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ANDREW SULLIVAN speaks truth to the old -- now dying-- Reagan - Goldwater - Taft bedrock of the Republican party:

conservatism as we have known it is now over. People like me who became conservatives because of the appeal of smaller government and more domestic freedom are now marginalized in a big-government party, bent on using the power of the state to direct people's lives .. Just remember all that Bush promised last night: an astonishingly expensive bid to spend much more money to help people in ways that conservatives once abjured. He pledged to provide record levels of education funding, colleges and healthcare centers in poor towns, more Pell grants, seven million more affordable homes, expensive new HSAs, and a phenomenally expensive bid to reform the social security system. I look forward to someone adding it all up, but it's easily in the trillions. And Bush's astonishing achievement is to make the case for all this new spending, at a time of chronic debt ..

The whole package was, I think, best summed up as a mixture of Bismarck and Wilson. Germany's Bismarck fused a profound social conservatism with a nascent welfare state. It was a political philosophy based on a strong alliance with military and corporate interests, and bound itself in a paternalist Protestant ethic. Bush Republicanism is not as authoritarian, but its impulses are similar - and the dynastic father-figure is a critical element in the picture .. But unlike Bismarck, Bush's foreign policy is deeply liberal and internationalist: promoting a revolutionary doctrine of democratization abroad in the least hospitable of places. His faith in this respect, if not his ease with using military force, is reminiscent of Woodrow Wilson.

-- More. Posted by Greg Ransom | TrackBack