The Lost Tradition of American Government
Let's bring back the Whig tradition.
What is the purpose of the government? When you examine most political debates, you usually find that question at the bedrock.
What makes a government good? What makes one effective? What is government supposed to do, and what shouldn’t it do? The reason we disagree so much about politics is often because we hold different theories about what the purpose of government is.
Most Americans today, whether they know it or not, hold one of two views of government. One theory holds government is meant to be our benevolent parent, managing society for our benefit. The other pushes back against this idea, holding government is meant to be more like a forest ranger that allows things to sprout on their own, and then puts out fires when necessary. These two theories frame our politics so completely that, for many people, it’s almost impossible to imagine government could be anything else.
America is overdue for a new theory of government. The American people have increasingly lost faith in both these visions, and for good reason. If neither model still works, we need to look elsewhere, but we need not start from scratch. America once had another theory of government, one that combined liberty with virtue, and opportunity with responsibility. It was neither technocratic nor hands-off. It was deliberate, principled, and uniquely American. It’s time to move forward by moving back. Government should be neither a parent nor a ranger. It should recover America’s lost tradition and once again become the steward of a system designed for individual human flourishing.
Government Shouldn’t Be a Parent
For most of the twentieth century, the dominant theory of government was the wise and benevolent parent. This theory held that government should be a proactive, compassionate force nurturing and guiding citizens as a conscientious parent might do for their children. It’s a theory with roots in the Progressive Era and solidified through the New Deal and Great Society that holds expert-led institutions should manage complex social and economic systems to produce the best outcomes for citizens and the nation.
The idea that experts should manage society has ancient roots, going back to Plato’s philosopher kings in his Republic. To Plato, this meant a ruling class trained from birth to properly manage the state. To Rousseau, it meant the general will set out in his Social Contract. To Hegel, it meant a state responsible for the moral development of citizens. To Rawls, it meant a society that structures its basic rules to fairly distribute liberties and opportunities. To Lippmann, it meant an elite managing complex modern societies on behalf of a public he believed lacked the capacity for rational decision-making. To Sunstein, it meant experts pushing citizens to make wise choices through a series of “nudges.” All these ideas believe in empowering wise and virtuous experts to chart the nation’s course, manage society, make national plans, and sometimes restrain individuals so the greater system thrives.
The idea of government as parent can take many forms, ranging from soft technocracy to outright dictatorship. That most extreme version supports ideas like communism or fascism, which is why some see the entire idea as an anti-democratic ground for tyrants. However, it can also be the foundation of republics with expert agencies, most corporate hierarchies, and even many churches. Since FDR, it’s been the backbone of the New Deal, which empowered experts to oversee America, and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, which empowered them to socially and morally reform it. In this form, it’s less a theory of domination than what we might call a benevolent, bureaucratic, technocratic, “administracy”—a system governed by experts who believe they know what’s best. It creates a nation ruled by experts who collectively act like a benevolent machine intelligence, planning the best and most fair outcome for the whole. Citizens are free to make decisions so long as they cooperate with the administracy’s plans for the nation’s collective good. When citizens disrupt those plans, or move outside the lines set out for them, they’re restrained or limited so the greater system can succeed.
This is how a parent manages a family with children. Like a good parent, the state wields authority to ensure citizens share resources, so everyone under its care, particularly the weak and vulnerable, receive everything they need. It overrides decisions it believes, in its judgment, are harmful or unwise. Like a parent, it views itself and citizens as interdependent, with its role balancing individual freedom with it’s view of collective responsibility.
There are clear benefits to entrusting governance to trained professionals who prioritize efficiency, data, and institutional memory over partisanship. It’s attractive to those who simply hope to plug themselves into the system, play a valuable role, and get back a decent life. It promises stability, expertise, and efficiency enforced in the name of fairness and justice. If you work hard and play by established rules, it promises that, while you might not achieve your wildest dreams, you’ll do okay. It also appeals to professionals who expect to be the ones administrating the system, offering them a meaningful role to make society a little better. Sadly, it also appeals to those drawn to power and authority, offering an attractive system to corrupt for selfish benefit.
As twentieth-century scholars like Hayek argued, however, this sort of system has significant vulnerabilities and downsides. It’s impossible for any group of experts, no matter how smart, to entirely understand, much less manage, all the complexities of modern societies involving millions of people with different wants and needs. Managed systems are wonderful at creating efficiency, predictability, and avoiding mistakes, but bad at dealing with individuals or outliers. No matter how well-intentioned, centralized systems suppress individual initiative, overlook local knowledge, and stifle innovation. Managed systems kill individuality and meaning, making the world more predictable and small like a row of chain stores in a corporate shopping mall. McDonald’s can train teenagers to produce consistent hamburgers, but can’t produce the innovation and creativity necessary for a Michelin-starred meal.
