Conservative Big Government

In 1996, President Clinton proclaimed, “The era of big government is over.” In recent years, however, federal spending, and thus the size of government, has exploded. The following quotes from recognized Republicans seem to explain and sanction this trend:

1. Fred Barnes, March 2006:

President Bush thinks, and I agree, that we are not going to have smaller government. Ronald Reagan tried to do it and gave up. Newt Gingrich did it and gave up. We are going to have a government of big size. . . .

[I]t’s unrealistic to think it is ever going to happen in our country. Bush recognizes it. He’s going to use big government for conservative ends.

2. The chairman and president of the American Enterprise Institute, late 2005 / early 2006:

Over the past six decades, AEI scholars have pledged their allegiance to the idea of limited but energetic government.

3. David Brooks, Sept. 2005:

Bush has muddled his way toward . . . a positive use of government that is neither big government liberalism nor antigovernment libertarianism. He’s been willing to spend heaps of federal dollars, but he wants that spending to go to programs that enhance individual initiative and personal responsibility.

4. Fred Barnes, Aug. 2003:

[We] believe in using what would normally be seen as liberal means—activist government—for conservative ends. And they’re willing to spend more and increase the size of government in the process. . . .

Big government conservatives prefer to be in favor of things because that puts them on the political offensive. Promoting spending cuts/minimalist government doesn’t do that.

5. William F. Buckley, July 2001:

What conservatives are going to have to get used to is that certain fights we have waged are, quite simply, lost. It is fine, in our little seminars, to make the case against a federal Social Security program, but it pays to remind ourselves that nobody outside the walls of that classroom is going to pay much attention to our Platonic exercises.

6. George W. Bush, July 1999:

There is another destructive mindset: the idea that if government would only get out of the way, all our problems would be solved. An approach with no higher goal, no nobler purpose than “Leave us alone.”