Posted on 10/28/2009 7:30:29 AM PDT by Josh Painter
Despite George W. Bush's many failures as president, in one area he was an unqualified success: demonstrating the impossibility of big-government conservatism. For decades, clever pundits and Republican apparatchiks have been touting this self-evident oxymoron as the path to political success. After eight years in practice, it has proved to be the road to irrelevance and ruin - politically as well as financially.
Ideologies that celebrate the swollen state while traveling under the name "conservative" are nothing new. As the Old Right faded into the modern American conservative movement, Eisenhower-era "Modern Republicans" preached a "dynamic conservatism" that was to be "conservative when it comes to money and liberal when it comes to human beings." This was followed by the Rockefeller Republicanism of the 1960s, which was essentially Kennedy-Johnson Democratic politics for the country club. Later, the neoconservatives sought to instill reverence for their old patron saints FDR, JFK, and LBJ among their new Republican allies.
But the big-government conservatism of the Bush era pretended to be a continuation of the American Right’s limited-government traditions rather than a Tory socialist repudiation of them. It promised low taxes, less regulation, and free markets, an "ownership society" instead of a cradle-to-grave welfare state. President Bush contrasted his vision with that of the Democrats: "a government that encourages ownership and opportunity and responsibility, or a government that takes your money and makes your choices." What this new conservatism did not aim to do, however, was directly reduce government spending.
Why? Because spending cuts were for "green eyeshade" proponents of austerity, political losers. Since World War II, Republicans have launched direct assaults on federal domestic spending three times...
(Excerpt) Read more at spectator.org ...
Voila!... BIG government republicans.. RINOs... democrats(R)..
big-government conservatism contributed to the major national problems that tore down the Republican majorities
“There’s a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics,” Reagan said in his farewell address to the nation in January 1989. “As government expands, liberty contracts.” This is a sharp contrast with Bush’s famous line, “When somebody hurts, government has got to move.” The American people agreed and voted Democratic.
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Reagan said in his farewell address to the nation in January 1989. “As government expands, liberty contracts.”
***Maybe a candidate for my next tagline
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