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

"We have a responsibility that when somebody hurts, government has got to move." -- President George W. Bush, talking to union workers on Labor Day 

Franklin Delano Roosevelt's rhetoric was more high-flown, and less therapeutic in emphasis. "Governments can err, presidents do make mistakes," said FDR, "but the immortal Dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm- hearted in different scales. Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity than the constant omission of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference." Both presidents' statements are, however, close enough in meaning. They are bookends: one spoken when big government in America was young and disputed, the other when it is old and accepted.

President Bush has compiled a record to match his rhetoric. Indeed, during his presidency the federal government has acted even when people were not hurting. Bush has increased the federal role in education, imposed tariffs on steel and lumber, increased farm subsidies, okayed new federal regulations on campaign finance and corporate accounting, and expanded the national-service program President Clinton began. Since September 11, he has also raised defense spending, given new powers to law enforcement, federalized airport security, and created a new cabinet department for homeland security.

No federal programs have been eliminated, nor has Bush sought any such thing. More people are working for the federal government than at any point since the end of the Cold War. Spending has been growing faster than it did under Clinton. Conservatives are, of course, inclined to tolerate, indeed cheer, most of the government's efforts to wage the war on terrorism. But non-defense spending has been increasing almost as fast as defense spending. Excluding defense and also entitlements, spending is up 28 percent over the course of Bush's first three years. Now Bush is seeking to expand Medicare to cover prescription drugs, at a projected cost -- almost surely an underestimate -- of $400 billion over the next decade.

Spending is not, of course, the only way that the government can commandeer society's resources. The regulatory state is alive and growing as well. Bush just passed up the opportunity to eliminate one particularly noxious regulation, the Department of Education's Title IX edict, which has universities killing men's sports teams to achieve "gender parity."

Over on the left, and even among moderate liberals, the idea that Bush is a right-wing maniac persists. Harold Meyerson of The American Prospect has suggested that Bush resembles no president in American history so much as Jefferson Davis in his hostility to progressive government. But Bush's record is inspiring considerable angst among his supporters. Most conservatives are critical of the governmental growth that Bush has allowed or encouraged. Some conservatives are also expressing concern about the return of deficits. The debate about how conservative Bush is, which began when he walked on the national stage in 1999, has been renewed. This time it has gotten mixed up with the considerably less edifying debate about whether he is a neoconservative (and about what that term means).

BUT IS IT CONSERVATIVE?

A minority of Bush's supporters, however, have celebrated Bush's alleged embrace of "big government conservatism." The term is that of journalist Fred Barnes, the only known self-confessed adherent to the creed. Big-government conservatives, according to Barnes, use "activist government" for "conservative ends." He writes in the Wall Street Journal , "The essence of Mr. Bush's big government conservatism is a trade-off. To gain free-market reforms and expand individual choice, he's willing to broaden programs and increase spending." Big-government conservatives are realistic, says Barnes, about what conservatives can accomplish given the public's support for a large federal role. They "prefer to be in favor of things because that puts them on the political offensive." They "support transfer payments that have a neutral or beneficial effect (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid) and oppose those that subsidize bad behavior (welfare)."

Peter Berkowitz, a moderate conservative academic, writes in the Boston Globe that "Bush's conservatism is certainly less rigid and doctrinaire than that of Newt Gingrich and his minions, who swept to power in 1994 and, in a most unconservative spirit, sought to remake the federal government by drastically reducing its size."

Irving Kristol touches on the same subject in the course of an essay for The Weekly Standard on neoconservatism. Kristol's purpose is to claim that neoconservatism is "the first variant of American conservatism in the past century that is in the 'American grain'" because it is cheerful. Also, it is neoconservative policies that are responsible for whatever popularity Republicans have enjoyed. (That thesis would be less preposterous than it sounds if Kristol were correct in claiming that tax cuts are a distinctively neoconservative idea.) Neoconservatives want a government that promotes economic growth, combats cultural decay, and maintains a strong military and a robust foreign policy. They do not, however, fret about big government. "People have always preferred strong government to weak government," he writes.

I may as well put my cards on the table at this point. I'm a small- government conservative who doubts there is any other kind. To put it in the positive terms that Barnes recommends, I favor the absence of all the government programs I'm against. I wish the Republicans of 1995 had succeeded in their modest plans to scrap a few of the less important cabinet departments, generally by placing the programs within them elsewhere, and to hold the growth of the federal government to $350 billion over seven years. I recognize that those Republicans were sometimes grandiose in their rhetoric. But I don't believe that they should be spoken of as though they were a band of anarchist revolutionaries.