Even if these systems could succeed, moreover, there’s a human cost. Human beings thrive on autonomy and agency. People are driven by their aspirations and fueled by dreams. They desire control over their destinies. They want a chance to soar. Even when done with good intentions, limiting people’s choices injures their autonomy, diminishes their dignity, and crushes their dreams.
As history also demonstrates, people entrusted with great power don’t always use that power like the neutral and benevolent experts that theory posits in books. Sometimes they’re greedy, lazy, and self-interested. They prioritize status and position over getting the right result. They’re credentialed but not competent. They reward friends, punish enemies, and kneecap rivals. They’re rigid and inflexible. They fall prey to ideological fads. They curry favor and give in to pressure from power.
At the twentieth century’s dawn, the idea of a managed society of neutral experts promised efficiency, prosperity, and fairness. Today, more aware of the flaws and downsides, Americans no longer believe in it. We’ve lost faith in the promise of this vision designed for the industrial twentieth-century world of mass production. From the Soviet collapse to American urban renewal debacles, these systems in practice have a track record that too often reveals rigidity, overreach, and a failure to respond to the unpredictable needs and energy of real human lives. Expertise, when unchecked, has too often produced systems that care more about plans than people, offering predictability at the cost of innovation, individuality, and dreams. They too easily devolve into Kafkaesque bureaucracies that stifles change, or corrupted oligarchies that extract value and hoard opportunities instead of creating the mass prosperity, fairness, and justice they promise.
It's a vision that meant well and got some things right, but misunderstood some critical aspects of human nature. As a result, too many Americans no longer trust in this theory of government. If we want to build a powerful movement of change looking ahead at the future, we can do better.
Government Should Be More than a Forest Ranger
An alternative vision of government grew to push back against the wise parent model, the state as forest ranger. This theory holds that government should be a minimalist, watchful presence that protects the conditions for individual flourishing without directing its course. A forest ranger doesn’t plant trees or direct streams. A ranger guards the edges, watches for fires, and lets the ecosystem evolve on its own.
The forest ranger state has roots in Bentham’s utilitarian limits on coercion and Mill’s classical liberal state that intervenes only to stop direct harms. It developed over the twentieth century in response to the managed state through ideas like Berlin’s negative liberty, Hayek’s defense of spontaneous order, Nozick’s minimal state, and Friedman’s defense of markets. It held that the state should simply prevent violence, enforce contracts, but otherwise allow spontaneous order to emerge. This idea is sometimes called a nightwatchman state, although that’s inaccurate because a nightwatchman is an enforcer of rules some authority made to govern others. This vision is less about enforcing rules than putting out fires. People are free to organize themselves as they choose until something overheats or breaks, when the state steps in to act.
The idea of the state as forest ranger has thrived alongside the idea of the state as parent as its counterpoint. When those preaching expertise and management went too far, those preferring the spontaneous order of the forest ranger pushed back. When authority sought to abuse its power to limit innovation, advocates of spontaneous order preached the benefits of limiting state power to allow new things to grow. When the desire for predictability and order limited freedom and opportunity, advocates of spontaneous order fought to limit state power in the name of the individual. This back and forth debate fit well into a world of industrial mass production and mass politics. These ideas flourished together like a Yin and Yang.
The forest ranger model appeals to dreamers, innovators, and anyone trying to change the world. Change disrupts existing orders and threatens the positions of those with wealth and power. Our world’s history is therefore a story of long periods of stagnation and decline, as those with power used it to strangle change, hoard opportunity, and reward friends and allies over talent. We all know that people with unusual new ideas rarely get rewarded by organizations built around old orders. Allowing disruption without permission lets talent reveal itself and big ideas emerge to invent, build, and repair broken societies.
What this theory too often forgets is that decentralized systems only foster merit and innovation when they're grounded in fair rules that reward character, talent, and effort. There’s a myth of efficient markets, that whatever emerges out the chaos of decentralized systems is always what’s most efficient, popular, and best. That only happens in systems embedded within well-enforced rules explicitly rewarding talent and virtue. As Hayek himself argued, markets depend not just on freedom, but on rules that channel that freedom productively. Market systems are fundamentally games built around some set of rules. Those rules decide what behavior is rewarded and what is punished. They decide whether the field is fair, or tilted toward powerful interests and incumbents. They decide whether talent is free to rise, or constrained by power. They decide whether corruption is accepted, or rooted out and punished. Markets and decentralized systems aren’t inherently fair, balanced, or efficient. They’re only that way if we choose to make them so and enforce it.
In a world without rules, the winner isn’t always the most virtuous. It’s often the most brutal, well-connected, and willing to do what others won’t. When empires collapse and laws vanish, what emerges from that chaos isn’t flourishing new utopias. It’s violent warlords brutalizing, stealing, and making themselves into kings. When power emerges without the constraints of rule and law, those who rise aren’t the builders and innovators but the crime lords and oligarchs capable of extracting resources through power.
