Speaking as a 'l'ibertarian, I would have a lot more reason to support the Republican party if we had ever seen any of those phantom budget cuts. Ironically from a budget perspective we seemed to do the best with a Republican congress and a democrat in the White House. Not that I'd want to go back to the days of the assault weapons ban and selling our nuclear secrets to the Chinese, but it would be very nice to see more welfare reform and spending cuts.
I think that's the real reason the Republicans lost. After decades of promising to cut the size of government, when they finally controlled both houses of congress and the presidency they did exactly the opposite and expanded it like European socialists.
True, if you don't care at all about the composition of the supreme court, or feckless treaties entered by the executive that, under international conventions, have binding effects on us without ratification (ICC, Kyoto, eg), or about executive orders that close off most of the energy resources of the West to development for easily a century or the commander in chief turning our military into a feminist sensitivity klatch, or, or . . .
The executive can do enormous damage all by himself as the eight years of clinton proved.
The problem is not conservatism. The problem is that the congress is run by a coalition of leftists and RINOS and the media is run by the left almost lock-stock-and barrel. Conservatives are a minority in both houses and were a minority during the entire Bush administration. That coalition has held power in the country for a century for all but a few years of the Reagan administration. That coalition will not suffer it's power to be diluted and the viscious assaults on Christians, Reagan and W (as far short as he fall of conservatism) from that establishment is the measure of that coalitions commitment to keeping power.
Bottom line, America is not a conservative country. At most, we elect about 35% of our representatives who reasonbly qualify as conservatives. That's the battle we have to win.
I don't disagree with you. I think both fiscal conservatives and social conservatives need to work together on these problems. Stuff like building up the Department of Education and adding prescription medicaid was absolutely insane, from any rational point of view.
A social conservative should agree that the worst place to put responsibility for the education of our children is in a massive and unaccountable federal bureaucracy. The Catholic bishops, who seem to support this sort of thing, should be re-educated in the Catholic principle of subsidiarity: that things should be done as much as possible on the local level.