New Populists Making Government Public Enemy No. 1 : Movement echoes its predecessor’s fear of lost control. But in these ‘90s, private power is seen as cure.

To a striking degree, the Republicans now storming into Washington take their inspiration from the political movements that flowered in the last decade of the last century. Earlier this month, likely presidential candidate Lamar Alexander hosted a conference that likened today’s Republican reformers to the turn-of-the-century Progressives. Conservative strategist Paul M. Weyrich presents the militant movements for term limits and property rights as the successors to William Jennings Bryan and the angry Populists who swept across the South and Midwest in the 1890s.

This new populist movement turns on its head the ideology of its predecessor. The original Populists and Progressives sought a stronger government to control the excesses of the private sector. They rose on the fear that Americans were losing control of their destiny to ominous and unaccountable forces--the giant new corporations remaking the economy.

The new populist movement shares the fear of lost control--but fingers Washington as the culprit. It posits that the best way of solving the nation’s problems is scaling back the national government. Under that billowing banner, the Republicans are advancing at least three distinct arguments that too often get blurred into one. To debate government’s role rationally, it’s important that in the coming months each argument faces scrutiny on its own.

Argument No. 1 has the broadest support: that government spends too much and performs its functions too inefficiently. In this arena, the Republican ascendance will make possible reforms that were unimaginable under the Democratic Congress--while putting off the table any major new government initiatives. That was apparent in President Clinton’s Oval Office speech last week--not only in what he proposed (tax cuts, spending cuts, market-oriented reform of job training), but what he didn’t (universal health care was conspicuously absent from his “middle-class bill of rights”).

There’s a risk in this, of course: that the Republican Congress will go too far in slashing programs, and both parties will endanger the hard-won progress on reducing the federal budget deficit with a tax-cut bidding war. But that risk has to be balanced against the demonstrated record of the Democratic Congress in resisting the government’s long-overdue re-engineering.

The key to the coming streamlining will be fairness--ensuring that Republican constituencies bear as much of the burden as the poor. That will be measured mostly by the GOP’s willingness to tackle corporate subsidies and middle-class entitlements--targets for which they’ve so far displayed little enthusiasm.

The second strand in the Republican argument is the belief that responsibility for solving problems should be devolved as much as possible--from Washington to state and local governments, and from there to nonprofit groups, families and individuals.

In its purest form, the argument contends that government’s growth through this century has preempted what British statesman Edmund Burke called the little platoons--local religious and charitable groups--that cared for the poor and the sick. With government providing the services that churches and charities once performed, many conservatives argue, the informal networks of moral suasion that once bolstered neighborhood standards have disastrously atrophied. In a kind of supply-side version of social policy, GOP theorists such as William Kristol argue that one reason for government to do less “is to allow for the strengthening of other institutions.”

There’s much worth debating in all of this. As a general rule, shifting solutions toward local governments is attractive, and Clinton may be able to reach agreement with the Republican Congress on consolidating dozens of categorical federal programs that needlessly limit local flexibility. But on issues from the environment to welfare, national standards play an important role. Without them, states would face enormous pressure for a race to the bottom--slashing social benefits in the hope of driving the poor somewhere else, or rolling back environmental rules to attract corporate investment. In many cases, national rules save governors from their own worst instincts.

The broader argument that government overreaching is undermining private activities seems overstated when social need greatly exceeds the combined capacity of public and private efforts. But the Republican rise will move to the forefront intriguing ideas for how public policy can strengthen those private efforts.

Incoming House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) has praised Wall Street Journal editorial writer John Fund’s idea to cap direct government social welfare spending and use the savings for tax credits that would encourage direct donations to charities helping the poor. Likewise, Michael S. Joyce of the Bradley Foundation recently proposed converting direct federal cash assistance to the poor into vouchers that they could use to purchase services from “local education and social service institutions.” Experiments in that direction (which Clinton himself mused about while touring Los Angeles after the riots in 1992) might prove popular: One election night survey found that Americans, by a 2-1 margin, considered the Salvation Army more effective than government at providing services to the poor.

The most incongruous element in the new Republican populism is its most direct assault on its predecessor: the attempt to retrench government oversight of business. It’s a somewhat unusual populist crusade in that it excites mostly business lobbyists--like the dozens of trade association representatives who crowded into a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing room last week under the direction of newly elected House Republican Whip Tom DeLay of Texas. There, in the cavernous chamber where Democratic Reps. John D. Dingell of Michigan and Henry A. Waxman of Los Angeles used to terrorize defense contractors and tobacco lawyers, representatives from the American Trucking Assn., the Business Roundtable and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce gathered to plot their counterrevolution.

Their guillotine is the plan in the House Republican “contract with America” to reform government regulation: On the argument that regulation is stifling innovation and growth, it offers an even sharper blade than Ronald Reagan brandished at the federal agencies that regulate everything from the environment to the purity of food and drugs. Among other things, the contract would establish a “cap” on the regulatory costs agencies could impose on business and require the government to reimburse any property owner for regulations that produce “any reduction in the value of property”--a sweeping and unprecedented mandate that could, for instance, require government to compensate mine owners forced to conform with strip-mining laws.

Government is so unpopular that any activity it undertakes is suspect, and regulation is no exception. In a Times Mirror survey this summer, just 41% of Americans said government regulation of business is necessary to protect the public interest; 54% said it “usually does more harm than good.” But the same poll found that three-fourths of Americans felt “too much power is concentrated in the hands of a few large companies.”

No one defends “overzealous regulators,” but the real issue is who draws the line between red tape and life-saving protections. Individuals still lack the technical capacity and economic leverage to determine for themselves whether planes are safe to fly, pesticides safe to ingest, cars constructed to withstand a crash; they can only make those determinations acting collectively through government. Rolling back health and safety regulations is less about reforming government than about strengthening business. In a fundamental sense, it is elitist because it would diminish, not increase, the control individuals can exert over their lives.

All over the country this fall, Republicans campaigned in flannel shirts and pickup trucks as populists determined to take back the country from the Washington elite. At his news conference last week, DeLay was surrounded by an overflow throng of tassel-loafered lobbyists who spilled out into the hallway and whooped at the denunciations of “blitzing bureaucrats” and “Gestapo (regulatory) tactics.” There wasn’t a flannel shirt in the bunch.