Back in the year 2000, before George W. Bush was even elected, Lew Rockwell already had the Republicans’ number. Having lived through numerous GOP presidents before, Lew knew what was coming. In a column titled “Dreading Republican Rule,” Lew wrote:
So I’m wondering: is it too early to start hating the Republican administration and all the groupies it is going to bring to town, all the pork it will hand out, all the flim-flam artists it will employ to cover the sellouts and abuses of power? You know it’s going to happen. The presidency of George Bush Junior, however much of a relief from the Clinton administration, is going to be a repeat of his father’s with slightly different coloring. That is, one long dark night of politics will be replaced with another.
The glory of American democracy is that it permits us to kick out the nasty tribe of parasitical despots that is currently ruling us. The tragedy is that it installs another group that will do essentially the same thing. Already you get the sense that GOP apologists, propagandists, and power brokers are gearing up for their turn at steering Leviathan. This is one reason the Republican Congress didn’t cut government. Why shrink something you are going to inherit?
He was, of course, correct. The Bush years experienced many of the worst abuses of power and many of the biggest expansion of federal spending and federal power witnessed since the days of the New Deal. Bush and the GOP expanded Medicare more than anyone since LBJ. They created the Department of Homeland Security, the TSA, passed the Patriot act, and launched two disastrous wars that cost thousands of American lives and trillions of American tax dollars.
Through it all, Republicans incessantly lectured Americans about the need to give ever more power to the federal government, and to abolish more privacy. After all, “if you haven’t done anything wrong, you have nothing to hide.” Federal spending exploded. The welfare state thrived.
From senior White House staff down to the local county officials, Republicans were reliably all on auto-pilot repeating the mandatory slogans like “support the troops,” and “they hate us because we’re free” accompanied by demands to honor and obey “our commander-in-chief.”
It was all so tiresome.
And then, when the Global Financial Crisis came, the Bush administration did everything we feared it would do. Bush and his cronies gave us quantitative easing, corporate bailouts, and had the fed print trillions of dollars to buy up giant piles of government debt and MBS. The economic malaise, inflation, and growing economic inequality of today can be largely traced back to GOP’s enthusiasm for monetary inflation and the banker class.
The total failure and outright evil of the GOP from 2001 to 2008 then ushered in the Obama administration which did what the Democrats do in the wake of a GOP presidency. They capitalized on the GOP’s enormous and reckless expansions of federal power. If anything, the rate of federal expansion under Obama moderated somewhat, but the federal government was already much bigger, much more expensive, and much more wired to expand in every imaginable direction. That is, the Republicans had ratcheted everything up, so the Democrats naturally took the newly expanded federal government and used it to serve Democrat constituents.
And now we have another GOP president, with Republicans falling all over themselves to justify another major war, with many calling for “boots on the ground.” The Congressional GOP leadership is all in on this. Republicans are clearly willing to spike oil prices, drive up living costs for Americans, and even get Americans killed in a country that poses no threat to the United States whatsoever. This is all perfectly fine so long as the GOP serves its most important constituencies: AIPAC and the State of Israel.
Meanwhile, the federal debt has ballooned and federal entitlement spending is running overtime. In both his first and second terms, Trump and the GOP have created most of the largest annual deficits ever experienced. The GOP doesn’t even pretend to care about federal spending anymore. The excuse for this amounts to little more than an “argument” on a level that a toddler on a playground might use: “we’re better than Kamala.” But, we know how this really works. What really matters is staying in power to loot the taxpayer as much as possible until the Dems get their next shot at the same thing. (Oh, and it’s also important for Republicans to protect the GOP’s friends whose names are in the Epstein files.)
In other words, the welfare-warfare state is growing at breakneck speed. This, of course, is what we have learned we should expect from Republicans. Sure, when they’re out of power, Republicans pretend to care about the Constitution, and “limited government” and “free markets.” But when they’re in power, we remember those are all just campaign slogans that the GOP uses to pull the wool over the eyes of the gullible voters one more time. When the GOP is actually in power, it’s always “full speed ahead” with federal spending, war, and federal power in general. This will help ensure that when a Democrat is sworn in as president in January 2029, he or she will have access to the largest and most powerful government apparatus in the history of the world. And then the GOP and its activists will once against insist with a straight face that we need to vote for the “party of limited government” all over again.
