It's all part of my wiiingnut fantasy

George Will says Republicans shouldn't be that despondent because "they were punished not for pursuing but for forgetting conservatism." He opens the column with a potshot at the famed Bridge to Nowhere earmark in Alaska, a reference which seems strangely dated already and is meant to imply that Republicans got punished for a lack of fiscal discipline. He then goes on to say no, that's not really what he meant, and it was mostly the war, but the overall impression stands: Republicans lost because they weren't conservative enough.

This is a textbook example of what Josh Marshall wrote in this June post:

With all the efforts now to disassociate President Bush from conservatism, I am starting to believe that conservatism itself -- not the political machine, mind you, but the ideology -- is heading toward that misty land-over-the-ocean where ideologies go after they've shuffled off this mortal coil. Sort of like the way post-Stalinist lefties used to say, "You can't say Communism's failed. It's just never really been tried."

But as it was with Communism, so with conservatism. When all the people who call themselves conservatives get together and run the government, they're on the line for it. Conservative president. Conservative House. Conservative Senate.

What we appear to be in for now is the emergence of this phantom conservatism existing out in the ether, wholly cut loose from any connection to the actual people who are universally identified as the conservatives and who claim the label for themselves.

We can even go a bit beyond this though. The big claim now is that President Bush isn't a conservative because he hasn't shrunk the size of government and he's a reckless deficit spender.

But let's be honest: Balanced budgets and shrinking the size of government hasn't been part of conservatism -- or to be more precise, Movement Conservatism -- for going on thirty years. The conservative movement and the Republican party are the movement and party of deficit spending. And neither has any claim to any real association with limited or small government. Just isn't borne out by any factual record or political agenda.

I didn't really think of Will when I read this the first time, but thinking about it now he is the absolute poster child of the Fantasy Conservatives. He laments the loss of an ideology which, for all intents and purposes, never even existed.

Matt Yglesias wrote about this once in a guest-post for TPM too, though I'm too lazy to look for it. The way he phrased it is that conservatism is good fodder for campaigning (and, I would argue, limp-wristed punditry like Will's), but basically irrelevant as a strategy for governance. People just won't put up with having the government cut in half when it comes time to actually do it--they dislike "big government" in the abstract but freak out when you try to get rid of the actual programs that make up big government.

This brings us to Will's other fantasy--that the abandonment of Fantasy Conservatism was the reason Republicans lost the election. Er, no. While the bad pub over earmarks like the Alaska BTN unquestionably marred the Republican image, the real problems for them surrounding the earmark issue were more about corruption than overspending. And when it comes to fiscal policy, earmarks aren't terribly relevant anyway--they're a symbolic issue. Even Sen. Tom Coburn [R-Bumblefuck], one of the few elected Fantasy Conservatives, is careful to refer to them as the "gateway drug to overspending" because he knows anyone can look it up and tell they only make up like one bazillionth of the federal budget.

So let's talk about Republicans' record on a real fiscal issue: Social Security. After the 2004 elections, Bush and his lackies fell prey to the Fantasy Conservative notion that they could launch an attack on America's most popular entitlement program and not be skinned alive for their trouble. How did that work out for them? I would argue that Dems' momentum for this election actually started building the day after the 2004 election, when Bush announced that Social Security was first on the chopping block (and I even said so back then! Beat that, suckers!). Seriously, did the Republicans not seem totally unstoppable after that election? Then they came out of the gate with a distastrous idea and it's really been one downhill slide for them ever since.

The real irony for Will is that Republicans lost in part not for abandoning his imaginary ideology, but for one of the few brief times they actually tried to practice it.