I have been thinking about state capacity a lot recently.

State capacity: our government’s ability to actually do the things we want it to do. For Congressional gridlock to lessen, for permits to go through, for Amtrak to be on time. Well, at least some of those.

In my recent reading of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance, they are thinking about state capacity too. They contrast it with political stereotypes: the liberal who layers bureaucratic checkboxes that tie the government’s hands, the “nightwatchman” libertarian who wants his government to effectively be a standing army with a post office, the “small government” conservative who is supposed to want some middle ground between these.

Klein and Thompson point out that, in keeping with the American spirit, these factions all carry a degree of mistrust in government. They also presciently note the stark misalignment between what these factions say and do in practice, writing “the big government-small government divide is often more a matter of sentiment than substance.” ‘The government’ has grown in Republican and Democrat administrations. New departments and bureaus are installed no matter which party is in power, even if, as we have recently seen, they be new departments designed to kill others. As the light of the republican flame that fueled the civic passion of our forebears has ossified, we have labelled much of what goes on in society as “the government’s problem” and the government has grown in tandem. 

Klein and Thompson write, “Americans have always mistrusted the government. They’ve particularly mistrusted centralized power. But they also need government able to wield power…Americans were asking government to do more than it ever had but they were not willing to give the government the trust and authority it needed to do it.”

Enter state capacity. 

While I bemoan the growth of government in many ways, especially where it is connected to the weakening of a zealous citizenry, I agree state capacity is a more useful way to examine our relation to government. My purpose here today is to convince conservatives to throw away the “small government” platitude entirely and get on board.

Conservatives are outcome-focused as a rule. We do not deal in abstractions, adhering to the wisdom of Burke. We appeal to prudence in all matters, and ought not to be swayed by party lines. The opening salvo of Roger Scruton’s The Meaning of Conservatism says as much, paraphrasing Peel, that conservatives represent “that great and intelligent class of society…which is far less interested in the contentions of party, than in the maintenance of order and the cause of good government” (emphasis added).

Tired, imprecise tropes of ‘small government’ are nothing if not abstractions–the historical failure of such an ideology to ever be put in practice a smoking gun. What use is a smaller government if that government cannot still function? A smaller government does not guarantee Congress will cease bickering nor local organizations will stop halting projects. A smaller government does not guarantee that the social organism will be healthy and Americans will get along again. History is littered with the corpses of small republics, their size never beyond tangential to their peril.

Can a smaller government be conducive to freedom? Of course–but only upon particular application and never as a rule. Our goal is to sustain our government as befits its proper form, which we take from its Constitution. A man exercises the muscles of his body so they remain in balance; to work the biceps or the legs only is to make him grotesque and awkward in appearance, which we judge according to his canon. So too ought the facets of our government be maintained in their proper balance and form, which we judge against its canonical document. 

We desire our statesmen to be Burke’s “physicians of the state” who excise with precision particular places of bloat or disease. The conservative sees society as a living social organism that can live and die, that must be maintained as an end in itself. Not as a means to another, ideological end. Our aim is thus good government, not small government, and where the two overlap is merely an accident of our government’s form.

Because state capacity is concerned with prudence and good governance, it is harmonious with the conservative statesman’s aims. As Klein and Thompson write, “sometimes [state capacity] requires more government. Sometimes it requires less government. But it always requires a focus on what the state is trying to achieve and what is in its way.” State capacity removes political thoughts from abstract pedestals and forces our values to be grounded in the “immediacies of politics,” a thing Scruton heartedly advises. State capacity is something malleable and real; we know it because we experience it.

Therefore, the conservative ought to join with those liberal counterparts, led by Klein and Thompson, who wish to frame political debates in terms of state capacity. From this plane he may better argue his case for an ordered and healthy society, reminding the left that liberty is nothing without wisdom and virtue. Above all he should strive to remind the people that state capacity is nothing more than our capacity to act and function like a people. For, as scholar Yuval Levin writes, we are the government, in “first person plural.”

By Evan Patrohay