Conservatism's current intellectual chaos reverberated in the Republican ticket's end-of-campaign crescendo of surreal warnings that big government — verily, "socialism" — would impend were Democrats elected.
John McCain and Sarah Palin experienced this epiphany when Barack Obama told a Toledo plumber that he would "spread the wealth around." America can't have that, exclaimed the Republican ticket while Republicans — whose prescription drug entitlement is the largest expansion of the welfare state since President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society gave birth to Medicare in 1965; a majority of whom in Congress supported a lavish farm bill at a time of record profits for the less than 2% of the American people-cum-corporations who farm — and their administration were partially nationalizing the banking system, putting Detroit on the dole and looking around to see if some bit of what is smilingly called "the private sector" has been inadvertently left off the ever-expanding list of entities eligible for a bailout from the $1 trillion or so that is to be "spread around."
The seepage of government into everywhere is, we are assured, to be temporary and nonpolitical. Well.
Probably as temporary as New York City's rent controls, which were born as emergency responses to the Second World War, and which are still distorting the city's housing market.
It's a good piece but I think they miss a fundamental point.
Conservatism never changes because it's based on principle. What happened to conservatism is a bunch of rogue democrats decided to run as republicans and claim they were conservatives (see John McCain, George Voinovich, Bob Taft, Chuck Nagel).
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