What do we mean when we talk about “big government”? Conservatives have railed against this enemy for generations, but it is striking how rarely we try to define the term.

The conservative movement was born in opposition to the New Deal and has thus historically oriented itself against the programs that emerged from that era. Social Security, our New Deal-era retirement system, is America’s biggest federal outlay by far. This makes it tempting to conflate “big government” with the government’s total fiscal footprint. Yet at least since Trump, conservatives have awoken to the folly of libertarian-inflected cuts to popular entitlement programs. While Medicare and Social Security have their problems, they are viewed by the public as earned benefits, and don’t represent what most conservatives intuitively mean by “big government” anyway.