Cheer up, Liberals!

James Joyner writes about more Democratic self-destruction through arbitrary partisanship and links to Stephen Brainbridge's comments on the Democrats' obsession with opposing Bush, regardless of the issue at hand.

There's a lot of Republican triumphalism going around since Bush won re-election and the GOP picked up seats in the House and Senate in '02 and '04. I'm not impressed. The GOP may be the dominant party for now (and for years to come if Howard Dean has his way), but it has only done so by tilting to the Left. I mean, when Reagan took office in 1980, he pledged to eliminate the Departments of Education and Energy. Reagan held a healthy contempt for government and is known for saying "The government is like a baby's alimentary canal, with a happy appetite at one end and no responsibility at the other." He then proceeded to spend money like water, raising the national debt from $900 billion to $2.7 trillion.

Fast forward to the Bush Administration. The Department of Education? None of the Federal government's business? Not in the eyes of George "Small Government" Bush. Raise its budget to $96 billion. Remember the old joke about liberals' copy of the Bill of Rights missing the Tenth Amendment? Do does Bush's, or at least I never saw anything about prescription drugs in the US Constitution.

My point in all of this is to illustrate that the GOP has only remained competitive by moving into the ideological center. It has not remained conservative at all, except by being more conservative than the Democratic Party in comparison. There's an old line in Libertarian circles that Republicans campaign like Libertarians and govern like Democrats -- meaning that they talk about reduced government and personal freedom/responsibility, but promote big, intrusive government once in office. Well now, Republicans campaign and govern like Democrats. Bush campaigned on raising spending and Federal involvement in education and increasing spending on health care across a range of Federal health care bureaucracies, including doubling the budget for the National Institutes of Health. It's now standard practice for Republicans to brag about how much money they can spend on unconstitutional Federal programs.

So, cheer up, liberals! You're winning! Oh, maybe the Democratic Party isn't winning elections, but the liberal agenda continues to dominate Federal policymaking, and that's what really matters.