In 1964, Barry Goldwater carried just six states running on a
platform of constitutionally limited government. If certain
provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 were not among the
expansions of federal power Goldwater opposed, he likely would
have lost five of those states too.
Just eight years later, however, Republican Richard Nixon was
reelected to the presidency in a 49-state landslide, after
embracing wage and price controls, the Environmental Protection
Agency, affirmative action, and Keynesian economics. So this
proves that big government is good for Republicans while small
government is for losers, right?
Such an argument can only be sustained by ignoring longer-term
political context. Goldwater both came from and enhanced a
movement that made the Republican Party truly competitive
nationally, as opposed to the permanent minority party that could
only elect president when nominating a war hero or reacting to
Democratic overreach. Nixon’s victory was followed by the
overwhelmingly Democratic Watergate Congress after the 1974
elections — and, once designated successor Gerald Ford fell in
1976, unified Democratic control of the federal government.
Watergate — and, in Ford’s case, a poor choice of words
concerning the Soviet Union’s position vis-à-vis Poland — had
more to do with this than Republican big government, of course.
But Republican big government certainly didn’t do anything to
help.
Though Nixon deserves considerable credit for bringing the Silent
Majority into the GOP electoral coalition, few big-government
conservatives hold up his presidency as a boon to the Republican
Party. But some members of this seemingly oxymoronic club still
want to
rehabilitate George W. Bush as an example of how
compassionate Toryism is the ticket to electoral success.
Given the results of the last two national elections, this is
almost as convincing as the Goldwater-Nixon contrast. With the
possible exception of the Bush tax cuts and the president’s SCHIP
veto, it is hard to come up with any policy of this
administration that was influenced by small-government
conservatism. And notwithstanding his commitment to cutting
wasteful spending, John McCain’s national greatness philosophy of
government makes George W. Bush look like Calvin Coolidge.
Again, the Iraq war and the global financial crisis had more to
do with the GOP’s losses over the past two election cycles than
big-government Republicanism. But once again, big-government
Republicanism certainly didn’t help. The Democrats were able to
outbid Republicans on health care despite the Medicare
prescription drug benefit, on education despite No Child Left
Behind, and most spectacular on recession worries despite the
$700 billion bailout plan.
With Republican numbers dipping to pre-1994 levels in both houses
of Congress and a Chicago Democrat about to take over the
presidency, it is difficult to argue with a straight face that
compassionate conservatism will lead to a new GOP majority. Yet
that doesn’t stop some people from trying.
Bill Kristol, for example, argued
last week in the New York Times that advocating smaller
government is the political equivalent of the Charge of the Light
Brigade. He points out that Republicans ran into political
trouble when their new congressional majority tried to restrain
the growth of Medicare spending in 1995. Bush, on the other hand,
at least arguably helped himself in 2000 and 2004 by first
advocating and then signing an expansion of Medicare to cover
prescription drugs.
Leaving aside whether it is truly “successful” government policy
to worsen
Medicare’s looming insolvency rather than try to alleviate it,
this analysis leaves out some important political benchmarks.
Despite the backlash against the class of ‘94’s Medicare gambit,
Republicans continued to control Congress for twelve years
afterward. The prescription drug benefit didn’t buy Republicans
more than three years in the majority. Newt Gingrich handed over
the speaker’s gavel to another Republican; President Bush will be
replaced by unified Democratic control of the federal
government’s elected branches.
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.
