Noemie Emery: Swing time is coming for Dems, GOP

"We're all socialists now," crowed Newsweek in springtime, but, if we were then, we are not any more. The end of the end of big government, proclaimed to have come in with Obama's election, has now itself ended.

It went the way of the great Progressive Era brought in by Bill Clinton in 1992, as well as the Anti-Government Libertarian Era brought in two years later by the Republican Congress.

Actually, none of these "eras" ever existed, except in the minds of the people who hyped them, and the problem each time was the American temperament: Tocqueville said about 180 years ago that American politics moves by degrees between closely placed goal posts, and he was right.

It isn't quite true that the country swings back and forth in fairly wide arcs between the two parties. It is more true that it stays in much the same place - somewhere between the New Democrats and Compassionate Conservatives - while the two parties tend to circle around it, each coming more or less close to the center as the other veers off to one side.

Mandates for one thing or another - to grow or shrink government - are generally meant to do so in increments. Great growth in government isn't an increment. As Obama is finding out now.

Through the years, the American character has remained remarkably constant - communitarian and individualistic, quick to associate, but hostile to bureaucrats - and in the past eight decades, it has seemed to want the same things.

These include free enterprise, a government that helps create opportunity, and a small, effective welfare state that helps people face troubles not of their making such as fire, flood, or economic disaster, that does not reward or encourage bad conduct, and shields people against the loss of a breadwinner and some of the perils of illness and age.

This was what was missing when Franklin D. Roosevelt came into power and he provided it; by the time Ronald Reagan appeared, it had mutated grotesquely, and he cut it back. The space between Reagan and Roosevelt is where the country seems happy, and it resists efforts to move beyond either one.

As Riehan Salam and Ross Douthat write in their book, "Grand New Party," what Americans want is the New Deal apparatus administered by a conservative temperament, which is what they had in Eisenhower and Kennedy, who enforced the New Deal without expanding it greatly while reaching sustained personal popularity levels seldom seen since.

Conservatives were unhappy with both, and nominated Barry M. Goldwater, who ran against the New Deal, and was crushed in a landslide. They won 16 years later with Reagan, who ran against the Great Society, (but not the New Deal, for which he had voted), and tried to trim the state back to pre-LBJ levels.

He seemed far right (at least to the leftists), but mainly because the country (and Democrats) had moved so far left in the interim that the swing to the middle looked like the Dark Ages. It wasn't.

FDR wasn't a socialist, and Reagan was far from a true libertarian. He didn't say government was always the problem; he said it was the problem when it went beyond its real duties, which were the defense of the realm, enforcement of contracts, creation of opportunity, and the care of the helpless, who could not take care of themselves.

Calibrating the balance between the state and the free enterprise system is a delicate business, which is why the "big" and "small" government parties tend to take turns in power, so they can absorb and fine tune one another's achievements, and undo each other's mistakes.

When the out-party wins power, it is given a mandate to tweak the controls and make a slight change in the country's direction, the key words being "slight change" and "tweak." Confronted with excess, the country enforces its own equilibrium, as when the Republican Congress crashed into Bill Clinton, frustrating both, but pleasing the country, creating welfare reform and a roaring economy.

Divided government is a substitute for a conservative temperament, which is why it is frequently popular. The way things are going, it may shortly be with us again.

Examiner columnist Noemie Emery is contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”