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Bush the Budget Buster part two

In the last decade, both parties have discovered that big government can be popular with the middle class -- if those big-government bucks are spent on the middle class. Clinton steered the Democratic party away from exotic and fringe concerns; he made the bulk of Americans feel good about getting money from Uncle Sam. Which is to say, Clinton started to transform Washington from the tool of minorities to the tool of the majority. Bush is doing the same thing. If the American middle class wants better schools, the federal government will seek to provide them, and pay for them; traditional conservative compunctions about federalism and decentralization will be forgotten.

Indeed, the dominant thinking within the GOP is not conservative, but rather neoconservative. Irving Kristol, defining "The Neoconservative Persuasion" in the August 25 issue of the Weekly Standard, writes that his ideological fellow travelers are "impatient with the Hayekian notion that we are on 'the road to serfdom.' " Neocons, he says, see the growth of the state as "natural, indeed inevitable." They have no interest in a minimalist Goldwaterian state; it's "National Greatness" they crave. These neocons once opined that such greatness might be found in majestic monuments. David Brooks in a 1997 Weekly Standard piece on "A Return to National Greatness" waxed lyrical over the Library of Congress as the embodiment of "brassy aspirations of Americans" and "their brash assertion that America was emerging as a world-historical force." But after futilely casting about for opportunities on the home front, neocons have settled on the idea that greatness comes from fighting foreign wars.

Richard Perle, a leading hawk with influence in the administration, outlined that road to greatness in 2002. "This is total war," he declared. "If we just let our vision of the world go forth . . . our children will sing great songs about us years from now." And while George W. Bush might once have wished to be a "humble" president, it's clear now that he means to be a Greatness president. And the great commanders in chief, such as Lincoln and Roosevelt, were never bean counters, let alone budget balancers.

Looking beyond the change in the Republican party, one can espy an even larger shift in the national psyche as a whole. Sept. 11 has morphed into a "worldwide war on terror," which has led in turn to a "generational commitment" to the Middle East -- a place larger than the United States.

So yes, war is the health of the state. In 1918, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George declared that his government would reward the men who had fought for king and country in World War I; Britain would be "a fit country for heroes to live in," he vowed. The result, based upon the blood and memory of gallant men, was the cradle-to-grave welfare state.

Nine decades later, Americans feel the same war-tempered impulse; honoring heroes and their families is front and center on the agenda -- and in the budget. So while the opposition Democrats are less than eager about the Bush doctrine, they are keen to "invest" in America, in the name of Social Security and social solidarity. And as the Democrats are more natural heirs to the Lloyd George worldview, the Bush Republicans still risk being outbid.

But for now, the Republicans have the upper hand. They've long had the edge on tough-talking flag-waving, yet they were vulnerable to looking hard-hearted and uncaring. Under Bush they've solved that problem, because they are now willing to spend like Democrats. The result: a right-wing big government, heavy on nationalism, with a touch of militarism. And it seems to be working. Today, it looks as if tomorrow belongs to the Big Government GOP, the party of both warfare and welfare.

James Pinkerton, who served as a deputy assistant for policy planning for President George H.W. Bush, is a columnist for Newsday and a fellow at the New America Foundation

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