I was recently invited to debate a leading conservative strategist before an audience of influential conservatives at a gala dinner. I suspect I'd been invited as the dinner.
What's a liberal to say? My message is that conservatives have won most of the great battles of the past two decades but are now in danger of succumbing to hubris. They are overreaching, to their likely downfall.
What did conservatives win? First, government -- the great engine of equality and citizenship -- is smaller, less prestigious, and less involved in the economy than before Ronald Reagan. The tax system is far less redistributive. Fewer industries are regulated.
This change occurred not just in politics but in the culture. Fewer popular heroes today are leaders of government; more are entrepreneurs. In the 1960s, being a businessman was widely seen as remunerative but boring, if not selfish. By the '80s, entrepreneurship was broadly considered not just enriching but socially virtuous and even hip.
The right has won other battles at the junction of culture and public policy, such as welfare reform. Liberals, in the 1960s and 1970s, had a chance to reform the old, self-defeating system of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (liked by neither taxpayers nor welfare recipients). But too many liberals flinched, and the opportunity was squandered.
By the time Bill Clinton finally resolved to end welfare as we know it, the Republicans controlled Congress. The actual program drastically cut welfare but was needlessly harsh. Thanks to the fortuitous climate of full employment and an increase in the Earned Income Tax Credit, many former welfare recipients improved their lives. But many did not, and many children in particular are suffering. The latest proposed revision is even worse.
Conservatives have made broad gains in several other areas. Corporations have been unleashed -- to combine without fear of antitrust enforcement, to rig prices, to cook their books, to pay CEOs astronomical salaries and stock benefits, and to move overseas in order to avoid taxes, labor costs and environmental regulation.
Conservatives also dominate the world of ideological entrepreneurship. The other day, the moderately liberal David Broder, the Washington Post's senior columnist, wrote an abjectly generous column on the good works of the right-wing Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute, citing their ''willingness to challenge the conventional wisdom.'' But the estimable Broder is behind the curve. The conservative world view has been the conventional wisdom for two decades.
Even Democrats, as the opposition party, have embraced many of the conservative premises about deregulation, privatization, tax-cutting, globalization, and budget-balance.
Why, then, is conservative dominance at risk? Because the right keeps overreaching.
A major backlash is brewing against corporate excess. Ordinary Americans, in a national security emergency, resent corporations ripping off pensioners, moving to tax havens, defrauding investors, soaking ratepayers. It would not take all that much reform to rein in the excesses, but the supremely confident Bush administration is rejecting modest reform.
Or take ''compassionate conservatism,'' the Bush administration's signature philosophy. Study the details and it's a complete fake.
Here, too, it wouldn't take much to combine welfare reform with decent child care, but the administration refuses. And so, despite the Bush slogan, millions of children will in fact be ''left behind.'' Nor would it take much to provide seniors with decent drug coverage, but the administration has already spent the money repealing the estate tax. It would take only $8 billion a year to adequately staff every nursing home, but the White House is determined to slash Medicaid and Medicare.
If the right truly believed in compassionate conservatism or efficient free markets, it would moderate its extremes -- and it might remain dominant for decades to come. What is preventing the right from making a prudent course correction? Two things, I'd suggest.
First, the ideology has hardened into dogma. No longer are markets said to work tolerably well much of the time; it's that they always work better than government regulation. Well, tell that to the Enron pensioners, those who can't afford life-saving drugs, or all of us appalled by airport security lapses by private contractors.
Second, corporations are now in the drivers' seat. They surely won't restrain themselves. And the Bush administration won't restrain them either.
So just when one ideology seems entirely in control, its excesses are already undermining its reign. Ordinary people get fed up.
Candidly, it would be more satisfying if conservatism were undone by resurgent liberals on the march. But this battered but unrepentant liberal will gratefully take progress where he finds it.