Make Way for Tomorrow
By 
The excellent historian Lawrence Glickman reminds us that the Republican war on Social Security is by no means just an obsession of President Musk. Republicans have always hated Social Security and they still want it gone. The Gilded Age is their ideal and by God that’s what they are going to get if they have to declare a dictatorship to have it.
Inapt though such comparisons may be, they have been a persistent strand of conservative thought ever since 1935, when the Social Security Act became law. The initial conservative backlash—first to the act, then to the other gains of the New Deal era—laid the groundwork for the nine decades of attacks on public goods that have followed. Since then, the strategy has been refined, but the crusade still follows the same four-pronged process: demonize Social Security, claim that the essence of government is found in spending on absurd programs, use the state as a personal piggy bank, and assert that you and your fellow elites have been the real victims all along.
In 1937 a New London, Connecticut, newspaper, evaluating the new “social security scheme,” dismissed it as a “Ponzi-like plan” based upon a philosophy of “something from nothing.” The comparison stuck. In 1956, Clarence Manion, the former Dean of Notre Dame Law School, pioneering conservative radio broadcaster, and future member of the John Birch Society, said the federal government had “[adopted] the Ponzi “‘get rich easy’ scheme as its very own.” In 1981 conservative senator Jesse Helms called Social Security a “Ponzi scheme to buy political popularity at the risk of social security’s ultimate bankruptcy.”
When running for office, Republican presidential candidates—even those who, like Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, previously voiced similar criticisms of Social Security as a scam—tell a different story. Recognizing the overwhelming popularity of the system, they claim to be its defenders come election season. Goldwater, who said the system should be “voluntary” in 1963, backed off the next year when he was a presidential candidate, saying instead that he wanted a “strong, sound system.” Reagan cast doubt on the Social Security system from the early 1960s through the mid-1970s, but when he achieved the presidential nomination he had been seeking for a dozen years in 1980, the Republican platform assured voters that “Social Security is one of this nation’s most vital commitments to our senior citizens” and called it the “fundamental contract between our government and its productive citizens.” At the start of his second term in 1985, Reagan went so far as to call it “one of the most successful and popular programs ever established by the American government.”
The one counterexample—the one time a Republican president sought to undermine the Social Security system—came during the presidency of George W. Bush. But it is the exception that proves the rule. Like Goldwater and Reagan, Bush supported Social Security reform in his pre-presidential years. Unlike his predecessors, he stuck to his guns: during his first presidential campaign in 2000, he said that “we should trust Americans by giving them the option of investing part of their Social Security contributions in private accounts.” Still, most were taken aback when Bush tried to use what he called the “political capital” he’d earned from re-election to build public support for a partial privatization plan, devoting his 2005 State of the Union address to what he called “saving Social Security for America’s future generations.” His proposal was wildly unpopular, and within a few months Bush acknowledged that his efforts had failed, accelerating his lame-duck status.
This year’s attack on Social Security is different. Although Trump had expressed an openness to cuts in Social Security in his first term and even at times on the campaign trail in 2024, he was widely seen, and often promoted himself, as a different kind of Republican, one who wanted to “keep Social Security intact.” The 2024 GOP platform was unambiguous on this matter. One of the twenty promises the President and the Republican party promised to “accomplish very quickly” if they won the White House and Congress was to “FIGHT FOR AND PROTECT SOCIAL SECURITY AND MEDICARE WITH NO CUTS, INCLUDING NO CHANGES TO THE RETIREMENT AGE.” As late as December, Trump insisted that “we’re not touching” Social Security.
But since January, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)—nowhere mentioned in the GOP platform at the Republican National Convention—has been proposing, and apparently enacting, massive cuts to the Social Security system, which could lead to a “collapse,” according to Martin O’Malley, former commissioner of the Social Security Administration. Rather than denying this charge, Musk recently told Larry Kudlow that “10 percent of federal expenditures” consisted of Social Security fraud and that “entitlement spending” was a “big one to eliminate.” Already, the Social Security Administration is preparing to lay off at least 7,000 people. Republican elected officials have quickly closed ranks around the plan. Earlier this month, House Speaker Mike Johnson claimed that DOGE had found an “enormous amount of fraud, waste, and abuse” in the Social Security system, although he also incongruously promised that cuts to Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security are “off the table.”
In his address to Congress last week, Trump did nothing to assuage public concern about the cuts. Unlike Johnson, he did not put forward even a perfunctory promise to protect the program, although he did say he was seeking “no tax on Social Security benefits for our great seniors.” Instead, he treated Social Security as the paradigmatic site of government waste, claiming that DOGE had identified “shocking levels of incompetence and probable fraud.” He then spent three paragraphs repeating discredited claims that millions of long-dead people are receiving payments. “Believe it or not,” he said, “almost 5 million people between the ages of 100 and 109 were on Social Security.” He even claimed that DOGE had found “1,039 people between the ages of 220 and 229; one person between the age of 240 and 249; and one person is listed at 360 years of age.”
Republicans hate you and want you to die on a park bench.