Big-government conservatism

Jonathan Chait in the New Republic:

Everybody, with the exception of Jack Abramoff, agrees that Jack Abramoff is a very sleazy man. (You can get a sense of Abramoff's low repute from his ubiquitous description as a "disgraced lobbyist"; in a profession of such rock-bottom standards, to distinguish yourself as unethical requires villainy on a truly epic scale.) And most everybody agrees that Representative Tom DeLay, Abramoff's longtime friend and ally, is at least moderately sleazy. "The Beltway wisdom is right. Mr. DeLay does have odor issues," argued The Wall Street Journal in a widely noted editorial.

All that is certainly true. But DeLay and Abramoff are not merely a pair of ethically challenged individuals. They do not even merely represent the Republican leadership having grown "comfortable with the perks of power," as National Review noted with dismay. They are the inevitable byproducts of the governing ideology that has taken hold in George W. Bush's Washington. The ideology is called "big-government conservatism."

It occurs to me that "big-government conservatism" may have first taken root in Wisconsin during the Tommy Thompson years. Tommy's philosophy was to talk conservatively but carry a big wallet, and he left the state in a fiscal mess.

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