Bill Kristol writes a very interesting column today in the NY Times addressing the question of what's best for conservatism--"big government" conservatism or "small government" conservatism. Read the whole thing for yourself here, and read the whole thing.
Let me address two points in his piece with which I have a problem.
First, he seems to suggest that small-government conservatives can't win election, that the American people won't go for it. Well, but we can't simply base our principles on what we believe will win elections--right? If we want to go that route, we might as well just adopt the Bill Clinton solution and poll everything, deciding our positions on the results. We don't know for sure what will become of "small government" solutions--unless and until we keep trying. We need to work harder at getting our points across--not just say, well, we lost in 2006 and 2008, so we need to abandon this and that...
Second--Kristol suggests that some big government programs in this new administration (for example, stimulus and public works) are "inevitable." And of course you know what that means--that's usually followed by the notion that if it's inevitable, we must bow to it. That's dangerous. If something's "inevitable", that doesn't make it right--and even more important, that doesn't mean it will work and that its perpetrators will be forever lauded! (Just exactly where these days is the hall of fame for the guy who came up with the idea for a tax rate on the rich of 70% or above?)
And I don't think Kristol and most conservatives are that far apart, really. He wants government to be limited and constitutional, too. But we've got to beware of those falsehoods of inevitability and making public opinion a god creeping into our thinking. It leads to me-tooism, which infected the Republican Party throughout the 1930s and 1940s.
Think: how many presidential elections did Republicans win in those years???
