Hostility to the excesses of the federal government is a possible source of consensus on the right.

O ne of William F. Buckley’s most famous statements is sometimes misunderstood these days. His promise in 1955 that National Review would “stand athwart history, yelling Stop” was not a mere commitment to preserving the status quo. It was, rather, a refutation of leftists, of the standard domestic variety and of the radical communist variety alike, who believed that the triumph of their worldview was somehow inevitable. Buckley and NR have spent the past 70 years disproving that pretentious assumption.

There is considerable merit in the notion Buckley articulated, even in its most basic sense. Take Donald Trump’s impending executive order on the Department of Education. Its practical essence would be to stand athwart the relatively new department’s remit, yelling stop — that is, calling for it to cease activities that go beyond the powers granted to it by congressional statute and for Congress, ideally, to abolish it. The order and the mindset behind it are a possible source of consensus on the right.

The first few weeks of the Trump administration have already demonstrated the potential unifying power of a “stop” agenda. Obvious instances of excesses within the executive branch itself, which rightly fall under the president’s control, are a good place to start.

As the administration continues, obstacles will emerge. Conservatives may differ on the wisdom or necessity of certain line items. Congress will, eventually, have to assert itself to institute durable change, a complicated proposition given legislators’ fickleness and, frequently, their cowardice. And the federal budget does not consist entirely of conspicuously wasteful projects.

A “stop” agenda retains immense promise despite these obstacles. The retrenchment of federal agencies through reductions in employees and newly enforced limits of their actual responsibilities is good in itself. It could begin to enforce accountability on an unchecked and unelected administrative state that subverts the constitutional separation of powers between branches and between the states and the federal head. Such actions, however small, could also introduce the welcome notion to our politics that not each and every executive department, in all its current particulars, requires preservation from all alteration, much less expansion.

For the first time in decades, the Swamp could face a genuine threat, as I hoped just before Trump’s second presidency began. That threat could be not just from a hostile president, but from a resurgent legislature and even from a public that now realizes the extent to which the federal government is misusing taxpayer dollars and abusing its powers.

But with my hope came a concern: that some figures, claiming to speak for the people, or even for Trump himself, would look upon the Swamp and rather than see something that needed draining would just see a host of new tenants. They would argue that “Republicans have been insufficiently enthusiastic about making themselves comfortable in the Beltway” in their unwillingness to make peace with the engorged state there.

Notre Dame professor Patrick Deneen has stepped into this role. Listing agencies that have rightly come under scrutiny from the Trump administration, including the Department of Education, Deneen asks, “Why get rid of them? Why not turn them to better purposes?” The “underlying assumption” driving the efforts to ax departments, he says, recalls Thomas Paine: “Freed of the evils of government, the natural goodness of man will emerge” and things will return to “normal.” But Deneen prefers what he calls the wisdom of “Aristotle and Aquinas”: that “normal” is “the result of the mysterious interaction of law’s majesty and the reciprocal influence of culture.”

This effort to use the Western tradition as a justification for preserving a government agency that came into existence only in 1979 is certainly interesting. Forget Aristotle’s wisdom on the nature of a mixed regime; the Department of Education updates him. Forget the drafters of the Constitution, who in their wisdom did not envision the necessity of such a department; we have improved on them. Go ahead and throw out as well the teaching of Aquinas on the relationship between limitations and distribution of power and the natural law; the Department of Education has gored the Ox. If we are to follow Deneen, then we must read these figures as prophets of a progressive statism advanced centuries later, for which they merely laid the groundwork.

Let us not follow Deneen. To do so would increase the likelihood that the second Trump administration “more resembles the failures of the Bushes than the successes of Reagan and Trump.” There is a specific Bush failure enabled by the conciliatory mindset Deneen’s logic promotes: the expansion of the Department of Education by No Child Left Behind, which President George W. Bush spearheaded. The consistent disappointment of academic outcomes in the intervening decades ought to dispel the notion that it’s necessary. Even those who have attempted to use the department to good ends, such as Betsy DeVos, Trump’s secretary of education in his first term, have concluded that the agency is one we “will be better off without.” The Department of Education was not simply “captured by the left,” as Deneen writes. It was created by the Left, to serve its aims. Curtailing or — better yet — destroying it outright would weaken the Left.

To believe otherwise, as Deneen does, is not merely to lack faith in the other places our constitutional system has ordained as responsible for education. Nor is it merely a lack of faith in the Constitution itself. It’s a failure of imagination of the sort he regularly accuses critics of having — in this case, an inability to conceive of a polity with a smaller federal government — one that, say, lacks a department that’s only a few decades old.

William F. Buckley, and those inspired by him, did not suffer from such a lack of imagination. Four decades after promising that National Review would stand athwart history, Buckley, inspired by the same spirit, wondered “whether we should egg history on, and if so, how.” He called for a “a very careful opening of books once thought settled,” especially concerning questions about the “fate of freedom under self-government.” May we rise to a moment that appears to be considering such questions anew.