It's good to have hobbies. Some people collect stamps. Others keep coins. Me, I like to watch conservatives face up to the ceaseless growth of government over the last thirty or so years. It's the kidney stone of conservatism. But William Voegelli'a attempt to pass it takes a bizarre turn towards the end. Surveying the wreckage of small government conservatism, he comes to two linked conclusions. The first is that conservatives should "accept the legitimacy of government programs to help the small minority of citizens who are chronically unable to fend for themselves and the larger minority occasionally and transitionally unable to do so." In other words, if social policy must exist, let it be means-tested. Sadly, he says, such an approach "rests on a foundation of wishful thinking. Liberals reasonable enough to be swayed by arguments about the moral and material prerequisites of the welfare state wouldn't be liberals in the first place." Plans for a constructive role in governance thus scrapped, he turns to his final suggestion: "Conservatives need to make the macro-question the central one, and to insist that limited government is inseparable from self-government." In other words, attack the very legitimacy of the welfare state, take aim at "the rhetoric and ideas justifying the perpetual existence and expansion of those programs." I have my policy arguments with means testing programs, but let's leave those aside for a moment. Imagine I were a liberal who believed deeply in means testing. Voegelli's article would force me to suppress that impulse. One could imagine a world in which legislators of good faith came together and agreed to means test various social programs, targeting them more tightly at those who need help. But that's not the world we live in. Instead, we live in a land where conservatives still write articles questioning the legitimacy of the New Deal, and counsel each other on how best "to attack liberalism where it is weakest, rather than where it is strongest." Liberalism, in this case, means the welfare state. And the welfare state is always weakest when it serves the weak. Which is to say, it is weakest when confined to those who would be left after means-testing. And since the overarching agenda is to destroy the welfare state in totality -- or at least something near to it -- you don't find liberals willing to reform social policy along means testing lines, because they know perfectly well that to do so is to reform social policy along politically vulnerable lines, and that the political weaknesses of the policy will be mercilessly exploited by those seeking to dismantle the whole of the safety net. Voegelli blames brain-dead liberals for the failure of means-testing, but really, he need only look a few paragraphs forward in his piece to see why it's such a non-starter.
