Conservatives Are Not Against Government, We Are Against Rule by Bureau

Every few years someone tells conservatives that we hate government. The charge usually comes with a raised eyebrow and a question: if you dislike government so much, why do you want to run it?

It is a good line, and it works because we have too often let it stand. So let me answer it directly. Conservatives do not hate government. We built one. We wrote its charter, argued about every clause in it and then ratified it. What we object to is something different, something the Founders would have recognized and feared: a system of rule that has the power of government without any of its accountability.

I want to draw that distinction sharply, because a movement that cannot say what it is against will end up against the wrong things.

Two definitions

Government, in the sense the Constitution uses the word, is authority that is elected, enumerated and answerable. Elected: the people choose those who exercise it, and can remove them. Enumerated: its powers are listed in a written charter, and what is not listed is not granted. Answerable: it must act in public, by law, and be held to account in elections, in courts and through the press.

Bureaucracy, as I use the word, is authority that is appointed, open-ended and insulated. Appointed or hired, not chosen by voters. Open-ended, in that its mandate is a broad grant such as "the public interest" or "reasonable" rather than a defined list. Insulated, in that its officials are hard to remove, its procedures are hard to see and its decisions are made far from the people they affect.

Notice that these are not two sizes of the same thing. They are two different kinds of thing. A government can be large and still elected, enumerated and answerable. A bureaucracy can be small and still appointed, open-ended and insulated. The conservative case is a case about kind, not size.

What the Preamble says

Begin where the Constitution begins. "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

Read it as a list of purposes. Union, justice, domestic tranquility, common defense, general welfare, liberty. That is a statement of what government is for, and no one who wrote it believed in anarchy. They wanted an army, a navy, courts, a postal system, a currency, protection of property and contracts, a government with the energy to do the things only a national government can do. Hamilton, in Federalist No. 70, wrote that "energy in the executive is a leading character in the definition of good government." The men who wrote those words were not shy about power. They were careful about its source and its limits.

And notice the first three words. "We the People." The authority comes from the governed, and the Constitution is their instrument. We the People Wrote a Preamble That Limits Government Instead of Licensing It reads the Preamble closely, and it is worth the time.

Enumeration: powers few and defined

The Constitution does not give Congress a general power to do good. It lists. Article I, Section 8 sets out eighteen clauses: to lay and collect taxes, to borrow money, to regulate commerce among the states, to coin money, to establish post offices, to raise armies, to declare war, and so on, ending with the power "to make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers." The list is long enough to be serious and short enough to be a list.

Madison explained the principle in Federalist No. 45: "The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite." The Tenth Amendment, which came a few years later, said it again: powers not delegated to the United States "are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

Now hold that up against a bureaucracy. An agency's authority is often granted in a clause that says the officials may do what is "necessary" or "in the public interest." That is not a list; it is a blank. The first is what the Founders called government. The second is what the Founders called arbitrary power, and they had left the British Empire in part to escape it. The question of how far Congress may hand over such blanks is the subject of The Nondelegation Doctrine Says Congress Cannot Hand Its Job to Someone Else.

Accountability: Federalist 51

The second pillar is answerability. Madison put the problem in a famous passage in Federalist No. 51: "If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself."

Look at the structure of that sentence. The first task is to enable the government to govern. A conservative who read only the second half would be an anarchist, and Madison was not. The second task is to make it control itself, and the whole architecture of the Constitution, the separation of powers, the checks and balances, the two chambers, the veto, the independent courts and the frequent elections, serves that second task. A little later in the same paper, he writes that "a dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions."

So the primary control is the vote. The auxiliary precautions are the structure. A bureaucracy removes both. The official who writes a rule that binds ten million people is not on any ballot. And the structure that Madison designed, in which the legislature makes the law, the executive carries it out and the courts decide disputes, is folded together in a single agency that writes a rule, enforces it and judges its violators. The argument that this is the "very definition of tyranny" is made in Madison Called It the Very Definition of Tyranny, and Agencies Hold All Three.

Tocqueville's warning

The most chilling description of the alternative came from a French visitor. Alexis de Tocqueville, in the second volume of Democracy in America, published in 1840, asked what kind of despotism democratic nations had to fear. He did not expect tyrants in the old style. He foresaw something milder and more pervasive: an immense, protective power that takes charge of the citizens' security and comforts, directs their main affairs, regulates their inheritances and divides their estates, and works to keep them in a kind of permanent childhood. It does not break the will, he said. It softens, bends and guides it. It covers society with a network of small, detailed, uniform rules, and the people become, in his phrase, a flock of timid and industrious animals with the government as their shepherd.

I am paraphrasing; the passage is long and worth reading in full. But the point is clear. What Tocqueville feared was not a government that was too weak or too strong. It was a government that was administrative, that ruled through regulations and officials rather than through laws and representatives. Later writers called it administrative despotism. It is precisely the kind of power that operates by guidance, by memo and by permit, as described in Guidance Documents Are Rules That Skipped the Line, and Families Pay for It. It is mild, orderly and, at each step, defensible. That is what makes it dangerous.

The charge, and the answer

Now to the accusation. "Conservatives just hate the state."

