Bill Kristol, self-loving liberal

The great irony is that for as much as liberal Manhattanites curse Bill Kristol as they read his column over their lattes at Starbucks, he isn’t conservative in any sense of the word. Today, he cautions conservatives against being conservative in any meaningful way:

Indeed, the “Republican Revolution” of 1995 imploded primarily because of the Republican Congress’s one major small-government-type initiative — the attempt to “cut” (i.e., restrain the growth of) Medicare. George W. Bush seemed to learn the lesson. Prior to his re-election, he proposed and signed into law popular (and, it turned out, successful) legislation, opposed by small-government conservatives, adding a prescription drug benefit to Medicare.

So 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.)

Now it’s true that the size of the government and the modern liberal agenda are connected. It’s also true that modern conservatism has to include a strong commitment to limited (though energetic) government and to constitutional (though not necessarily small or weak) government. Still, there’s a difference between a conservatism that is concerned with limited and constitutional government and one that focuses on simply opposing big government.

This is all quite clarifying. In Kristol’s view, modern conservatism has to have “a strong commitment to limited…government,” while passing trillion-dollar drug entitlements. In other words, Republicans aren’t going to restrain the undue growth of government. So, assuming one thinks Obama has a cooler head and better judgment than the GOP has shown on foreign policy of late, why exactly should he vote for Republicans anymore?

Kristol is surely right that a platform geared toward libertarians would fall flat, but he seems to have missed the memo that a platform geared toward neocons isn’t exactly going anywhere either. If the Republicans are going to alienate economic conservatives, foreign policy realists, and a whole rising generation that’ll eventually get wise to the fact that it’s footing the bill for all these bloated entitlements, what’s left? Somewhat socially conservative, self-identifying liberals who support school choice and tax cuts and Israel?

That’s not the swing vote, it’s the staff of The New Republic.