary institutions between the sovereign and the individual. In France, the revolution abolished everything, and subordinated all institutions to the rule of central authority. The New World was more fortunate: “The principle and lifeblood of American liberty” was, according to Tocqueville, municipal independence.
Does that distinction still hold? In the twentieth century the intermediary institutions were belatedly hacked away—not just self-government at town, county, and state level, but other independent pillars: church, civic associations, the family. After the diminution of every intervening institution, very little stands between the individual and the sovereign, which is why the latter now assumes the right to insert himself into every aspect of daily life and why Henrietta Hughes in Fort Myers, Florida, thinks it entirely normal to beseech the Wizard in the far-off Emerald City, where the streets are paved with borrowed green, to do something about her bathroom.
In its debased contemporary sense, liberalism is a universalist creed. It’s why the left dislikes federalism. Federalism means borders, and borders mean there’s always somewhere else to go: the next town, the next county, the next state. I’m pro-choice and I vote—with my feet. Universal liberalism would rather deny you that choice. America has dramatically expanded not just government generally, but nowhere-else-to-go government in particular. As Milton Friedman wrote in 1979:
From the founding of the Republic to 1929, spending by governments at all levels, federal, state, and local, never exceeded 12 percent of the national income except in time of major war, and two-thirds of that was state and local spending. Federal spending typically amounted to 3 percent or less of the national income. Since 1933 government spending has never been less than 20 percent of national income and is now over 40 percent, and two-thirds of that is spending by the federal government…. By this measure the role of the federal government in the economy has multiplied roughly tenfold in the past half-century.51
