Consider where the GOP stood in the run-up to the 1998 midterm elections. The party was powerful but reeling. In a sense, there had never been a better time to be a conservative in America. The GOP had held Congress since 1994, when they captured both houses for the first time since 1954; a Democratic president had rung down the curtain on the era of big government; a right-of-center consensus held sway on everything from welfare and balanced budgets to free trade and out-of-wedlock births.

Yet these victories masked a developing crisis. Gingrich’s push for entitlement reform had run aground, like Reagan’s before it, on Democratic demagoguery and the public’s unwillingness to curb spending. The conservative agenda seemed increasingly to be all stick and no carrot, and the party’s leadership, from Gingrich to Dick Armey, Phil Gramm, Tom DeLay, and all the rest, played poorly on the national stage. Worse, the Republicans’ congressional majority was already eroding. The GOP lost all the battleground states in the Dole-Clinton presidential race and shed congressional seats in the Rust Belt and Pacific Northwest. ~Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, The Weekly Standard

As someone inclined to agree with the conservatives who urged GOP defeat in The Washington Monthly as a necessary chastisement and purgative of various bad habits (though I take a distinctly harsher view of the elections as a time for punishment, rather than penance), I find that Ross and Reihan’s article has the annoying problem of being basically right about the reasons for why bigger government was inevitable under unified GOP government: the GOP was never able to roll back or alter the structure of entitlements in the ’90s because most Americans did not want those entitlements touched, much less reduced.  I could make one of my usual remarks about how this demonstrates the unsuitability of democracy as a form of government and how it breeds dependence and servility, and so on, but that isn’t the point of this discussion. 

It is all very well to decry in Bolingbroke-like fashion the Robinarchy that has given us Big Government conservatism and all its evils, but we are eventually forced to recognise that the Robinarchy not only suits the interests of those in power, but also wins the support of the people by extending its system of corruption to the people.  Obviously this is not a new development, but the system continues to be expanded and comes to embrace more and more of the population until there is no longer a majority that seeks to defend their independence because they no longer have very much independence left to defend–and we discover, to our dissatisfaction, that they want it this way. 

But this would hardly be Eunomia if we let the administration and Congress off that easily.  Yes, the people want relatively larger, more active government–that is to their discredit, but there it is.  But I find it hard to believe that it follows that they therefore want profligate and irresponsible government that mortgages the future of this country. 

There are admittedly strong constituencies that would oppose any real diminution of entitlement spending, and there would inevitably be routine COLA increases every so often to keep those spending levels rising at a rate equal to the rate of inflation, but what we see under Mr. Bush and unified government is something far more excessive than a simple accommodation with the inevitability of big government, bad as that is in principle: the GOP with unified control has gone hog-wild with their domestic spending, whether in the form of creating new entitlements (the public did not put a gun to their head and demand this new Medicare program, though they just might take up arms to protest its baffling organisation) or Mr. Bush’s refusal to veto a single spending bill.  The Washington Monthly contributors are not exactly complaining about a lack of zeal to zero out the Department of Education, though well they might complain, but even if small-government conservatism doesn’t sell terribly well surely they are right to complain about massive new federal spending on education that has no precedent as well as massive federal intrusion into local education with the despised No Child Left Behind Act.  Even if you accept that these departments are going to exist, which a pragmatist might do, there is no reason why their budgets should be growing at 6 or 8% per year.  Even if we accept that tolerating and making effective use of larger government is politically necessary, there is no political upside to having the management skills of a drunken gambler.

Ross and Reihan make other observations, one of which hits on a vital point while the other makes a basic error:

No doubt there is conservative disaffection today. But it failed to manifest itself during Bush’s first five years in office, when he was no less of a spender than he is now. If conservative voters have turned against their president, it’s because of his perceived incompetence–over Iraq and Katrina–and his support for immigration reform, not No Child Left Behind or the prescription drug entitlement. Indeed, if there’s any lesson to take from Bush’s sky-high popularity among conservatives for most of his presidency, it’s that the movement’s rank and file cares far less about government-cutting than its activists do.     

Rank-and-file people may care less about government-cutting than activists, but put that way it isn’t saying very much.  Rank-and-file people almost always care about any policy issue less than activists, which is why the latter are, well, activists.  Okay, perhaps that’s taking an easy shot.  In fact, this observation is very important, because it points us towards recognising that the rank-and-file Republican voters and “movement” conservatives are concerned above all with national security, borders, immigration and national identity, taken together with highly symbolic cultural issues centered on marriage and the family.  In some ways this has always been the case, as the GOP is the nationalist  party in American politics, and this nationalism can degrade and has degraded the quality of conservatism inside the party in many respects. 

