The Conservative Response to the Welfare State

The Republican Party fell into hard times in the 1930s after Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal brought the economy back from the depths of the Depression. Its opposition to American involvement in Europe retained the support of isolationists, but this disappeared after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941. After the US declared war the following day, the federal government swelled to a record size as the Roosevelt administration took control of the economy. Both parties tolerated this as part of the nation’s war strategy.

After the war, the Republicans challenged the vast administrative state that the Roosevelt administration had built in the past decade. But they realized that the US economy depends on the existence of a safety net for those less well off, and they came to accept that government should not allow people to starve or die due to lack of medical care for a medical emergency. Frederich Hayek became one of the intellectual heroes of the Republican Party, which experienced a resurgence in the 1950s under President Dwight Eisenhower. The first selection is from Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty, which was published at the end of the decade.

The 1960s saw the Democrats return to office and further expand federal social and economic programs, but these did not solve the underlying problems that the US faced. In the bicentennial election of 1976, the Republicans ran the only president who never won a national election, Gerald Ford. Weakened by his pardon of Richard Nixon, he was beaten by former Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter. However, in the next election, the Republicans returned to power with a message that echoed Theodore Roosevelt’s faith in individual initiative and Hayek’s skepticism of government solutions. Included in this unit are Ronald Reagan’s 1981 Inaugural Address and Russell Kirk’s essay setting forth ten principles of conservatism.