As the most recent GOP presidential debate drew to a close, the moderator asked a mild question: Which former president would you draw inspiration from and why? This is not hardball stuff. Being the last to respond, however, can make it tricky.
Chris Christie had an easy response: Ronald Reagan, on whom he is about to publish a book. Nikki Haley, perhaps greedily, chose two, Washington and Lincoln, almost unimpeachable picks. Even Vivek Ramaswamy, a self-conscious disruptor, named Thomas Jefferson, a figure he has turned to in the past, though he could not resist pointing out Jefferson was only 33 when he drafted the Declaration of Independence.
Ron DeSantis, left till last, could have found it awkward. To whom should he point? Extraordinarily, the Republican Party finds itself in an ideological position in which Reagan is the only uncontroversial choice of the last 150 years. Eisenhower is dangerously centrist, Teddy Roosevelt too wayward, Grant an argument not worth having. But the Florida governor did not hesitate: he chose the 30th president of the United States, Calvin Coolidge.
Coolidge does not get much attention from modern historiography. It doesn’t help that he was preternaturally taciturn: A (possibly apocryphal) story has a woman seated next to Coolidge at a formal dinner confessing that a friend bet her she couldn’t get the president to say more than two words — to which Coolidge responded, “You lose.”
The man known as “Silent Cal” was in many ways as participative in politics as he was in conversation. As president from 1923 to 1929, leaving office only months before the Wall Street Crash, he practised laissez-faire in the extreme, slashing federal taxation to the point that, by 1927, only the wealthiest two percent of American taxpayers paid any federal income tax.
“People don’t talk about him a lot,” DeSantis admitted. But, he went on, “he’s one of the few presidents that got almost everything right.”
This is a big claim. Of course it is an ideological one: DeSantis proposed that “silent Cal knew the proper role of the federal government,” and that role was small. The governor comes from the part of the GOP that sees Washington as almost inherently bad, an overweening bureaucracy that exists more than anything else to interfere in the proper jurisdiction of the 50 states.
DeSantis refers scathingly to “this massive fourth branch of government, this administrative state which is imposing his will on us and it’s being weaponized against us.” That is the federal government; he is quite willing for state governments to intervene in school curriculums, how tech platforms regulate content and even in banning direct-to-consumer sales by car manufacturers (except for Tesla).
Is this embrace of Coolidge a winning strategy for a Republican candidate? His reputation is not high. A 2017 C-Span poll of historians ranked him 27th out of (then) 44 presidents (Cleveland is double-counted), while a survey by the American Political Science Association the following year put him 28th; either way, in the lower half of the rankings. His lack of a grand vision or purpose might endear him to many small-government enthusiasts, but he is also frequently blamed for laying the foundations of the 1929 crash and the Great Depression.
Coolidge’s own view, as he expressed it in 1925, was that “the chief business of the American people is business.” He kept well away from the Federal Reserve, and his appointments to the Federal Trade Commission and the Interstate Commerce Commission tended to be men of a similarly light-touch instinct. William E. Humphrey, the former congressman he nominated as chairman of the FTC, all but stopped prosecuting anti-trust cases, and most of the federal government’s economic activity emanated from the Department of Commerce, led by Herbert Hoover (who would succeed Coolidge as president).
There are attractive totems for a 21st-century GOP. Coolidge paid down a quarter of the federal debt, the last president to make serious overall reductions until Bill Clinton in the 1990s. The Revenue Act of 1926, which encapsulated how Coolidge approached public finances, cut the inheritance tax, lowered the top income tax rate to 25 percent and abolished the gift tax.
In his 1925 inaugural address, Coolidge was stern on the very concept of taxation. “The collection of any taxes which are not absolutely required, which do not beyond reasonable doubt contribute to the public welfare, is only a species of legalized larceny,” he told the crowd. This was not about the amount of revenue raised; for Coolidge, it was about the freedom of the citizen. He saw, correctly, that taxation was fundamentally the deprivation of personal wealth and income, justified only by absolute necessity.
DeSantis did not choose Coolidge as his inspiration on the spur of the moment. A history graduate from Yale, he has given this thought, and we should pay attention. To suffuse the Republican Party with the spirit of Coolidge, in what would be the centenary of his election win of 1924, would be to stake out a dramatically sparse conception of the federal government, a surrender of powers by Washington on a huge scale and a fundamental reconception of what the state is supposed to do.
There is a body of opinion in the GOP which thirsts for that, and DeSantis may have caught the public mood. Voters increasingly think the federal government is doing too much, and trust in Washington to do the right thing, at 16 percent, has literally never been lower.
Then we have to remember that these debates, and the candidacies of DeSantis and Ramaswamy and Haley and Christie, are shadow-boxing. All the evidence shows that the Republican nominee in 2024, with 61 percent of party members backing him, will be Donald J. Trump, the 45th, and perhaps 47th, president of the United States.
Eliot Wilson is a freelance writer on politics and international affairs. He was senior official in the U.K. House of Commons from 2005 to 2016, including serving as a clerk of the Defence Committee and secretary of the U.K. delegation to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly.