It's Not the Size, It's What You Do With It

In response to my CNN.com column about the breakdown of Congress, Erick Erickson argues that conservatives need to worry less about how Congress functions and more about shrinking government. But this conservative indifference to policy and governance is the real problem.

There's been a lot of criticism of my column at CNN.com about the breakdown of Congress since 1980.

I'll deal shortly with criticisms from Bruce Bartlett, Matt Yglesias, and Kevin Drum.

Let me deal first with a criticism from the right-hand side of the blogosphere, epitomized by this from Erick Erickson of RedState:

Maybe, just maybe there is a different reason Congress has done little since the seventies. Maybe, just maybe it could be because conservatives largely took over in the 80’s through Republican controlled White Houses or Congresses and conservatives tend to think we don’t need sweeping legislation to solve all the ills of the American people.

Isn’t this the quintessential vanity piece of liberal drivel? Those elites back in the 50s to the 70s could get great things done because they didn’t have to interact with the people. But once they were forced to interact with those C-SPAN cameras, they couldn’t solve all the problems the American people never knew they had.

If it were possible for two paragraphs to sum up everything that is wrong with the American conservative movement, these are them.

The total indifference to policy and governance - the glib equation of ideological activists with "the people" - the assumption that conservatives just needed to "take over" and then all problems would spontaneously disappear  ....  it's all on display.

The suggestion that conservatives don't need to legislate - or anyway don't need to legislate anything much - is ignorant of history, ignorant of policy, ignorant of government.

To their critics, the deregulation of oil and gas in the 1970s was "sweeping." Ditto the deregulation of air, trucking and rail. Ditto the Reagan tax cuts. Ditto welfare reform.

The problems ahead for conservatives will require even bigger action still.

Do you want to balance the budget? You can't do it without curbing the growth of Medicare and Medicaid, and that will take major reforms in both programs.

How about a shift from unskilled to more skilled immigration? Not a small project.

Concerned to protect the environment while enhancing U.S. energy security? That too will require legislation that some would call sweeping.

On the other hand:

If for you "limited government" is a slogan rather than a political project -

If you are less eager to fix problems than to complain about them -

If you see politics not as a search for agreed solutions, but as a theater for cultural clash:

Then who cares whether Congress functions well or not? Your politics is about electioneering, not governance - about grievance, not responsibility.