Standing athwart history, yelling BACKWARDS….GO BACK I SAY!

From the Wingnet:

If I understand it correctly, the thesis of William Voegeli’s book Never Enough: America’s Limitless Welfare State is that left-progressives are national busybodies. No matter how big government is or how much it spends, there’s always something else they’re going to find wrong in the social order and then, naturally, seek an even more expansive state.

 On its face, this posture had struck me as somewhat childish. Why should we expect anyone, left or right, to hold to a predefined notion of ideological terminus — some Calvary-like moment when it might clearly be declared that “It is finished”? Couldn’t the question just as easily be asked of conservatives: How much should government be shrunk? To pre-New Deal levels? Pre-Civil War?

This is actually easy.

For Grover Norquist it is 1900. He has said so:

    Question: You are known for saying that you want government to be “the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” Can you elaborate on this?   

[Norquist]: I want to drop the government in half over the next 25 years, and then drop it in half again. The government’s about 33 percent of GDP, 33 percent of the economy. We want to take it down to 16 and a half percent, then take it down to eight percent, all of which would take us to where we were at the turn of the century.

For Paul Ryan, it is the 1870s or 1880s. I don't have a quote from him pining for the good ol' days. But this period is the heyday of Social Darwinism and he's an old line Darwinist. So I think 1880 is a good pick.

For Ron Paul, it is 1861. I say this because of his outrage at the Morrill act of 1862, i.e., Land Grant Public Universities. If I were kind, I'd say that Ron Paul would prefer to turn the clock back to 1850, i.e., the year of the Fugitive Slave Act . The Fugitive Slave Act marked an expansion of Federal Power, ironically demanded by so-called states' rights slave holding south, to use the Federal Government to help capture runaway slaves. If Paul is against the Morrill Act, he's likely against the Fugitive Slave Act.  But since he has not spoken out on the immorality of the Fugitive Slave Act and because I am not kind, I am going with pre-civil war 1861 instead.

For Various Teabagging Outfits, I think the date they'd prefer is 1781. That is the date of the ratification of the Articles of Confederation which created a very weak central government that was later replaced by the Constitution in 1789. It has all been downhill from there so their complaints go.  Today's Teahadists claim to love the constitution, but it seems to me that the better comparison would be with the Anti-Federalists of the old days.  Anti-Federalists, if one recalls, also wore tri-cornered hats. So this one works too.