Opinion/DiNunzio: Thoughts on Reagan, Goldwater and America's conservative legacy

Mario R. DiNunzio is a professor emeritus of history at Providence College.

“Government is the problem.” Ronald Reagan intoned that warning to the happy crowd at his first presidential inaugural. His admirers cheered with little understanding what a dangerous idea it was in a democracy. To the delight of libertarians, the statement soon became the mantra of the American conservative movement.

But if government by the people is ”the” problem, what is the alternative? Governments do make mistakes. One core principle of a democratic republic is the ability to throw the rascals out when they make a mess of things. But to argue that government itself is the problem is to undermine democracy itself.

Reagan did not invent the thought. The conservative surge of preceding decades rehearsed the idea. At the 1964 Republican National Convention conservative hero Sen. Barry Goldwater sternly instructed his audience that ”… extremism in defense of liberty is no vice.” The heart of his conservatism resided in unrelenting hostility toward government and unqualified support of business freed from regulation.

Modern conservatism was born in reaction to the excesses of the French Revolution. Its godfather was Edmund Burke in Britain, and John Adams was its spokesman in America. These founding conservatives called for respect for government, good order, tradition and established institutions.

Absent from the original program was the idea that business enterprise should be left free and unregulated in the pursuit of profit. Adam Smith, another conservative icon, is often quoted for his support for the free market. But his modern devotees ignore his warning that large enterprise would inevitably distort the free market, and government action might be necessary to harness the power of capital to control the marketplace.

The original conservatism of Burke et al was distorted and perverted by capitalist interests and Social Darwinists just as the capitalists were reaching their dominant power in the last decades of the 19th century. Real conservative values took a far-back seat to the defense of free capital.

Unrestrained by government or ethics, capitalists seldom resisted investing in any enterprise no matter how damaging to health and morals. Using sex to sell, with all its degrading effects, has never been an embarrassment. Lying about the effects of tobacco, pollution, defective products or climate change has been standard practice. None of this is compatible with any rational understanding of genuine conservative values.

By the 20th century, conservatism became a different ideology. What was absent in the original formulation took first place for American conservatives. The idea of unfettered capitalism became the dominant value, with lip service and not a little hypocrisy given to other objectives. (As governor of California, Reagan signed the most liberal abortion and divorce laws in the country.)

From the days of the Reagan presidency, deregulation, tax subsidies for the richest Americans, and incessant denigration of government served as conservative centerpieces. Taxation was not a tool for good order and the general welfare, but an evil incompatible with genuine liberty. It remains a puzzle why conservatives who so feared the power of government, could encourage absolute freedom of capital, whose unchecked power could be so damaging to individuals and society.

Many Americans, disaffected for a variety of reasons, took their cue from conservative rhetoric and, with little evidence, embraced the idea that government was the problem and the cause of their distress. In their frustration they subscribed to a distorted conservative program which, for many of them, ran counter to their own economic interests.

They became an audience ripe for picking, and to the harvest came Donald Trump.

This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: Reagan, Goldwater, Trump and America's conservative legacy: Opinion