by Matt Barr

Sam I am

This is an important essay, even if you don't have the patience for the policy proposals.

[A] party ideologically committed to a small government may be ill-equipped to run a large one. Many honest small government conservatives aren't interested in overseeing programs that they would prefer to see slashed or abolished, so their place has been filled by an assortment of cynical operators, for whom the only guiding principle is to keep Republicans (and themselves) fat, happy, and securely in power.

In truth this is still a party ideologically committed to small government, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. You see it in the nascent "porkbusters" campaign, an individual pundit's line item veto over bloated spending. You see it in the visceral reaction to the Harriet Miers nomination, or, more directly, what you see there is that this is not a party interested in backing the President for no other reason than the R after his name on Election Day. You see it, frankly, in the fact the U.S. hasn't turned into a creaky nanny state like France, or tried to be a gun-free utopia like San Francisco (an experiment doomed to last until the next set of crime statistics or two). The majority of the country won't stand for it, because they're deeply suspicious that a remote government full of millionaires knows best.

Still, does the small government conservative (did you ever think you'd hear that phrase?) bent stand a chance of coalescing into a leveragable bloc of voters? Douthat and Salam identify Pew research dividing voters into nine discrete groups, including the Republican base among Enterprisers (most reliably) and Social Conservatives (who are, and this is me here not the authors or Pew, most likely to stay home fed up on Election Day) and Pro-Government Conservatives (who, same disclaimer, think limited government is swell except it would be nice if that conviction didn't have any actual consequences, please).

The Republicans' losing Social Conservatives to an Election Day sit-in and Pro-Government conservatives to a sensible-sounding Democrat would be exceedingly easy; it's happened during elections in 1992 and 1996, most recently. The key to the national GOP keeping these blocs is not to spend itself into oblivion, it's a two-pronged approach.

First, while you can't engineer prosperity (nor keep housing prices soaring), you can cut spending when you cut taxes. Pro-Government Conservatives want responsible government. They believe it's a positive force, but not if it acts like, well, they do with their credit cards, spending beyond its means.

Second, the argument needs to be made and defended that the federal government isn't the vehicle to engineer social policy of almost any kind. We've devolved to a state where one side wants to centrally plan everything and the other wants to scale back that central planning by... central planning. Roe v. Wade will be overturned in this decade, and if the GOP is really concerned about losing an issue when it does, it should practice the argument that the abortion debate belongs in communities and state assemblies. You can pander to Social Conservatives, in other words, by promising to do the opposite of the more licentious among us, or by working to get social issues out of Washington altogether. Conservatism certainly wouldn't have to learn a new language to do this, just strengthen some atrophied muscles.

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