Let me state it at its strongest, as its defenders would. Conservatives, the critic says, have spent decades attacking government as the problem. They cut agencies, mock civil servants, and tell voters the government cannot be trusted. Yet they support a large military, police, prisons, border enforcement and courts. And when they win office, they use the machinery of the state to advance their own goals. So the criticism "against bureaucracy" is just a way of disguising a dislike for whatever government does that conservatives do not like.

There is a fair point inside it. Some conservative rhetoric has been sloppy, and some has lumped every public employee and every program together. A movement that says "government is the problem" invites the retort that it should therefore not be asking to run it. And the critic is right that conservatives support a strong state in some areas. We do.

But the answer is that the distinction I have drawn is the principle, and it explains the supposed inconsistency.

One. A conservative can support a strong military and a strong police force because those are enumerated powers, exercised by officials answerable to elected leaders under law. Article I, Section 8 gives Congress the power to raise armies and declare war. Article II makes the President the commander in chief. These are government in the proper sense.

Two. A conservative opposes a regulatory agency that writes, enforces and adjudicates its own rules, not because the agency is big, but because it does what Article I forbids: makes law without a vote of the people's representatives.

Three. The test is the same in both cases. Is the power enumerated? Is the official answerable? Can the voter remove the person who exercises it? Where the answers are yes, the conservative has no objection. Where they are no, he does.

Four. The test also cuts against conservative preferences. A conservative who believes in the principle must oppose an unaccountable agency even when it is doing something he likes, and must support a congressional vote even when it produces a result he does not like. That is how you know it is a principle and not a preference.

Five. The tradition of the Founders supports this reading. Hamilton, the great advocate of national energy, wanted a strong executive, but a single, accountable one. His argument in Federalist No. 70 is that the unity of the executive is what makes him answerable: the people know whom to blame. A hundred officials sharing power, none of them elected, is the opposite.

So the answer to the charge is this: we are not against government. We are for it, in the form the Constitution gave it.

What a government of the right kind looks like

If the argument is right, it has consequences for what conservatives should propose, and they are positive, not merely negative.

• Make Congress responsible for the laws. The voters should be able to point to a roll-call vote for every rule that binds them. See Make Congress Vote on Every Major Rule, and Watch Accountability Return.
• Make the executive answer to the elected President. Officials who exercise executive power should be removable by the person the voters chose. The fight over that question is described in Schedule F Is Really a Fight Over Who Answers to the Voters.
• Make agencies justify themselves again. Powers granted without an end date should be reviewed, as in Every Agency Should Have to Justify Its Existence Again, the Texas Sunset Way.
• Keep the list short. Federalism, the Tenth Amendment and the enumeration of powers are not a mood. They are a method. The Tenth Amendment Left Out One Word, Expressly, and the Omission Mattered explains how much hangs on a single missing word.
• Respect the civil servant. Most people who work for the government are doing a job. The quarrel is with the structure that puts power in their hands, not with them. A reform that treated them as villains would be both unjust and unwise.

Those are the proposals of people who think government is important and want it to work, and to work in a way that a free people can control.

Why this makes the argument stronger

There is a practical reason to hold the distinction. A conservative who says "less government" invites the question "which parts?" and finds himself arguing about particular programs. A conservative who says "government by the people, through their representatives, under written law, with every power answerable to the voters" has a principle that sorts the cases. It explains why we support the military and oppose the unelected rule-writer. It explains why we want judges who apply the law and not make it. It explains why we are the ones who insist on reading the text.

It also puts the burden where it belongs. The defenders of the administrative state must explain why it is acceptable for officials who are not elected to make binding rules, and the best answers are the ones that appeal to expertise and speed. Those are real values. But they are the values of an enlightened despotism, and the Founders considered and rejected that bargain. They chose slow, public, accountable law. A conservative should say so without apology, and should say it as someone who wants the government to work.

The numbers show how far the practice has drifted. The Federal Register published 3,248 final rules in 2024 and 2,441 in 2025. Congress did not vote on those rules. They were written by officials, and the officials were doing what they were authorized to do. The question is who authorized them, and whether the authority was ever really granted by a vote of the people's representatives. You can read the text that answers it at the Constitution page and see what your own representatives are doing about it at the oversight page.

The case in brief

1. Government, in the constitutional sense, is authority that is elected, enumerated and answerable; bureaucracy is authority that is appointed, open-ended and insulated, and the conservative quarrel is with the second, not the first.
2. The Preamble lists the purposes of a strong national government, and Federalist No. 70 defends executive energy, so the Founders were no enemies of power.
3. Article I, Section 8 and Federalist No. 45 describe powers "few and defined," while an agency's open-ended grant is a blank, not a list.
4. Federalist No. 51 requires that government control the governed and then control itself, through the primary check of elections and the auxiliary precautions of structure, and Tocqueville warned of a mild administrative despotism that removes both.
5. The charge that conservatives hate the state fails, because the test is the same in every case: enumerated, elected, answerable.

What you can do: read Article I, Section 8 in full tonight, then write to your representative naming one federal rule that affects your family and asking which clause of that section authorized it.