When Bill Clinton declared, "The era of big government is over," a Texas Republican was probably the last person he expected to resuscitate it. However, under George W. Bush, the GOP has come a long way from its counter-counterculture days of small government conservatism, at the apogee of which Ronald Reagan declared, "Government is the problem." To some extent, the only thing lean about government under the president is the truth and the only thing bigger is the deficit.
Less trim are the tentacles of government, as discretionary spending has shot up 27 percent in the last two years. The defense budget has skyrocketed by billions to cover the growing cost of war and occupation in Iraq. The federal treasury coughs up similar amounts in new funds for the Department of Homeland Security -- incidentally the largest expansion of the federal bureaucracy in half a century. Time was, Newt Gingrich and company sought to eliminate departments, not add them.
In the No Child Left Behind Act, the administration protrudes, albeit via state government, into every classroom in America armed with mandatory testing and mandated standards. President Bush also signed Republican Medicare reform legislation, representing the largest expansion of social services since the Great Society.
Attorney General John Ashcroft sent the USA PATRIOT Act up to Capitol Hill to allow the government into our libraries, our e-mail accounts and our credit card transactions -- not to mention our attorney-client consultations and maybe even our homes. The administration wants to spend billions to send mankind to Mars. The president and his party even want government to have a say on the altar.
The party of red on the map has in a sense become the party of red tape and a red bottom line. Republicans and conservatives, though not the true ones, will counter that these initiatives are necessary for security, for social justice or for the integrity of Western civilization. To a certain extent, I agree, but that is not the issue. Rather, this line of argument is really an admission of the fallacy of the entire debate, for it cedes that the true measure of government is not size but utility.
Anti-government conservatives may seem to believe that federalism is an exercise in self-emasculation and may mouth that no government is too small, but their true target is the welfare state and progressive taxation. Republicans bait voters with big government not because they object to its size, but rather to how Democrats use it. They don't want to destroy government; they want to run it.
Hence, big government has become an epithet for social welfare, the right's version of that evil liberal moniker, "military-industrial complex." In the end, the right appeals to the lowest common denominator of sheer bigness because it is much easier to play on fears of the big, bad tax-eating wolf than it is to explain, say, why social democracy is at odds with libertarian individualism.
Conservatives use this tool with greater frequency and success merely because the kind of big government they oppose is more recent than that which they support: the military and marriage are time-honored necessities, while Medicare is a relatively new luxury.
Yet this tacit admission that defense initiatives trump social ones hardly vindicates the conservative anti-government sophistry. In the end, it is dangerous to place at the helm of government those who are willing to denigrate its sense of possibility for political gain, because we do need an end to big government, not merely a perpetuation of rhetoric to that effect. The notion that every "problem has a program" is as insufficient, ineffective and dehumanizing as it is politically expedient.
And that is the tragedy of the faux conservative construction of government as a necessary evil, unable to do any good: It destroys the possibility of its own important nominal objective. Big government should be attacked not in an electoral volley against tax-and-spend liberals but in protest of its inability to solve real problems for real people.
The notion that government cannot do everything is only useful to the extent to which it illuminates the corollary: that it must do something. Both parties agree on the size of government; it is about time somebody thought about its responsibility. In this regard, the future belongs to those who can wed weariness with big government to a progressive purpose. For the sake of liberal objectives of social justice, America must harness conservative dissatisfaction with alphabet soup solutions and the need for innovative ones -- not to concede that government cannot work, but to show that it can.
The right, then, does well to question big government, but is wrong not to actually move beyond it. Yet such GOP demagoguery is perhaps a blessing, for in the final analysis, the larger the government we oppose, the greater the necessity and our inclination to change it.
Justin Raphael is a sophomore American history major from Westport, Conn. Uncommon Sense appears on Tuesdays.
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