Cowardly Conservatives.
What is a cowardly conservative? First, they seem to cast themselves as pragmatic. But as an identifying feature, what they do is find and then stick a giant magnifying glass in front of a real bogeyman (or just fabricate a sufficiently large bogeyman from whole cloth) and then get the people to agree to all manner of insanity in order to be “protected” from the “staggeringly enormous threat”. Health-care costs, retirement funds, terrorism, mass bankruptcy, mass foreclosure, deflation, economic collapse, global warming, etc. Coward conservatives differ from liberals not in methods, but only in the targets for their manufactured fears.
This is how these "conservatives" sell activist federal government - by suggesting that the absence of intervention will always lead to a crisis, and that the government is merely "protecting" people from some threat (attaching to liberty a very low value, or perhaps treating it as a harmful liability) - mind you, it is not to protect our liberties, but to trade our liberties in for "less risk". It is an outgrowth of the 1930-1960 era Democrat party, where entitlement programs and additional government spending were announced to be necessary in order to head off some impending disaster. Both groups feed off of uncertainty and fear, and IMO both groups are largely sincere in their motivations (which makes it really sad).
When you see a Republican willing to trade YOUR liberties for something - security, subsidy, equality - call them by their chosen name:
Cowardly Conservatives.
The choice is between cowardice (activist government) and principle (limited government). The people who founded this country loved liberty more than they feared death. Quite a contrast against where we have sunk to today.