The Struggle to Limit Government.

• Author: Gregory, Anthony
• Position: Book review

* The Struggle to Limit Government

By John Samples

Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, 2010.

Pp. v, 340. $24.95 cloth.

For three generations, U.S. conservatives have vowed to restrain the federal leviathan. Their main electoral vehicle has been the Republican Party (GOP), whose politicians perennially condemn the Democrats' spendthrift recklessness. It is time to reexamine this movement history because the alleged alternative to the current president's politics is the GOP.

Talk of reviving Reaganism has returned. Both fans and detractors assume that Ronald Reagan's GOP pushed an agenda of cutting spending, gutting welfare budgets, and upholding individual responsibility over communitarianism.

John Samples's new book, The Struggle to Limit Government, at once embraces and challenges this narrative. Samples tells the back story of the current "regime," casting the Democrats as the active proponents of big government and the Republicans as passive or secondary culprits--except for Reagan and his followers, who are described as genuine, if very nuanced, supporters of limited government. The story

Samples tells, however, appears to undercut this qualified thesis because, as he clearly shows, the Republicans, even during Reagan's presidency, never demonstrated much genuine interest in constraining government.

The book begins with the Progressives, recalled through intellectuals such as Herbert Croly, a "prophet preaching moral decay [as well as an] intellectual promising reasoned renewal" (p. 4). They wanted an active state "charged with fighting monopolies" (p. 10) and reforming domestic life, and they were dedicated to "the value of a good war" (p. 6).

The Progressives obtained power under President Franklin Roosevelt, whose New Deal created the "old regime" under which Americans still live. Although the New Dealers radically expanded welfare, they did not overthrow American values: "Keynesianism did not seek to change Americans" fundamentally (p. 12). Social Security began with the "illusion of individual responsibility" (p. 13), although its architects "assumed from the start it would not be self-financing in the long run" (p. 14).

The Great Society solidified this old regime, advancing its reach into American culture. President Lyndon Johnson increased financing for academia and the media, which henceforth would reliably support Washington, D.C. He signed the Civil Rights Act, which partially nationalized private property nationwide, although...