George Will has a great column out today about the lessons that the Republican Party should, but won’t learn from the recent election and the death of limited-government conservatism as a governing force.
The storm-tossed and rudderless Republican Party should particularly ponder the vote last week in Dover, Pa., where all eight members of the school board seeking reelection were defeated. This expressed the community’s wholesome exasperation with the board’s campaign to insinuate religion, in the guise of “intelligent design” theory, into high school biology classes, beginning with a required proclamation that evolution “is not a fact.”
(…..)
“It does me no injury,” said Thomas Jefferson, “for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” But it is injurious, and unneighborly, when zealots try to compel public education to infuse theism into scientific education. The conservative coalition, which is coming unglued for many reasons, will rapidly disintegrate if limited-government conservatives become convinced that social conservatives are unwilling to concentrate their character-building and soul-saving energies on the private institutions that mediate between individuals and government, and instead try to conscript government into sectarian crusades.
Pundits have often wondered if the coalition that exists in the Republican Party between advocates of limited government and social conservatives could truly survive. As events in Dover, Kansas, and elsewhere demonstrate, the social conservatives are beginning to concentrate more of their efforts on what they see as the moral decline of a America and less on limiting the size, scope, and power of government —– which used to be a central tenant of the GOP. As will points out, the idea of limited government is pretty much dead in Washington today.
[T]he limited-government impulse is a spent force in a Republican Party that cannot muster congressional majorities to cut the growth of Medicaid from 7.3 to 7 percent next year. That “cut” was too draconian for some Republican “moderates.” But, then, most Republicans are moderates as that term is used by persons for whom it is an encomium: Moderates are people amiably untroubled by Washington’s single-minded devotion to rent-seeking — to bending government for the advantage of private factions.
And the War on Terror cannot be used as an excuse for this untrammeled, unquestioned growth of the state:
Federal spending — including a 100 percent increase in education spending since 2001 — has grown twice as fast under President Bush as under President Bill Clinton, 65 percent of it unrelated to national security.
In 1991, the 546 pork projects in the 13 appropriation bills cost $3.1 billion. In 2005, the 13,997 pork projects cost $27.3 billion, for things such as improving the National Packard Museum in Warren, Ohio (Packard, an automobile brand, died in 1958).
And the spending continues unabated. As Will points out, though, the GOP could face the same consequences as the School Board in Dover if it continues to abandon its limited government roots:
[L]imited-government conservatives will dissociate from a Republican Party more congenial to overreaching social conservatives. Then those Republican congressional caucuses will be smaller, and Republican control of the executive branch will be rarer.
Unfortunately, if that happens, the whole country will pay the price.
Linked with Don Surber and The Political Teen and bRight & Early and Jo’s Cafe and TMH’s Bacon Bits and Basil’s Blog
