The rise of compassionate conservatism can be explained by two reinforcing factors, one pragmatic and one philosophical. On the pragmatic side, the Democratic Party is spiraling into the void like Darth Vader's TIE fighter at the end of the first "Star Wars" movie. Ideological purity and irrational Bush hatred are making Democrats into the goofy party.
In a two-party system, when one party moves to its base it leaves the political center - where elections are always won - relatively unguarded. This allows the other party to move in. It's one of the odd paradoxes of American politics: When one party immolates itself, the other party moves closer to the flames, not farther away.
When the GOP was perceived, sometimes unfairly, as moving too far to the right in the early 1990s, Bill Clinton grabbed the political center like it was a mast in a storm. The GOP is now doing the same thing, tacking to the center on all sorts of issues, partly out of opportunism, partly out of necessity. Demographic projections show that the GOP must expand its base by 2004 or it will surely lose.
The second explanation has to do with the changing nature of conservative dogma. Or, to be more accurate, the faltering adherence to conservative dogma. For fifty years, it was an article of faith that growth of government was synonymous with loss of liberty. Many conservatives believed that government meddling in the free market put us all on what Friedrich Hayek famously called "The Road to Serfdom," his literary way of saying the slippery slope to communism or fascism.
But welfare reform, the collapse of communism and the relative popularity of middle-class entitlements like Social Security and home mortgage interest deductions have caused that dogma to lose much of its oomph. A movement that believes writing checks to old folks is a step toward tyranny is more likely to fight government spending than one that thinks it's merely bad bookkeeping.
When you look at it from this perspective, it's fair to say this administration is conservative. But it's also fair to say it favors big government. What will make politics very interesting in the years to come is that "big government conservative" used to be an oxymoron. now it means "compassionate conservative."