The assault on the federal government didn't wait for Donald Trump's actual return to the White House. A week after his election, Trump has already sparked hostilities by appointing arguably the most influential billionaire in the US at this moment, his ally Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, SpaceX and X, to head a commission charged with "dismantl[ing] government bureaucracy."

These hostilities are in perfect Republican continuity. The party's motivations may have varied over the decades, but the objective remains the same: To turn back the clock on a Rooseveltian political legacy – the expansion of the federal government under the dual impact of the Great Depression and World War II. Republicans had put up with it before embarking on what the Democratic Party considers a reactionary crusade.

This crusade was launched just 60 years ago by the conservative Arizona senator Barry Goldwater during the 1964 presidential campaign, in which he was soundly defeated by the incumbent president, Democrat Lyndon Johnson. The term "crusade" is not unjustified if we recall that the catalyst for the American right's revival advocated "freedom under a government limited by the laws of nature and of nature's God."

A wave of deregulation

"Those who elevate the state and downgrade the citizen must see ultimately a world in which earthly power can be substituted for divine will. And this nation was founded upon the rejection of that notion and upon the acceptance of God as the author of freedom," Goldwater said in his acceptance speech for the Republican nomination, at a time where the 1964 Republican Party Platform described a "moral decline and drift" in America.

This Republican reawakening involved a double rearmament: spiritual with the Moral Majority, an organization created in 1979 by ultraconservative pastor Jerry Falwell, breaking with the traditional separation between religion and politics; ideological with the emergence of the right-wing think-tank The Heritage Foundation, founded in 1973. It bore fruit as early as 1980 with the victory of Ronald Reagan, who placed the assault on the federal government at the heart of his actions.

"The nine most terrifying words in the English language are 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help,'" said the Republican. The spiritual dimension gave way to economic imperatives in the context of the slump triggered by the second oil crisis. The new president insisted he knew how to achieve the limited federal government that has become the mantra of the right: "Government spends all the taxes it gets. If we reduce taxes, we'll reduce spending." Cuts in the social programs of Johnson's "Great Society," deemed ineffective, were accompanied by a wave of deregulation.

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