There are reasons to question whether big-government conservatism can succeed even on its own terms. A suspicion of statism and a love of individualism are very much in the American grain, but are sentiments somewhat alien to Kristol's neoconservatism. An attachment to the right to bear arms, for example, is certainly a feature of the American Right that springs from our cultural history but with which neoconservatism has little to do. (And one doesn't have to embrace the myth of America's historical isolationism to wonder whether a sustained activist foreign policy is really in the American grain, either.)

Irving Kristol is too sanguine about the compatibility of a large welfare state, on one hand, and economic growth, cultural conservatism, and military strength on the other. Most conservatives believe that federal spending depletes resources that would otherwise be available to the private sector. Note, by the way, that the very programs that are doing the most to bankrupt the country are the ones that Fred Barnes reckons have "a neutral or beneficial effect." These programs have also had cultural consequences. Social Security and Medicare helped to undo much of the economic basis of the multigenerational family, and Medicaid has been an invitation to fraud and abuse. More generally, the expansion of the federal role in health, education, and welfare has reduced the social role of organized religion (and would do so even if the government were less insistent on secularism; in that case, churches would over time become clients of the government).

Kristol's notes toward a definition of neoconservatism conflate government's size with government's strength. That governments must be strong enough to effect their legitimate ends no sensible person would deny. But a central insight of conservatism has been that a government chasing after goals at once utopian, vague, and picayune -- leaving no child behind, for example -- is likely to neglect its core function of protecting its people from violence. Turning his gaze abroad, Kristol writes that "Europe's democracies cut back their military spending in favor of social welfare programs." Just so.

The strongest point in favor of big-government conservatism is the practical political one: A reduction in the size and scope of the federal government is, in the short term at least, impossible. Even this point can be (and frequently is) overstated. The difficulty for conservatives is not, as is so often said, that "the public likes big government." It is true that the public likes many large federal programs, such as Social Security, Medicare, and student loans. But it's not any deep public sentiment that keeps the Small Business Administration, or the sugar subsidy, alive.

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.

It's important to note that this small-government strategy does not amount to going along with any government program that makes Republicans more popular. An editorial in the Washington Times recently argued that a new prescription-drug entitlement would be worth the cost, because it would get more Republicans elected . . . and in a few years they would reform entitlements. But even if the Republicans were to get 60 senators in this fashion -- a big if -- a party that had thus gained power would be likely to find itself bereft of its reformist zeal. For partisans of small government, the goal should be to strengthen the coalition for conservative governance more than to strengthen the Republican party.

Liberals have been following their own version of this strategy for many years. Since the collapse of the Clintons' health-care plan in 1994, for example, they have sought incremental reforms that would make people more receptive to government-provided health care. Both parties are aware that they are fighting a kind of trench warfare, contesting small territories in bitter engagements in the hope of winning a better position for tomorrow's battles.

When they judge how well the president has served them, conservatives ought to ask whether he is advancing the cause of limited government given the political circumstances. Surprisingly often, the criticism of Bush ignores those circumstances. In the intra-conservative debate about Bush, it is assumed that to approve of Bush's performance is also to approve of the big government he has expanded, and that to oppose big government one must also condemn Bush. But the attitude conservatives should have toward Bush does not follow straightforwardly from the attitude they should have toward excessive government, because political considerations have to be taken into account.

The president's conservative critics sometimes make it sound as though the idea for a prescription-drug entitlement sprang from his (or Karl Rove's) head. But it's not Bush's fault that voters, including self- described conservatives, like the promise of free medicine. The entire Republican party, from top to bottom, concluded in 1999 that it would be politically perilous to stand against the idea. That doesn't mean that the president's behavior in this matter is above reproach -- it would be nice if he would demand that the bill contain real free-market reforms, not just that it be bipartisan -- but criticism should be based on actually available alternatives. Similarly, people talk as though the president set federal spending levels all by his lonesome. Bush has indeed made decisions worth criticizing: He could, for instance, have vetoed the farm-subsidy bill. But where's the criticism of the congressional spenders, Republican and Democrat (all too) alike? More to the point, where's the effort to reform a budget process that is designed to pump up the government?

When judged in this manner, some of Bush's compromises will appear to be reasonable, some to be gratuitous sellouts. Still others will take time to judge. The steel tariffs were probably necessary to get Congress to give the president the authority to negotiate free-trade deals; we won't know if it was worth it until some time in Bush's next term (assuming he has one). In some cases, conservatives may decide that Bush made the right call given the political circumstances but that they should denounce him anyway, as part of their effort to change those circumstances. The steel tariffs may fall in this category, too.

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.