Whither American conservatism?

Jonah Goldberg had a good "state of conservatism" piece in today's WaPo. It begins like this:

Well, this wasn't the plan.

As pretty much everyone has noticed, the Republican race hasn't exactly followed any of the scripts laid out for it. Mitt Romney has been hacked apart like the Black Knight in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail." John McCain's fortunes -- which had been bouncing up and down like a printout of Dick Cheney's EKG -- have suddenly spiked northward after his victory in New Hampshire. Fred Thompson ran a brilliant "testing the waters" campaign from his front porch, but when he tried to walk on the water, he sank like a basset hound trying to swim. Pushing the poor beast under the waves was Mike Huckabee, whose down-home folksiness makes Thompson look like David Niven.

Huckabee's surprise surge in Iowa has made him this season's pitchfork populist, albeit a much nicer one -- sort of a Disneyland Pat Buchanan. Then there's Ron Paul. He started out as the designated wack job, then became so successful that the Des Moines Register had to cast Alan Keyes in the role of hopeless firebrand wingnut for a brief campaign cameo. And it's a sign of how poorly Rudy Giuliani -- once the indisputable front-runner -- has done that I'm now mentioning him only after Paul.

That's good writing. And I appreciate Jonah's giving me notice here, though I should make it clear that I emphatically do not sign on with the crusading faith-based internationalism of Gerson's kind of conservatism:

Many of the younger conservative policy mavens and intellectuals have also become steadily less enamored of free markets and limited government. Post columnist Michael Gerson, formerly Bush's chief speechwriter, has crafted a whole doctrine of "heroic conservatism" intended to beat back the right's supposed death-embrace with small government and laissez-faire economics. He relentlessly calls for moral crusade to become the animating spirit of the right. But he's hardly alone. "Crunchy conservatism," the brainchild of Dallas Morning News columnist Rod Dreher, is also a cri de coeur against mainstream conservatism. And both of these derive from the kind of thinking that led George W. Bush to insist in 2000 that he was a "different kind of Republican" because he was a "compassionate conservative" -- a political program that apparently measures compassion by how much money the government spends on education, marriage counseling and the like.

It should probably also be pointed out that "crunchy conservatism" does have a moral basis, but so does every political movement. Jonah surely wouldn't contend that Reaganism wasn't built around a certain set of moral principles. Politics is more than arranging administrative rules; it's about determining which set of moral principles members of a polity will be governed by. Fighting for abortion rights is based on moral principle; so is fighting for the rights of the unborn. The healthier a society is, the less government it will need.

But I don't object to government in principle, and I find it odd that hating government is considered a first principle of conservatism. Government is always in need of reform, but it is often necessary to protect the common good (I always feel better when I look out the window and see the government driving by in its police car). Yet a conservative understands that too much government can be as bad as too little. The reason my conservatism is more or less traditionalist and not libertarian is that I am convinced, by reading the Bible and the morning newspaper, that the fallenness of mankind requires government. Politics is the process through which a people determines how much government it will have, and where and how its powers will be brought to bear on the affairs of the citizenry.

Libertarians would disagree, but for traditional conservatives, the question of the goodness or badness of the government can only be answered by examining the ends to which government is put. Look at gay marriage. Libertarians and cultural liberals see government's failure to sanction gay marriage, and state voters approving anti-gay marriage initiatives, as oppressive of individual rights. Traditional conservatives, on the other hand, see oppression in the actions of government's judicial branch to override legislatures and impose gay marriage on states. Both sides believe government is overstepping its bounds, and ought to be reined back in. How can they both be right? You can only judge by looking at the ends they're trying to achieve, and secondarily, the means by which they're trying to achieve it.

I favor a government big enough to keep big business from running over little people, but a government small enough to be defeated by little people when it tries to run over them too. Anyway, as I've said before: would someone please show me who the small-government conservatives are? Where is that constituency? Conservative voters may say they favor small government, but they don't mean it, not if it's going to cost them their favorite program. Ron Paul may rail against Leviathan, but he brings home the earmark bacon for his constituency too.