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We agree that, were I to win the lottery, lightning to repeatedly strike Michael Moore, and Bush and the Republican Congressional leaders announced and swiftly enacted a revised federal budget based on pre-New Deal federalism, that the Democrats, the unions, the Left, and the news media will denounce the drastic budget cut in the fiercest terms as being an example of "Republican extremists" trying to "turn the clock back" with dire consequences for "women, the poor, and minorities," and a "betrayal of the American workingman and middle class."

As to how the millions of dependents of the federal welfare state will react, gosh, you pose a huge question to a huge hypothetical and the answer you have is so curt. You think there will have been a liberal Democratic landslide in the next election.

I disagree, especially if the Congress did it at the beginning of a two-year term (say, at the first meeting of Congress in 2006), gave all the misbegotten funds back to the States from which they came, and didn't budge on the budget or government in general's job for two years.

But that's not the issue here. We agree that incrementalism is necessary and reality. The problem is that conservatism doesn't even get that. I repeat the statement I made before, in response to your comment "There is simply not enough of a political constituency for old-style federalism to make it possible to roll back the federal government to a pre-New Deal reading of the Constitution."

Let me know when someone tries it so I can see if you're right. When's the last time the federal government actually devolved something to the states entirely? When's the last time it was proposed by a president?

If it ever happens again that a state gets back federally-grabbed powers without the feds ensuring they've always got supervisory roles and Congressional oversight, or the President even proposes that, fire up the air-raid sirens, okay? I'll pay any fines you get for it.

You still hunger for a long shot roll of the dice by the national GOP against the federal welfare state. But no governor and group of legislators, GOP or otherwise, have ever made or seriously contemplated an equivalent gamble at the state level. Among workaday politicians and strategists, anyone who suggested that soon find his colleagues edging away from him as not just suicidal but wanting to take the room with him. Given the mechanism and fig leaf of rationalization offered by socialism, a consistent political majority of people can eventually be fashioned to relish cream and fruit taken from their neighbors. That is what sustains the Left and the Democratic party nationally, not the unwillingness of the GOP to gamble otherwise.

Yet do not despair. The impending demographic and generational bankruptcy of the modern welfare state will provide the spur of crisis and acute need.

We are beginning to enter an era of danger and opportunity that will make enduring conservative and libertarian reforms possible and necessary -- but not inevitable. Against that prospect, why should the national GOP make a hopeless and premature cavalry charge into the enemy's fortified position?