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

National Review, Sept 29, 2003 by Ramesh Ponnuru

It would be more precise to say that the constituency for smaller government is too weak to prevail. The beneficiaries of particular programs are intensely interested in their survival and expansion. Very few people are ideologically committed to their retrenchment or elimination. The outcomes of political battles are generally what one would expect given this balance of forces.

This political weakness is why the Gingrich revolution sputtered out, and Phil Gramm's 1996 campaign never got going. Since then, antistatism has declined further. Welfare reform, the drop in crime, and the end of inflation made people look more benignly on government. President Clinton labored mightily to end the public's association of government activism with hostility to middle-class values.

The weakness of antistatism has motivated every attempted ideological innovation within conservatism for the last 15 years. In different ways, Jack Kemp's "empowerment" conservatism, Pat Buchanan's "conservatism of the heart," and John McCain's "national greatness" conservatism have all sought to detach conservatism from a small- government philosophy that seemed to have no electoral value.

Although he is something of a prophet without honor in today's Republican party, Kemp appears, in retrospect, to have been the most successful of these innovators. He was the most marginalized member of the elder Bush's administration. Yet the second Bush has appropriated much of the political identity of Kemp circa 1990. Like him, Bush II is a tax cutter, a pro-Israel hawk, an unequivocal enthusiast for immigration. Kemp was fond of saying that people don't care what you know until they know that you care, which is another way of saying that conservatives must be compassionate, and advertised as such. Like Kemp, Bush is eager to attract minorities and union members to his party, and is willing to embrace sometimes dubious outreach strategies to attain this goal. Like Kemp, Bush would rather reform than end government programs -- and like Kemp, he is a big spender.

'THROW AWAY THE BUDGET CUTTERS'

Small-government conservatives cannot say we weren't warned about Bush. From 1999 through the present, he has taken plenty of opportunities to tell us that he is not one of those troglodytes who consider government to be the problem. For Bush, to say that government is the problem is, indeed, to take part in the "stale debates" of the past. Grover Norquist, a leading conservative activist, said that what united Republican voters was their desire to be left alone by the government. During the early days of his campaign Bush rejected that formulation: Government had higher purposes than merely leaving people alone. Marvin Olasky, an influence on Bush's "compassionate conservatism," said, "Let's throw away the budget cutters. I see that coming with Bush." Looking at the trajectory of federal spending, one certainly must give Olasky credit for prescience.

Yet if small-government conservatives should have had no illusions about Bush, we also had good reasons to support him in 2000. Those reasons include, but go beyond, the nature of the Democratic opposition and Bush's conservative positions on foreign-policy and moral issues. There was also the possibility that Bush, as president, would shift American politics to the right. Tax cuts could restrain the growth of government spending. Tort reform could weaken an important constituency for liberalism. Trade liberalization could undermine government activism (and labor unions). Above all, a free-market reform of Social Security could change the American electorate by making every voter a member of the investor class. By the late 1990s, most conservatives active in politics had concluded that a frontal assault on the welfare state was doomed to failure, and that conservatives would have to try an indirect approach: enacting reforms that would create the conditions for success in the future. Steve Forbes campaigned as the conservative alternative to Bush on a platform no bolder than that. If Bush were to deliver such reforms, it would make up for the day-to-day annoyances that his presidency would surely bring.