… The Republican health care dilemma has become a microcosm of the larger challenge faced by the conservative movement for the better part of a century. American conservatives are committed to the ideal of limited government power as a means of protecting individual liberty, and have repeatedly promised to achieve “revolutionary” reductions in the size and scope of the federal state. Yet rolling back government power is very difficult in practice, since most of what it actually does—providing benefits to various classes of citizens—is politically popular. …
Thus the increasing electoral success of an increasingly conservative Republican Party over the past 40 years of American politics has yet failed to result in an overall reduction of federal authority. When conservative activists complain that Republican politicians talk a good game about shrinking government but seldom follow through once in office, they have something of a point. As Matt Grossmann and I explain in Asymmetric Politics, much of the GOP’s distinctive governing behavior reflects the enduring gap between the American public’s general preference for “small government” in the abstract and its collective support for most specific government activities. CONT.
David A. Hopkins, Boston College