Obtuse GOP Politicians Are Pretending The Courts Will Save Us

The story of the last century is the explosive growth of an overlapping set of technocratic managerial status groups that presume to have the authority to direct society. As Woodrow Wilson put it, speaking as more or less the founding father of the technocracy, “I let everything alone that you can show me is not itself moving in the wrong direction, but I am not going to let those things alone that I see are going downhill.” They alone decide on the right or wrong direction. Society is a bus that they drive.

As they think they run America, and should, they also feel pretty sure that they hate it. As the historian Christopher Lasch wrote in his book The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, “The new elites are in revolt against ‘Middle America,’ as they imagine it: a nation technologically backward, politically reactionary, repressive in its sexual morality, middlebrow in its tastes, smug and complacent, dull and dowdy.” His conclusion to that thought: “It is a question whether they think of themselves as Americans at all.” If you can catch up to Hillary Clinton or Gavin Newsom in Davos or Munich, you can ask them if that’s true.

Technocratic management grows like cancer, as they can never find anything that doesn’t require their intervention, and so the cost of technocratic management can never be brought under control. They are going to spend more, the end. Gavin Newsom became the governor of a state with a $200 billion budget; he finishes his second term with a proposed budget that falls just short of $350 billion. That wild spending has delivered dirty cities, poor infrastructure, and a much larger homeless crisis.

As the Hoover Institution at Stanford University explained in 2024, “California’s state government spends about $23,000 per household. In contrast, Florida, which is one of the fastest-growing states in the country — meaning that they are building expensive new schools, hospitals and infrastructure to accommodate their growing population — is spending $14,000 per household and since 2019 has increased its per-person spending at less than half the rate of California.” Look around on your own: Blue states and cities spend far more on government, per capita, than red states and cities, with nothing to show for it.

Meanwhile, a federal government that spent about 4 percent of GDP a hundred years ago now spends about a quarter of GDP. The growth of the technocracy has come with the explosive growth of its cost.

We’ve seen a century of absolutely relentless growth: Growth in the power of government, growth in the cost of government, growth in the burden of government on society. It just keeps getting bigger, everywhere the technocrats get their hands on the levers.

So here’s Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., responding to the Supreme Court’s tariff decision late last week:

It will not. Rand Paul has been an important voice in the effort to resist the metastasization of government, but it’s increasingly clear that he hasn’t been an important legislator in that effort. Like Thomas Massie, Paul speaks from a kind of bubble in which reference to the founding principles of the American republic has some kind of magical restraining power against a thing that has never submitted to the slightest restraint. Oh, good, the rule of law will keep AOC from implementing socialism! It’s like we’re having a 19th-century debate club while the Bolsheviks casually slide into the October Revolution.

There is no evidence of any kind that Supreme Court rulings will stop government from continuing to get much bigger. This kind of make-believe is fatal. At some point it simply becomes a refusal to see where we are. The $2-trillion-plus-a-year federal government that Barack Obama inherited is now a $7 trillion-a-year federal government.

The courts aren’t going to save us. Waking up to the meaninglessness of legal barriers on the road to serfdom is merely the start. “The rules” have no magic. Actual political victory is required.

Chris Bray is a former infantry sergeant in the U.S. Army, and has a history PhD from the University of California Los Angeles, not that it did him any good. He also posts on Substack, at “Tell Me How This Ends,” here.