Just as Americans have lost faith in benevolent technocrats, they’ve also grown wary of government that abdicates its role entirely. Public power is dangerous because the people who control police forces, intelligence services, and courts can abuse their authority to secure their positions and take the things they want. Private power, although less dangerous than public power, can be quite dangerous too. In order for decentralized systems to work, the game must be fair with a level playing field and good incentives. Talent must be rewarded and corruption rooted out. Powerful corporations, crime families, and corrupting interests can wield power to create injustice, cruelty, and corruption, which must also be policed. If left alone, good things don’t automatically happen.
If Americans no longer trust the government as parent, or the government as forest ranger, there must be another choice. We need another way that protects freedom but doesn’t abandon virtue, fosters innovation without surrendering fairness, and uses the state not to rule over life but to shape the conditions for a good one.
The Whig Vision: A Government of Human Flourishing
In his Politics, Aristotle argued the state exists for the sake of giving people good lives. Its purpose was neither to manage the daily life of citizens, nor stand aside entirely as a watchman. It was to establish a framework that allowed citizens and society to flourish. Aristotle rejected Plato’s rule by philosopher kings managing the state, but also believed the state had a greater role than the forest ranger. He believed government exists to create a framework in which citizens can become virtuous and lead fulfilling lives. This is the Whig vision, a forgotten American tradition that once anchored our republic and guided reformers from Lincoln to Theodore Roosevelt.
This Whig vision goes back to Alexander Hamilton, who made it the motivating philosophy of his Federalists. It went on to become the core of the American Whigs, Lincoln’s Republicans, and Teddy Roosevelt’s New Nationalism. It fueled a Whig Party that’s often confusing to contemporary Americans because it’s conservative in some ways and progressive in others. It was pro-commerce and pro-capitalism, but advocated for vigorous reform to spread education, build infrastructure, provide opportunity, and uplift people. It inspired Lincoln’s Republicans, who broke slavery and rebuilt the republic. It became the core of Teddy Roosevelt’s Square Deal, which sought to ensure fair rules would break corrupt concentrations of power and protect the weak by creating an order in which justice and virtue prevailed. Roosevelt’s New Nationalism rested on the idea that success should be determined not by wealth and privilege, but by hard work and character.
Unlike libertarian thinkers who sought to minimize the state, or thinkers trusting expert managers, Whigs believed in harnessing state power to create the conditions in which liberty, virtue, and prosperity could thrive together. The Whig philosophy sees the job of government not as managing outcomes but promoting opportunities and rewarding fairness, merit, and virtue. It holds that a strong republic requires virtuous, informed, prosperous, and self-disciplined citizens. Government should create systems that reward and promote industriousness, virtue, and social mobility. It should provide citizens the tools they need for individual success, and work to spread opportunity fairly to everyone. Then it should leave people free to chase their desires and allow character and merit to rise. It seeks to design and oversee a system in which we can pursue our dreams and flourish.
The Whig vision doesn’t aim to engineer outcomes, maximize GDP, or serve any particular class or interest. It designs rules to ensure the game rewards merit and virtue, but doesn’t reward evils or corruption. Government is to ensure a level playing field in which everyone can fairly compete to chase dreams. It makes sure the game rewards hard work and merit, and not cruelty or greed. It encourages merit and talent, while ensuring everyone has the tools and opportunity to rise. The state fosters and rewards virtuous citizenship, and shapes systems that produce fairness and justice. It allows people to define their own goals and dreams, but also takes on the responsibility to ensure they have a fair and equal chance to reach them. It prizes not just efficiency and production, but also individual agency, creativity, and meaning.
The Whig tradition takes the best parts of government as parent and government as forest ranger and unites them. Like government as parent, the Whig tradition believes government has an affirmative responsibility to shape a better, fairer, more prosperous society. It has a duty to reward merit and character, and police corruption and injustice. It must provide a level playing field and offer education and tools necessary for anyone to rise. At the same time, like the forest ranger, it’s rejects the job of ruling over people like a national manager. It’s not the state’s job to manage people’s lives, pick winners, or decide who others are meant to be. It seeks to unlock the opportunities that innovation and new ideas can bring. It shapes the conditions for people to chase their American Dream, and then leaves them free to chase it. After creating fair and virtuous rules, it leaves us free to compete in this better and more just system however we choose.
I increasingly believe this vision can help win back the trust of the American people. We need a political movement organized around the idea that the purpose of government is to create a system in which citizens can flourish, and then takes pride in watching them thrive. This is the tradition that grew out of America’s Founding and shaped our politics for generations, until we forgot these ideas that once fueled national success. It may sound simple—and it should be—but today it feels foreign, idealistic, and naïve to many Americans. It feels conservative to some, and progressive to others. It’s neither. It’s a vision that feels new because it’s old, and American enough to bring back.
Should we bring back the Whig tradition? Join the conversation in the comments.