The implicit premise is that it is all well and good for the government to be ideological and political when it funds things but not to defund them.

We keep returning to this theme: the liberal/progressive meltdown over progressive ideological organizations and projects (such as National Public Radio and Planned Parenthood) being defunded by the democratically elected branches of government, and the ensuing lawsuits to prevent this. The implicit and sometimes explicit premise is that it is all well and good for the government to be ideological and political when it funds things (so long as that ideology or partisanship runs to the left) but not to defund them. That’s actually a complete inversion of how the Founders saw the nature of government funding. As James Madison explained in Federalist 58, the beating heart of representative government is the power of Congress to simply not choose to fund things:

The House of Representatives cannot only refuse, but they alone can propose, the supplies requisite for the support of government. They, in a word, hold the purse that powerful instrument by which we behold, in the history of the British Constitution, an infant and humble representation of the people gradually enlarging the sphere of its activity and importance, and finally reducing, as far as it seems to have wished, all the overgrown prerogatives of the other branches of the government. This power over the purse may, in fact, be regarded as the most complete and effectual weapon with which any constitution can arm the immediate representatives of the people, for obtaining a redress of every grievance, and for carrying into effect every just and salutary measure. [Emphasis added.]

When it comes to funding the activist allies of one party, there are three basic models of governance:

First, the small-government model: The government spends money only on those public goods that have broad popular support, and anything that’s highly controverted or involves effectively bankrolling the activist class and messaging of one side has to be funded privately by that side’s own donors and private institutions.

Second, the spoils-system model: Whichever side wins elections gets to shower government favor on its own people and causes, but that all goes away the instant they are out of power.

Third, the “Our Democracy” model: The cultural left gets to keep its own causes permanently financed whether it’s in power or not, and a phalanx of courts and entrenched bureaucrats ensure that the results of elections do not alter this.

Now, most conservatives would probably agree on two things. One is that the small-government model is the ideal; the other is that it’s not currently the world we live in, and is probably not the world we are ever entirely going to attain. That doesn’t mean that we should stop pressing in that direction, any more than we should stop pressing in the direction of, say, tax simplification, but it does mean that we should have no illusions in the meantime. Because the spoils model, for all its vices, is quite obviously superior to the third model, under which the people simply never get a say in how the government they supposedly elected spends the money it takes from them.