One of the many refrains of the nouveau (purported) “Right” is that the conservative movement and/or GOP were the “surrender caucus” who pretended to opposed the march of the Left, but then happily joined in when it became a fait accompli. Ironic, then, that those nay-sayers are by and large embracing the socialism and welfare state of the Left. Such is the case with the desire to turn poor married couples with children into a new welfare class, dependent on the “Right”-lead government for their largess.
To these people, an all powerful welfare state that empowers the government to shape society according to the dictates of the enlightened elite was not the problem, only that they weren’t the elite who get to mould society according to their ideal. They have fully accepted that socialism is here, but that it ceases to be socialism under their leadership and their vision of society-to-be.
As Ronald Reagan would say, this isn’t a choice—it’s an echo.
The mistake mad is the assumption that government must be a tool to impose someone’s idea of morality and what is the “common good”, and if you don’t impose it on others, then others will impose it on you.
Limited government exists to restrain this false dilemma fallacy.
The only “choice” is what cog in which machine they’d prefer to submit to. Either which way, Leviathan calls. That society and the economy should be moulded to some fantasy “common good”, “justice”, or some other trite slogan is considered a given, with only the specific superficial form in question. But when it comes to promising free stuff and an uplifted society, it’s Johnny-come-lately vs. the entrenched faction. Or, to put it another way, it’s the “Diet Coke of socialism”. Slapping on a superfiscially moral paintjob doesn’t change the collapsing wreck beneath.
The two are no more on different ends of a spectrum than a horseshoe bent to the point of making a circle. It is the same type of difference between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, Hitlerites and Strasserite, or the Judean People’s Front and the People’s Front of Judea.
To double down on the socialism, President Trump has promised “dividends” of $5000 be paid to Americans from a source that doesn’t involve the taxpayers (perhaps in the form of Monopoly Money).
In both cases, fallacious assumptions are made, including: Individuals can not rule themselves, but some who are “more equal” can rule the rest; society can be remade/fixed/transformed into a permanent good by imposing the desired outer form; that imposing the preferred superficiality will transform the people according to the fantasy of the imposers; that such transformed people will become what the Soviet’s called “The New Soviet Man”; and that empowering government without limit, fetters, or the restraints that comprise our American heritage can not and will not backfire or empower their enemies.
Economic policy choices in 2026 be like pic.twitter.com/mMeOZzbJgT
— Sunny (@sunnyright) September 10, 2026
In both cases, they conflate the substance with the outward form that grows from that substance, so they impose the form and presume that the moral substance will spontaniously pop into existence through the will of government. In both cases, also, is the assumption that without this ordering of society, that too much freedom means freedom to be immoral, so morality must be imposed by men of angelic perfection for men to be free, with freedom being living according to those angelic Nomenklatura. It is a false dilemma fallacy where either the government imposes morality or immorality becomes the policy of the state.
The state, confined by precedent and experience, can support policies conducive to a prosperous society to organically grow, but it can not impose it.
And in order to achieve this, the Constitution must become living (again) and bend to a higher purpose and power of secular ideology, despite any attempt to wrap it up in an oracular skinsuit.
Conservative have long derided the post-Wickard world where the limited powers of Congress are turned unlimited by declaring all things a form of interstate commerce or the “General Welfare” being a grant to unlimited power for some purported “Common Good” or “Social Justice”. Why, some have even tried to claim that the Constitution empowers the centralized imposition of a moral society!
The “logic” is that many Founding Father’s thought that the Constitution, under the people, could only work if the people were “moral”. This is then cited as the true “Law of the Land” and turns the limits, checks, and balances Constitution into a mere conditional vehicle that can and must be waived when some elite decide the people are not moral enough. The argument is that because Congress exercising its limited powers can only work if people are moral, again according to whoever is in charge, than the imposition of a proper moral order, without constraint or limit, becomes “necessary and proper”!
The Constitution does not grant plenipotentiary power to impose social engineering in order to immanentize the eschaton and impose a singular moral order without limit.
This is contrary to not only the original text of the Constitution, including baring religious tests, but to the very purpose of the Bill of Rights which not only kept the Federal government’s nose out the moral impositions of established religion in such a religiously pluralistic country, but made it clear that the all non-enumerated powers and the unenumerated rights of the people were outside of the Federal government’s power to interfere with.
True renewal must come organically from the people themselves. It can’t be imposed by government, for even at best government is run by imperfect men, and as you give government the power to impose a moral order, you attract the corrupt who desire above all else to wield that power.
Subordinating the Law of the Land to the nebulous idea of the “Common Good” and moral society requires unfettered power by people who are above the temptations of immorality. The guardrails of limited government protect society from the concentration of power and the corruption that inevitably attracts; it is the abolishing those guardrails in order to create the opposite of decay by the will of a purported hyper-moral elite. It’s not much of a guardrail when “necessary and proper” ceases to be in furtherance of actual enumerated powers but a power unto itself without limit according to the whims of those in power, and textually based on þe olde shadow of the penumbra of the Preamble.
Necessary and proper is limited to the enumerated powers and not a carte blanche grant for the Federal government to engage in totalitarian control of every single person and institution in the country. Creating a new class of “Welfare Queens” with free money or just tossing out over a trillion dollars in “dividends” is not only neither necessary and proper for the proper functioning of the Federal government, it’s just plain bad socialist policy.
