If I were President Trump, I would focus less on using federal power to discipline “woke” cities, states, and universities and prioritize permanently cutting back the federal government to constitutional limits.
And yet, I admit it: There is a deep sense of satisfaction in seeing the “progressives” feel the sting of the scorpion they nurtured.
Leftists created a Frankenstein monster of federal and institutional power and have used it for decades to bully productive and patriotic Americans. Here are some examples from my personal experience:
- I saw their federal “healthcare” programs render it more and more difficult for my father to pursue his chosen profession as a family physician.
- I watched in frustration while dominant media outlets—with what I then thought was bias but now recognize as propaganda—consistently bashed conservatives, underplayed conservative causes, and correspondingly promoted liberals and liberal causes.
- I attended college and law school classrooms flooded with liberal propaganda—only to see my classes disrupted when far-left protesters occupied and closed down campuses.
- I saw how “progressive” officeholders and government employees diverted taxpayer resources to manipulate elections and the political system in their favor, and how they employed street thugs and the propaganda media to stifle dissent.
- As a small businessman, I saw how government regulations frustrated productivity.
- After I became a law professor, I witnessed how the Left wielded its dominance of colleges and universities to skew admission, hiring, and promotion to favor collectivist ideologues and demographic groups supportive of the National Democratic Party.
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- Also, while a law professor, I saw neo-Marxist “critical theories” dominate legal academia, to the disadvantage of practical teaching and useful and honest research.
- I saw race-baiters enjoy privileged access to academia and the media.
- I watched the degeneration of Democrat-run cities, including those in the area of Colorado where I now live.
- I personally suffered from the weaponization of government against conservatives and other productive citizens.
- I looked on while federal social programs metastacized, and I traced their toxic influence throughout American life.
All of this continued under Republican as well as Democratic administrations. The Republican response to a fatally flawed Democrat program was not to repeal it but to try to fix it. Of course, this rarely worked in the short term and never in the long term.
The Trump administration has been the first to really strike back. Watching the Left’s federal Frankenstein monster being unleashed against its creators has been glorious. The bullies who persecuted the rest of us for so long finally find themselves under attack.
Although revenge is sweet, we need more permanent solutions. A better alternative than using federal aid programs to dictate to “woke” states is to end those programs entirely, so those states bear the full burden of their faulty policies. A better alternative to weaponizing federal laws and programs against the Left is repealing them entirely so they no longer cause social damage and cannot be weaponized again. Better than suing our bloated and dysfunctional universities is to end the government subsidies that bloated them and made them dysfunctional.
Some may argue that the experience under Trump will teach “progressives” a lesson—that they will recognize that what they created is dangerous, and induce them to join with the rest of us to prevent future abuse.
Those who make this argument seriously misunderstand the “progressive” mindset. Their ultimate concern is power, and the experience under Trump will increase their lust to wield it again. Once they win a federal election, they will redouble their efforts to suppress the rest of us.
The only permanent solution is to dismantle the Frankenstein monster. Good places to start would be repealing Obamacare, repealing the Dodd-Frank law, and closing the U.S. Department of Education.
Recent experience has helped me better understand the end of the Roman Republic. I sometimes have wondered why Roman statesmen who fought so hard for the republic meekly accepted the autocracy of Caesar Augustus.
One answer is that for decades, they had watched successive autocrats abuse unlimited power to upset the Roman constitution and attack their political enemies. Ultimately, republicans despaired of ever being able to constitutionally limit government power again. They found it preferable to live under Augustus’ government, which deployed power well and used it to suppress rather than promote malefactors.
As long as Augustus remained emperor, that worked. But after he was gone, the abuses returned with a vengeance. Romans became more oppressed than ever, initially by tyranny and ultimately by chaos as well.
Roman statesmen could not remove Augustus, nor would it have been wise to do so. But like us, they needed to look to the future. They needed to construct a new republican constitution with workable federal and representative institutions that rendered republicanism feasible over an extended territory. And they needed to have a plan for implementing the new republican constitution once Augustus was gone.
To forestall future tyranny and chaos, American conservatives also should devise and implement a plan for restoring our own republic and reducing federal power to constitutional limits.
Robert G. Natelson, a former constitutional law professor, is Senior Fellow in Constitutional Jurisprudence at both the Independence. He authored “The Original Constitution” (4th ed., 2025) and is a contributor to the Heritage Foundation’s “Heritage Guide to the Constitution.”
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