Swallowed By Leviathan: Conservatism versus an oxymoron: 'big- government conservatism'

National Review, Sept 29, 2003 by Ramesh Ponnuru

"We have a responsibility that when somebody hurts, government has got to move." -- President George W. Bush, talking to union workers on Labor Day

Franklin Delano Roosevelt's rhetoric was more high-flown, and less therapeutic in emphasis. "Governments can err, presidents do make mistakes," said FDR, "but the immortal Dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm- hearted in different scales. Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity than the constant omission of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference." Both presidents' statements are, however, close enough in meaning. They are bookends: one spoken when big government in America was young and disputed, the other when it is old and accepted.

President Bush has compiled a record to match his rhetoric. Indeed, during his presidency the federal government has acted even when people were not hurting. Bush has increased the federal role in education, imposed tariffs on steel and lumber, increased farm subsidies, okayed new federal regulations on campaign finance and corporate accounting, and expanded the national-service program President Clinton began. Since September 11, he has also raised defense spending, given new powers to law enforcement, federalized airport security, and created a new cabinet department for homeland security.

No federal programs have been eliminated, nor has Bush sought any such thing. More people are working for the federal government than at any point since the end of the Cold War. Spending has been growing faster than it did under Clinton. Conservatives are, of course, inclined to tolerate, indeed cheer, most of the government's efforts to wage the war on terrorism. But non-defense spending has been increasing almost as fast as defense spending. Excluding defense and also entitlements, spending is up 28 percent over the course of Bush's first three years. Now Bush is seeking to expand Medicare to cover prescription drugs, at a projected cost -- almost surely an underestimate -- of $400 billion over the next decade.

Spending is not, of course, the only way that the government can commandeer society's resources. The regulatory state is alive and growing as well. Bush just passed up the opportunity to eliminate one particularly noxious regulation, the Department of Education's Title IX edict, which has universities killing men's sports teams to achieve "gender parity."

Over on the left, and even among moderate liberals, the idea that Bush is a right-wing maniac persists. Harold Meyerson of The American Prospect has suggested that Bush resembles no president in American history so much as Jefferson Davis in his hostility to progressive government. But Bush's record is inspiring considerable angst among his supporters. Most conservatives are critical of the governmental growth that Bush has allowed or encouraged. Some conservatives are also expressing concern about the return of deficits. The debate about how conservative Bush is, which began when he walked on the national stage in 1999, has been renewed. This time it has gotten mixed up with the considerably less edifying debate about whether he is a neoconservative (and about what that term means).

BUT IS IT CONSERVATIVE?

A minority of Bush's supporters, however, have celebrated Bush's alleged embrace of "big government conservatism." The term is that of journalist Fred Barnes, the only known self-confessed adherent to the creed. Big-government conservatives, according to Barnes, use "activist government" for "conservative ends." He writes in the Wall Street Journal , "The essence of Mr. Bush's big government conservatism is a trade-off. To gain free-market reforms and expand individual choice, he's willing to broaden programs and increase spending." Big-government conservatives are realistic, says Barnes, about what conservatives can accomplish given the public's support for a large federal role. They "prefer to be in favor of things because that puts them on the political offensive." They "support transfer payments that have a neutral or beneficial effect (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid) and oppose those that subsidize bad behavior (welfare)."

Peter Berkowitz, a moderate conservative academic, writes in the Boston Globe that "Bush's conservatism is certainly less rigid and doctrinaire than that of Newt Gingrich and his minions, who swept to power in 1994 and, in a most unconservative spirit, sought to remake the federal government by drastically reducing its size."

Irving Kristol touches on the same subject in the course of an essay for The Weekly Standard on neoconservatism. Kristol's purpose is to claim that neoconservatism is "the first variant of American conservatism in the past century that is in the 'American grain'" because it is cheerful. Also, it is neoconservative policies that are responsible for whatever popularity Republicans have enjoyed. (That thesis would be less preposterous than it sounds if Kristol were correct in claiming that tax cuts are a distinctively neoconservative idea.) Neoconservatives want a government that promotes economic growth, combats cultural decay, and maintains a strong military and a robust foreign policy. They do not, however, fret about big government. "People have always preferred strong government to weak government," he writes.