Jonathan Chait writes:
When conservatives see this same expansion of government, they see liberalism triumphant. My colleague, Jonah Goldberg, is a good example. Last fall, in a column in which he called Bush’s domestic spending “lavish” and “spectacular,” he wrote that, far from being ruled by conservatives, government was in the hands of “moderates, squishes, apostates, New York Times-pleasing ‘mavericks,’ centrists and all the others who want to ‘get beyond labels’ or get a standing ovation from the Brookings Institution.”
From the liberal or centrist standpoint, this statement is mystifying. The Bush presidency has been rife with acts of big government, but nearly all of them have been the sorts of things liberals and centrists abhor. The Medicare giveaway, the corporate tax bill, the unprecedented pork, the tariffs — all were designed for no other purpose than to maximize the profits of pro-Republican business entities. Brookings types were aghast at all of them.
The mistake Goldberg and other conservatives make here is in thinking that because these policies were bad from a conservative point of view, they must be good from a liberal (or, at least, a moderate) point of view. In fact, they were awful from any point of view, save that of their direct financial beneficiaries.
Me: I think there’s some merit to Chait’s point. But I think the mistake Chait makes is failing to recognize that while “Brookings types” may not like the beneficiaries of Bush’s largesse, or Republican rent-seekers generally, this doesn’t mean that this aspect of Bushism isn’t “liberal” in an important sense. Nor does it mean that this isn’t a victory for liberals in the long run. Whenever the Right moves toward big-government, this puts more slack in liberalism’s leash to be for big government even more.
When a future Democratic President decides to enrich some corporate fat cats or labor unions and conservatives complain, does anyone doubt that Chait et al. will cry “hypocrisy!” They will note that Bush helped his friends, so any objection to a giveaway to Democratic friends — Labor, Trial Lawyers or the Teacher’s Unions (or to various corporations who prefer Democrats generally) — will smack of a grotesque double-standard. And, at least politically, they will be right.
That is, unless conservatives criticize their own “team” when Republicans behave like Democrats and point out that such policies are not consistent with conservative principles. Chait, as we all recall, is convinced that liberals are not dogmatically in favor of statism. That’s an old argument we shall not revisit here. But it strikes me as fairly obvious that anything which sets precedents for the State to do as it pleases in regard to spending is a liberal victory, even if on the “pragmatic” or programmtic level the Brookings types would prefer to over-spend on something else.