The Road to Statism is Paved With Incompetence

In a recent article for Townhall, columnist Kurt Schlichter wrote that the putative Senate candidacy in Michigan of “Kid Rock” (stage name of rocker/rapper Robert Ritchie) “should make every normal American smile” because “it will drive the liberals insane” and “make George Will [and other conservatives like him] soil themselves.” Schlichter’s paean to the downhome values of Kid Rock is typical of the populist right that has emerged in recent years, a movement that fueled the rise of Donald Trump from longshot candidate to president of the United States.

The basic grievance of the populist right is that politicians no longer represent the values and interests of ordinary people, so a radical change in personnel is necessary. This claim certainly has some merit. Our government seems unresponsive to and even uninterested in the citizenry. However, as its enthusiastic embrace of the likes of Trump and Kid Rock demonstrates, the populist right is a movement that thoughtful advocates of limited government should be wary of.

The Anglophone world has been trying to tame its rulers since rebel barons forced King John to sign the Magna Carta at Runnymede in 1215. And the American Revolution was not really a fight against taxation, but about taxation without representation—the colonists were tired of being governed by a distant sovereign that did not reflect their interests.

In making their arguments against the British Crown, the revolutionary generation relied heavily on the British “opposition ideology” of the early 1700s. British polemicists like Lord Bolingbroke and “Cato” complained that the king’s ministers were using patronage and emoluments to bribe members of Parliament to support the Crown’s initiatives, against the interests of the people. What was needed, these “Country” Whigs argued, was a return to first principles—rooting out corruption and restoring the people (or at least, the landowning gentry) as the backbone of British liberty.

The colonists found this theory a helpful way to explain why the Crown’s actions violated their rights as Englishmen. The Jeffersonian “revolution” of 1800 was built at least in part on this same opposition ideology. When James Madison and Thomas Jefferson resolved to fight the economic policies of Alexander Hamilton, they returned to the arguments of the Country Whigs. Andrew Jackson found this thinking useful as well. His veto of the Second Bank of the United States was heavily influenced by these ideas, and he justified the spoils system in part on the notion that it is bad for public administrators to be too distant from the people.