Among the many subplots roiling Washington DC is a surge in Republican concern about a provision of the Inflation Reduction Act that would invest $80bn in the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to modernize outdated technology and increase enforcement of tax laws. Citing this investment, Senator Ted Cruz warned of a coming “shadow army of 87,000 IRS agents”.
The preference to pay lower taxes is as American as apple pie and has been a centerpiece of modern Republicanism. Demonizing the IRS is not. In fact, mainstream Republicans have historically maintained a commitment to cutting taxes without promoting hysterical fears about the enforcers of tax laws. When champions of tax cuts have talked of “starving the beast”, even they have been clear that the beast is big government. The IRS is just the messenger.
George W Bush requested an increase in funding for “IRS enforcement activities”, insisting that “Americans who play by the rules and pay their taxes deserve confidence that others pay their fair share as well”, and also that “enforcement more than pays for itself”. This made sense for the leader of a party that prided itself on its commitments to “law and order” and balanced budgets.
For his father, George HW Bush, these commitments also required vocally rejecting anti-government rhetoric. In 1995, the former president publicly resigned as a life member of the National Rifle Association when the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre stood by his characterization of federal agents as “jack-booted thugs” who sought to “attack law-abiding citizens”, even after anti-government extremists carried out a deadly attack on a federal office building in Oklahoma City.
Today, the Republican party – emboldened by years of a sitting president denouncing the “deep state” – has embraced this precise brand of anti-government rhetoric, and their latest target is the IRS. In addition to Cruz’s talk of a “shadow army”, Senator Rick Scott issued an open letter to “American job seekers” discouraging them from applying for the new positions at the “IRS super-police force”. The Republican candidate for governor of Arizona has promoted the conspiracy theory that the new IRS funding is connected to the FBI’s search of Donald Trump’s home, warning “not a single one of us is safe”. And lest you believe these messages are confined to the fringe of the party, the Republican National Committee itself released an ominous ad focused on “growing fears about a growing IRS”.
Anti-IRS fearmongering did not come out of nowhere – conspiracy theories about the IRS have long festered at the extremist edges of the American right. The question is how they moved to the political mainstream. Media coverage of Republicans’ recent attacks on the IRS have focused on a key moment in the recent past: conservative backlash to the IRS’s improper targeting of Tea Party groups seeking tax-exempt status during the Obama administration. Responding to these revelations, the founder of the Tea Party Patriots attacked the IRS as “trained thugs” and “gangsters” who “have declared war on the American people!” Movement leaders and their allies in Congress swiftly called for the IRS to be investigated and moved to cut the agency’s funding.
They were drawing from a playbook Republicans had used before. In 1997 and 1998, congressional Republicans led a major effort to “rein in” the IRS that ultimately won bipartisan support for reforms that significantly curtailed the agency’s enforcement power. Theatrical hearings featured witnesses who “testified behind black curtains with their voices disguised, like Mafia snitches, to protect their identity”, and focused on “supposed commando-style raids by armed tax inspectors wearing flak jackets”. Representative Dick Armey – who went on to lead FreedomWorks, a major Tea Party organization – quipped of Republicans’ hopes for the process: “The IRS is too big and too mean. Once this bill becomes law, the IRS will just be too big.”
These efforts were notable not only because they were successful despite the fact that much of the IRS’s alleged misconduct was later debunked, but also because they marked a key moment when the Republican party gave a national platform to arguments previously heard primarily within anti-government extremist circles. As Daniel Levitas, an expert on the American far right, wrote in a 2001 report for the Southern Poverty Law Center: “Lawmakers chose to emphasize the image of a menacing federal agency out of control – an image long cultivated by the patriarchs of tax protest and other ideologues of the radical right.” In so doing, they “lent credibility to the claims of right-wing activists regarding IRS abuses”.
To understand why, it’s also necessary to situate these attacks on the IRS in a larger context of rising anti-government sentiment following the 1992 standoff in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in which federal agents killed the wife and son of a white supremacist during a siege, and a deadly 1993 raid on a cult compound in Waco, Texas. The Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh claimed his attack on a federal office building was payback for “what the US government did at Waco and Ruby Ridge”. These events are also credited with igniting the modern militia movement.
The anti-government sentiment that inspired this violence and extremism also seeped into the Republican party. Only months after the Oklahoma City bombing, rather than rejecting the paranoia that fueled this horrific act of violence (as former President HW Bush did), Republicans in Congress legitimized McVeigh’s concerns by demanding inquiries into federal agents’ actions in Ruby Ridge and Waco. “We sit on a powder keg,” Senator Arlen Specter said, “with a lot of anxiety and anger welling up across the country as to excessive action by the federal government.” The hearings that followed heightened public focus on the government’s use of “military-style tactics” against ordinary American citizens.
The backlash to Ruby Ridge and Waco focused mainly on the potential dangers posed by the agencies involved in these events, the FBI and ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms). But this backlash tapped into a much larger well of anti-government sentiment (often fused with white Christian supremacy and antisemitism) that has long framed the IRS as a deeply sinister threat. If we zoom out to view this broader picture, a third seminal moment joins Ruby Ridge and Waco to form a kind of holy trinity of anti-government martyrology: the 1983 death of the tax protester Gordon Kahl in a confrontation with law enforcement.
Kahl was a self-proclaimed “Christian patriot” and member of the far-right Posse Comitatus. After embracing the white supremacist and antisemitic ideology of Christian Identity, he came to believe “taxation was a scheme by ‘international Jews’ to enslave America”, and stopped paying his taxes. In 1983, Kahl killed two federal marshals when they attempted to arrest him on a tax-related charge. After escaping and going into hiding, he defended himself in a 16-page letter: “We are a conquered and occupied nation; conquered and occupied by the Jews, and their hundreds or maybe thousands of front organizations doing their un-Godly work.” Front organizations like the IRS.
Today, as sitting US senators sow fears of a “shadow army” of IRS agents, it is important to recall this shadow history. Those who attack the IRS today do not necessarily share Kahl’s antisemitism or propensity to violence. But when our political leaders repeat barely sanitized versions of far-right conspiracy theories, they are knowingly or not continuing the violent anti-government project that Kahl and others set into motion, and they are introducing and legitimizing those sentiments for new generations of conservatives. This is how the extreme becomes mainstream.
Ruth Braunstein is associate professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut and the author of Prophets and Patriots: Faith in Democracy Across the Political Divide. She is currently working on a book called My Tax Dollars
