The Occasional Observer

Following up on SHK's earlier post, here's more on the post-election conflagration between "good government" (know to opponents as 'big government') Republicans and "small government" (k.t.o. as 'fantasyland') Republicans.

First, Kristol, explaining what the "good governance" school thinks conservatism should look like, in a column titled "Small Isn't Beautiful":

...talk of small government may be music to conservative ears, but it’s not to the public as a whole. This isn’t to say the public is fond of big-government liberalism. It’s just that what’s politically vulnerable about big-government liberalism is more the liberalism than the big government. (Besides, the public knows that government’s not going to shrink much no matter who’s in power.)

If you’re a small-government conservative, you’ll tend to oppose the bailouts, period. If you more or less accept big government, you’ll be open to the government’s stepping in to save the financial system, or the auto industry. But you’ll tend to favor those policies — universal tax cuts, offering everyone a chance to refinance his mortgage, relieving auto makers of burdensome regulations — that, consistent with conservative principles, don’t reward irresponsible behavior and don’t politicize markets.

Similarly, if you’re against big government, you’ll oppose a huge public works stimulus package. If you think some government action is inevitable, you might instead point out that the most unambiguous public good is national defense. You might then suggest spending a good chunk of the stimulus on national security — directing dollars to much-needed and underfunded defense procurement rather than to fanciful green technologies, making sure funds are available for the needed expansion of the Army and Marines before rushing to create make-work civilian jobs. Obama wants to spend much of the stimulus on transportation infrastructure and schools. Fine, but lots of schools and airports seem to me to have been refurbished more recently and more generously than military bases I’ve visited.

W. James Antle III responds at AmSpec, dealing with the political effectiveness of Kristol's suggestions. He considers whether small-government or big-government Republicans fared worse with the electorate:

Since World War II, Republicans have seriously tried to cut federal domestic spending exactly three times. They did so most recently during Ronald Reagan's first two years in office and during the first two years of the Gingrich Congress. Republicans paid a steep political price both times -- neither the 1982 nor the 1996 congressional elections were kind to GOP incumbents -- but Reagan was reelected and the Gingrich majority still held. (The third group of Republicans who seriously tried to cut spending, the Do-Nothing Congress that stood athwart Harry Truman, didn't survive though many of their spending cuts did.)

In other words, the Republicans were in better shape after their spending battles than they were after eight years of big-government conservatism under Nixon-Ford or Bush 43. That's obviously not because the American electorate is comprised of doctrinaire libertarians. It probably has more to do with the fact there already exists a political party willing to satisfy voters' needs for new government programs. That party is called the Democrats.