Beneath and beyond the Trumpian populist surge that captured the White House and Congress in 2024, American conservative thinking is taking some confusing turns. Some conservatives are sidelining their familiar dogmas about free trade, small government and the free market and moving instead to use the formerly dreaded "administrative state" to impose "order" and virtue on Silicon Valley technocratic elites, "radical lunatics" and other enemies within.
Even Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency aren't really destroying the administrative state but rather reconfiguring it as a leaner, meaner tool for a dictator. This can only be confounding to old-line anti-government crusaders such as Grover Norquist, founder of Americans for Tax Reform, who said years ago, to widespread conservative acclaim, "I don't want to abolish government. I want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub."
