THE CONSERVATIVE SANTIFICATION OF BIG GOVERNMENT by Llewellyn H. Rockwell , Jr.
3 min readSep 16, 2019
The Conservative Sanctification
of Big Government
Llewellyn H. Rockwell , Jr.
T he most disheartening aspect of the Reagan years has
been the Inside-the-Beltway conservative love affair
with big government.
Education Secretary William Bennett has been nagging
Stanford University for changing its core curriculum. As a
cultural conservative, I agree with much of what he says. But
am I the only person on the Right who thinks federal bureau-
crats have no business telling universities what to teach?
Where are all my conservative friends, who used to de-
nounce federal interference in education, now that Washing-
ton is dictating a national curriculum? Or did their denuncia-
tions apply only when they weren’t doing the interfering?
PRIVATIZATION VS. GOVERNMENT OWNERSHIP
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In December 1980, Ed Meese called the Department of
Education “a ridiculous bureaucratic joke.” And he was
right. From the day Jimmy Carter established it— as a payoff
to the leftist NEA teachers union— it has been an expensive,
intrusive, unconstitutional, and centralizing instrument of
state power.
The 1980 Republican platform promised to abolish the
Education Department, and Ronald Reagan campaigned on
the pledge. But — like so much else — both were forgotten
when the cash and jobs could be directed to “our” side.
Instead of abolition, we’ve seen distension, with the ad-
ministration and Congress increasing the Department’s
budget from $10 billion in Carter’s last year to $22 billion in
1988. The head cheerleader for more spending on “educa-
tion” (actually, anti-education, of course) has been Bennett.
At the direction of his ideological control, Irving Kristol,
Bennett has lobbied furiously for more spending, and criti-
cized those with a “budget-driven agenda” (i.e. benighted
folks who think government already spends too much).
The giant Department of Education runs a complicated
array of programs, each with its own budget, its own interest
groups, its own bureaucrats, and its own regulatory man-
dates and prohibitions, which have to be interpreted, ex-
plained, and enforced. It is an immense burden on schools
and teachers, not to speak of taxpayers.
Bennett— with conservatives rooting him on— has central-
ized control over teaching methods, teacher selection, pay,
promotion, textbooks, and a host of other areas that are
none of the federal government’s business. And he has in-
creased the federal bias against private education. It is all
reminiscent of the neoconservative Napoleonic “reforms” of
French education, designed to support an authoritarian state
and force all children into a politically approved mold.
Since liberals have always favored federal control of edu-
cation, we now have no organized opposition in Washington
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to school centralization. Federal control of education has
been sanctified, so long as it is used to promote “conservative
values” (which presumably don’t include parental control of
childrens’ education).
And this is no isolated incident. The same thing has hap-
pened with the National Endowments for the Humanities
and Arts, the Department of Energy, the Federal Trade Com-
mission, OSHA, EPA, and a host of other agencies. Conser-
vatives denounced them when Carter was in office, but now
that they offer jobs and grants for the boys, there isn’t a peep.
Washington conservatives defended Ed Meese until he
fired his movement-conservative press secretary. Then they
attacked the Attorney General too. How dare he, top conser-
vatives sputtered: that press aide was “one of us.”
Lord Bolingbroke, writing more than 200 years ago, said
that politics consists of rewarding one’s friends, punishing
one’s enemies, and lining one’s pockets. Nothing much has
changed, of course. But there were those who thought the
conservatives might be different.