I’m sorry, but people who say that they want small government yet refuse entitlement reform and a shrinking military budget are not to be taken seriously. ~Freddie deBoer

So that would leave maybe 30% of Republican voters and maybe three-quarters of the conservative movement. I’m trying to be as generous as I can, so I am counting those who are in favor of either entitlement reform or shrinking the military budget. The numbers would go down dramatically if we are requiring support for both. Freddie has much the same problem with Ruffini’s post that I did. He cannot accept the idea that “the standard conservative economic message is deeply popular with the American people and a political winner,” and this is not surprising–this message is not deeply popular and is not a political winner. It wasn’t even popular when times were good, and it is particularly not popular now. Someone could try to argue that it is nonetheless superior and right, but most voters do not agree. Republicans have prevailed in the past in spite of what is called “economic conservatism,” and not because of it. It has been cultural and social issues along with a (now destroyed) reputation for foreign policy competence that kept the GOP competitive and made Middle Americans into reliable supporters, and it was decidedly not the party’s economic policy that kept these voters from drifting away. Incidentally, this is what makes the push to embrace amnesty and and the call to abandon social conservatism so much more foolish than many other reformist proposals, because these are arguably the only things that hold the majority of the coalition together any longer.

I would add that the “standard conservative economic message” these days is not much of a message at all. Telling voters who pay more in payroll tax that their income tax rates won’t go up (which is all that McCain promised last year) and that someone somewhere is going to get a capital gains tax cut is not compelling to anyone, regardless of their real views on the size and role of government. Calling subsidies and tax credits for people who do pay payroll taxes “welfare” is not going to win anyone’s vote. This is one of the most crucial problems with the Plumberization of the right: the basic complaint about tax policy at the core of the Myth of the Plumber is inaccurate at best. It isn’t just that conservatives rally around symbolic folk heroes, but that they do so in defense of a policy critique that isn’t really valid. In the end, the elevation of the Plumber is what happens when a party and movement are reduced to ridiculing the agenda of their opponents because they have no particularly compelling message of their own.