the loss of-- and call to-- limited government

From Charles Kesler in Imprimis...

First, some semi-serious banter about Obama's slogans...

Of all of the presidential contenders' slogans this year, Barack Obama's have been the most interesting. His campaign creed is: "Yes, we can." To which any reasonable person would ask: "Can what?" The answer, of course, is: "Hope." But again, a reasonable person might ask: "Hope for what?" To which the answer confidently comes back from the Obama campaign: "For change." Indeed Obama's signs say: "Change We Can Believe In," as opposed, one supposes, to the unbelievable changes. But the elementary problem with this—which any student of logic might raise—is that change can be for the better or for the worse.

And then he broadens it a bit...

Democrats in general, I would submit, confuse change with improvement. They fail to weigh the costs and benefits of change, to consider its unintended consequences, or to worry about what we need to conserve and how we might go about doing that faithfully. They ask Americans to embrace change for its own sake, in the faith that history is governed by a law of progress, which guarantees that change is almost always an improvement....

Then, Kesler turns to the GOP...

Republican slogans have not been much better. Mitt Romney's was: "Washington is Broken." This populist refrain echoed, among others, Ross Perot's from 1992. Romney, of course, was less a populist than an expert offering his skill as a businessman-consultant. He appealed to the old Republican fantasy that if only Washington could be run as efficiently as a private business, all would be well. But government is a very different thing from business...As for John McCain, he doesn't really have a slogan, unless we count "Mac is Back."....

Utterly missing in this election season is a serious focus on limited or constitutional government. The Democrats, generally speaking, want more government, not less, so their neglect of the issue is to be expected. But the Republican dereliction is more troubling. It represents a falling away from the standards of Ronald Reagan's conservatism...

Kesler then takes Bush to task-- as well as some prominent Republican (if not conservative) commentators-- before arguing for "seven propositions related to the problem of limited government in our day".

1.) Limited government can be distinguished from small government....[For example] At the height of World War Two, for example, the federal government spent 43.6 percent of GDP. But was this big government in the pejorative sense?...There are instances in which government can be big and expensive and yet its purposes remain limited.

2.) Limited government can enhance our freedom...

3.) Limited government can be compatible with energetic government. That is, limited government doesn't mean government that does as little as possible. To fight terrorists, or even to arrest and prosecute criminals, requires an energetic government...

4.) Limited government must be constitutional...

5.) Limited government, in the sense of constitutional government, is opposed to the political assumptions of the modern state, which arose after the New Deal....

6.) The decline of limited government in the 20th century was not inevitable....

7.) Limited government is not a lost cause....