(Crazy conservative) Douthat on the right's feeling of having its back against the wall here

[Recursion]

Interesting take from crazy-land:

http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/02/why-the-right-fights/

To understand how we ended up in this strange political moment, with the federal government shuttered in pursuit of a political goal that most elected Republicans concede is well-nigh-impossible to achieve, it’s worth talking not only about polarization and redistricting and the conservative media landscape and anti-Obama sentiment and the weakening of institutional party power, but also about a more basic, often-underappreciated element in how many movement conservatives regard the history of the last forty years. To explain this point, I’ll start with a quote from David Frum’s great book “Dead Right,” which was written in the early 1990s, in what seemed like a period of exhaustion and defeat for limited-government conservatism, just before the 1994 congressional sweep gave that movement new political life. Here’s how the Frum of that era — who was much more of a small-government rigorist than he is today — depicted the Reagan years and their implications for the right:

However heady the 1980s may have looked to everyone else, they were for conservatives a testing and disillusioning time. Conservatives owned the executive branch for eight years and had great influence over it for four more; they dominated the Senate for six years; and by the end of the decade they exercised near complete control over the federal judiciary. And yet, every time they reached to undo the work of Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon — the work they had damned for nearly half a century — they felt the public’s wary eyes upon them. They didn’t dare, and they realized that they didn’t dare. Their moment came and flickered. And as the power of the conservative movement slowly ebbed after 1986, and then roared away in 1992, the conservatives who had lived through that attack of faintheartedness shamefacedly felt that they had better hurry up and find something else to talk about …

What this passage gets at is the deep, abiding gulf between the widespread conservative idea of what a true Conservative Moment would look like and the mainstream idea of the same. For the American mainstream — moderate and apolitical as well as liberal — the Reagan era really was a kind of conservative answer to the New Deal era: A period when the right’s ideas were ascendant, its constituencies empowered, its favored policies pursued. But to many on the right, for the reasons the Frum of “Dead Right” suggested, it was something much more limited and fragmented and incomplete: A period when their side held power, yes, but one in which the framework and assumptions of politics remained essentially left-of-center, because the administrative state was curbed but barely rolled back, and the institutions and programs of New Deal and Great Society liberalism endured more or less intact.

This divide, I think, explains a lot of the mutual incomprehension surrounding size-of-government debates. To liberals and many moderates, it often seems like the right gets what it wants in these arguments and then just gets more extreme, demanding cuts atop cuts, concessions atop concessions, deregulation upon deregulation, tax cuts upon tax cuts. But to many conservatives, the right has never come remotely close to getting what it actually wants, whether in the Reagan era or the Gingrich years or now the age of the Tea Party — because what it wants is an actually smaller government, as opposed to one that just grows somewhat more slowly than liberals and the left would like. And this goal only ends up getting labeled as “extreme” in our debates, conservatives lament, because the right has never succeeded in dislodging certain basic assumptions about government established by F.D.R. and L.B.J. — under which a slower rate of spending growth is a “draconian cut,” an era of “small government” is one which in which the state grows immensely in absolute terms but holds steady as a share of G.D.P., and a rich society can never get rich enough to need less welfare spending per capita than it did when it was considerably poorer.

[Make7]

1. It'd be nice if they tried decreasing the size of government when they're in power...

... but somehow, even though that's what they really want, government spending seems to grow whenever they have the White House.

[Recursion]

2. That's pretty much what Douthat is saying

The howls from segments of DU about Obama are nothing compared to the howls throughout the conservative blogosphere during Bush's terms.

[Make7]

4. He's trying to explain away the idiocy of trying to achieve goals when not in power...

... that are never achieved (or apparently even attempted) when actually wielding power.

He's romanticizing an idea of smaller government that doesn't, in reality, seem to be what the right ring wants since they don't do anything about it when they are actually in a position to do so. They similarly seem very, very concerned about deficits when Democrats hold the White House, yet when their side holds that office the deficits seem to increase.

I think a lot of people make the mistake of believing the publicly stated goals of many groups are the same as their actual goals. Actions speak louder than words. If they want a smaller government then reduce it's size when you have the ability to do so (or at least attempt it). If deficit spending is worrisome to them, curb spending (or try to) when you hold the purse strings.

It's like many of these Republicans taking to the airwaves to proclaim they don't want to shut the government down - obviously they do want to shut the government down since they could have very easily not done so. To pretend that this shutdown is born of frustration over some lofty goal such as smaller government is disingenuous at best.

[Recursion]

5. No, he's pointing out that movement conservatives see that just as plainly as you do

Which is why they hate their political leaders so much

(If you read the full thing, you'll notice he also thinks the Tea Party is being idiotic.)

[muriel_volestrangler]

3. I suspect that's because the economy does better under Democratic presidents

which means less spending on unemployed people. And defense spending, of course - the form of spending Republicans are eager to increase.

[Make7]

6. I suspect it's because they don't really give a shit about "smaller government". ( n/t )