Americans 'want government to do things'

George Packer in The New Yorker explains why conservatism was doomed to fail:

That November [1994], Republicans swept to power in Congress and imagined that they had been deputized by the voters to distill conservatism into its purest essence. Newt Gingrich declared, "On those things which are at the core of our philosophy and on those things where we believe we represent the vast majority of Americans, there will be no compromise." Instead of just limiting government, the Gingrich revolutionaries set out to disable it. Although the legislative reins were in their hands, these Republicans could find no governmental projects to organize their energy around. David Brooks said, "The only thing that held the coalition together was hostility to government." When the Times Magazine asked William Kristol what ideas he was for — in early 1995, high noon of the Gingrich Revolution — Kristol could think to mention only school choice and "shaping the culture."

At the end of that year, when the radical conservatives in the Gingrich Congress shut down the federal government, they learned that the American public was genuinely attached to the modern state. "An anti-government philosophy turned out to be politically unpopular and fundamentally un-American," Brooks said. "People want something melioristic, they want government to do things."

If you find Packer's article interesting, you can download an interview with him on Radio West with Doug Fabrizio (look for the yellow box labeled MP3).