The differences between Republicans and Democrats in 2024 are now apparent, thanks to the parties’ national conventions. However, the conventions also revealed something that liberals and conservatives have in common: They both want the national government to play a very active role in the American people’s personal lives.
In the good old days of electoral politics, we could count on the GOP to stand for a limited national government that exists primarily for national defense. It kept its hands off personal choices and freedoms.
That’s not the case in 2024. Donald Trump, the Republicans’ nominee, says he wants to lay waste to the administrative state. The conservatives’ Project 2025 instruction manual says its mission is to “return self-governance to the American people.” Those are smoke screens.
Elsewhere in the manual’s pages and from Trump on the stump, we get a far different picture, of a government that meddles in who people love, the faith they practice, the medical treatment they are allowed to receive, what their children learn in school, what books our libraries can stock, and what energy we use (spoiler alert: fossil fuels). Trump makes clear we should be careful with free speech, lest we criticize him and find the FBI at our door, and careful how we assemble, lest we want a first-hand experience with the world’s most lethal military.