It's Not About Ideology. It's About Control.

Debunking the "small government conservative" myth

I don't share the heartache from the ultimate collapse of my belief system the way Rick, a sincere small-government conservative, does. I just note that the belief system was never what it seemed. Every postwar Republican president oversaw a sometimes quite extensive expansion of the administrative state, including Reagan and both Bushes. The only modern conservatives in the true Jeffersonian anti-federalist tradition might be the Mormons, Barry Goldwater and the Libertarian Party. Joseph McCarthy railed against an octopus state while turbocharging it against American citizens in the name of groupthink. How else are you supposed to fight the seeping menace of Communism, right? Prosecuting the cold war positively demanded an expansion of the administrative state.

Then the 60s and 70s happened and with them, a large expansion of the rights of ordinary citizens along with a material expansion of the always threadbare US welfare state. The question for the oligarchs (don't call them conservatives) was never about the size of the state per se. It was about who has control and how best to maintain the social norms that kept them on top. If it needed to keep a large number of men under arms and police institutions for subversive ideas, even though these things would make the Jeffersonian anti-federalists blanch (not to mention libertarians of any stripe), so be it.

Then, in an amazing decade (a decade that, incidentally, saw the publication of Thomas Pynchon's three greatest novels, V., The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity's Rainbow), we got Medicare, the expansion of defendant's rights, the ending of de jure segregation, the recognition of grotesque levels of Southern poverty, federal housing support (I just moved to a HUD building for seniors), Pell grants, much of LBJ's Great Society, the expansion of the franchise to include 18-year-olds and capping it off with Roe v Wade. It's also been called the Terrible Decade of American politics, from JFK's assassination to Nixon's disgrace. But it was also a moment of intense social progress.

All of a sudden the uber-statist cold war conservatives, so intent on drafting men into the military and beating the crap out of anyone with subversive ideas, fell in love with "freedom." How precious ;)

It's not about ideology, Rick. It's not about small government v. big government.

It's about control.