But if the policies supported by Middle America (e.g., the Iraq war) are oftentimes infuriating to traditional conservatives, there is a certain consistency focused around these basic issues.  What may be dispiriting to traditional and intellectual conservatives to discover is that Middle America will respond very favourably to the military commissions bill; one of McCain’s greatest liabilities, oddly enough, with primary voters has been his outspoken opposition to the torture of detainees, which suggests that once again a deplorable and horrendous law will find enthusiastic supporters in Middle America because they will see the entire issue as one of protecting America at the expense of torturing a few terrorists (and it doesn’t really count if you do it to terrorists, right?).  To someone like me, endorsing torture and saying that you intend to violate international treaties five weeks before an election seems stupidly self-destructive as well as deeply wrong, but it might be just the kind of thing that will convince Republican voters to turn out.  This is not because these voters have great enthusiasm for torture or illegality as such, but because I think they refuse to think of it in those terms or they view as one of those ugly-but-necessary things that “must be done” in wartime.  Perhaps I am wrong here–I would love to be wrong here–but I don’t think so.  (In passing, I would suggest that the reason why paleoconservatism does not take off like a prairie fire in Middle America, even though paleos tend to endorse many populist ideas in policy, is not so much that it is unknown, but that it is almost too cerebral and seems rather high-falutin’ to the mass of Middle American Radicals.)   

There was always deep discontent with the spending priorities of the first Bush administration (2001-05), but Mr. Bush could compensate for that with the broad acceptance–baffling to traditional conservatives–of his overreaching foreign policy and executive power grabs because they were done in the name of national security.  Mr. Bush has weakened himself on immigration first because he seems manifestly unserious about or indifferent to the potential security implications of insecure borders and second because he does not understand the sometimes incandescent outrage that illegal immigration in particular fires up among his core voters.  If he has profited unduly and unfortunately from the perception that he takes a hard line with America’s enemies, he has suffered equally from appearing to not even know what the question is on enforcing immigration law.  Here he has run into direct conflict with a voting base that is primed for populist nationalism of the kind David Brooks described earlier this year because he adopted the elite and business position on immigration that virtually no one in the heartland accepts.

The basic mistake is to confuse the voters’ acquiescence in Mr. Bush’s runaway spending with their approval.  They were willing to rebel over immigration or over the Dubai ports deal because these things hit a nerve in a way that Medicare D never did.  Government entitlement, which used to get some folks’ blood boiling, no longer excites that many people.  Handing our ports over to Arabs?  Well, that’s another story all together.  The things that strike them at their very core by seeming to threaten national security and, in a roundabout way, national identity will force them to turn against the party leaders. 

But that is not to say that they want more entitlement spending or that they think insane deficit spending is acceptable to them–they do not and it isn’t.  There still is a large conservative constituency that favours fiscal responsibility (which is not code for raising taxes, but means, of course, balancing revenues and spending) while also preferring generally lower taxes; they would have rebelled eventually against massive spending because it would inevitably mean higher taxes at some point in the future.  If domestic discretionary spending has not increased that much, the rest of the domestic expenditures have been shockingly large, or at least large enough to appall conservative voters.  Spending as a percentage of GDP was greater under Reagan, but loyal Reaganites used to routinely pin that on the Democratic Congress and the bargains Reagan had to make to get his defense appropriations through.  Mr. Bush does not have to bribe his own majority to get war spending, so why the relative explosion in domestic spending?  It can hardly be comforting for the base to hear that the federal government under Mr. Bush is only spending one fifth of the GDP instead of slightly more than that.  Oh, only a fifth!  No worries, then.  I remain skeptical that we should continue down the path of trying not to starve and weaken the beast, but instead try to teach it how to do tricks.  In the end, there can be no promotion of self-reliance by means of reinforcing a system of dependence; this is simply to change the terms of dependency and call it “empowerment.”  But he who empowers still dominates and controls, and he who receives the empowerment is still a serf.  Maybe that is not a winning election slogan (in fact, I know it is not), but it happens to be true. 

Big Government conservatives who think that the future of the GOP is theirs are sadly mistaken.  When the reckoning comes in the post-Bush years, it will also come for them.