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

National Review, Sept 29, 2003 by Ramesh Ponnuru

Bush's record will look very different if he succeeds in reforming Social Security in his next term. That program accounts for a fifth of all federal spending. Transforming it would surely outweigh the extra funding for national service. And while it is true that Bush never talks about government the way that Reagan did, we should remember that Reagan, too, was in practice willing to compromise to meet his priorities. Nor is the rhetorical contrast entirely to Bush's disadvantage. Reagan's tax cuts were justified, in part, on the theory that they would not set the federal government back too much: They would generate economic growth, which in turn would generate revenues. In 2000, Bush sold his tax cut as a way of taking money away from the federal government. This was, indeed, the central domestic-policy promise of his campaign: He would take money from the government and give it back to the people.

Where does this leave realistic small-government conservatives and "big-government conservatives"? It leaves them, presumably, as allies on 95 percent of the issues being debated in Washington, even as they disagree on what they would like Washington to look like in ten or fifteen years. Conservatives should, however, lament the necessity of letting our bloated government grow even further in the short term. They should not try to dress up this necessity as a coherent philosophy.