Doers vs. Undoers

But it was Roosevelt's political purpose to avoid a revolution. He sought to preserve the market system by regulating its health, safety and fairness. This is not laissez faire, but it is an authentic conservative tradition -- the use of incremental reform to diffuse radicalism. And few today would wish to return to 19th-century labor, health and antitrust standards.

All those few, however, seemed to be in attendance at CPAC, determined to sharpen an ideological debate. In the name of constitutional purity, they propose a great undoing. Not just the undoing of Obamaism. Undo Medicare and Social Security. Undo the expansive American global commitments that proceeded from World War II and the Cold War. Undo progressive-era economic regulations. Undo the executive power grab that preserved the union. Undo it all -- until America is left with a government appropriate to an isolated, 18th-century farming republic.

This is a proposal for time travel, not a policy agenda. The federal government could not shed these accumulated responsibilities without massive suffering and global instability -- a decidedly radical, unconservative approach to governing.

The alternative remains a reform conservatism, of which Teddy Roosevelt is a distinguished ancestor. Since the repeal of modernity is not an option, make modern institutions work. Update Medicare and Social Security to encourage market choices and ownership. Bust the public education trust with charters and competition. Diffuse radicalism with reform.

The debate between conservative doers and undoers is ideologically interesting, but in the political realm there is little debate. A candidate running recently in Virginia, New Jersey or Massachusetts on a Beck/Paul platform would have duplicated Ron Paul's results during his 1988 presidential run. (Paul gained less than one half of 1 percent of the vote.) All the Republican winners in these states promised the reform of government, not its abolition.

But I fear that the undoers may resemble Teddy Roosevelt in one disturbing aspect. This I have against the Rough Rider: In the 1912 election, he betrayed his friend, William H. Taft, and his party by running as a third-party candidate. In his hubris, TR believed that neither party met his own exacting standards of purity. The attitude is familiar today.