On 7 December 1998, National Review published a short piece by Stephen Moore—one in a continuing stream of articles, reports, and books emerging from the network of conservative media outlets and think tanks. The article ostensibly addressed a then-raging public debate regarding what the Federal Reserve Board could do to keep America’s economy growing, but Moore quickly seized the opportunity to shift attention toward the actions available to Congress and the president. “If there is any single enduring economic lesson of the past twenty years,” Moore observed, “it is that loose monetary policy cannot offset the negative effects of a punitive tax and regulatory regime.” In Moore’s judgment, growing levels of taxation were quickly approaching the danger zone that historically had triggered recessions. A large tax cut “would not just stimulate the U.S. economy, but would serve as an antidote to the global economic crisis.” Those actions should be paired with relieving the domestic regulatory burden on business, for environmental, consumer, and workplace regulations have “a vise grip around the economy.”

A nation-state defending against threats may, in the process, alter itself: some threats cannot be handled by existing political and institutional arrangements. Of course, the dynamic response undertaken to answer external, state-issued threats has been widely noted. Many students of government—if not history—understand wars between nations to be a great catalyst for state development. Interestingly, even non-state and vastly weaker threats can elicit transformative responses.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the U.S. federal government expanded the scope and extent of its constitutionally enumerated powers in naturalization, Indian policies, and regulation of interstate commerce. In doing so, Congress became more involved with matters of citizenship, both in defining public purposes and national identity. Citizenship had traditionally been a matter for the states, where governance rested on the features of differentiation, jurisdictional autonomy, and local control. The entry of the federal government and the federal constitutional norms of citizenship might have been expected to bring an overarching coherence to the fundamental liberal values that were declared after the Civil War. Under expanded federal power and federal citizenship, however, multiple traditions of both liberal rights of citizenship and illiberal conditions of status continued, and illiberal positions gained new footing.

Following its 1992 reorganization, the once scandal-ridden and sclerotic Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) experienced a dramatic turnaround. The agency morphed from a caricature of the ills of bureaucracy into a model of effective federal administration. Politicians who previously blamed the agency for its slow and inefficient response to disasters came to depend on the agency to lend credibility to their own efforts. After the agency’s reorganization, politicians at all levels of government purposefully appeared beside FEMA workers. As recently as 2002, FEMA’s reputation was so strong that the designers of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) included FEMA in it to lend prestige to the nascent department. Unlike other agencies so included, FEMA was allowed to keep its name, confirming the cachet of its brand.

On 3 October 1986, the 99th Congress—acting at the behest of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC)—voted to override President Ronald Reagan’s veto of the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act (CAAA). The passage of this bill, which placed strict economic sanctions on the white supremacist regime in South Africa, was a watershed moment in American politics for two reasons. First, veto overrides in the foreign policy-making arena are an exceedingly rare form of legislative action. More importantly, this was the first time in American history that the members of a minority group were able to use their positions within the Congress to translate a parochial desire into foreign policy against the will of a sitting president.