WE WIN

Okay, so we haven’t won yet. The era of big government isn’t quite over. American government is, after all, as big as it’s ever been. The Republican Congress has been stymied in most of its efforts to make it appreciably smaller. And Bill Clinton’s concession is in any case rhetorical and insincere.

But rhetoric matters. And, as Michael Kinsley once pointed out, insincere flattery is the most sincere form of flattery, since it testifies even more convincingly to the power of the person or idea being flattered. It would mean little if a Republican president proclaimed the end of the big-government era. But the Democratic party is the party of big government. It created big government; its historic role has been to defend it, to manage it, to extend it, to try to perfect it. The Democrats were once proud of this role. Now, after three years in offce, a Democratic president proclaims the end of the cause to which his party has heretofore been dedicated.

It took Gorbachev three years in offtce fundamentally to subvert his party’s claim to rule. Clinton has had three years; he is the Democratic party’s Gorbachev.

He didn’t plan to be. When he addressed Congress three years ago, he said, “I believe government must do more.” Two years ago, he threatened to veto any health-care legislation that fell short of creating a huge new government entitlement. A year ago, after the 1994 election, Clinton was willing to acknowledge that we had to “change the way our government works to fit a different time.” Now the force of the tidal wave of 1994 has become fully apparent; Clinton is cheerfully deserting liberalism’s sinking ship.

And he announced this desertion with what may be the only memorable sentence of his presidency. Fifty years from now, “The era of big government is over” will be (along with his pre-presidential “but I didn’t inhale”) the only quotation from Bill Clinton memorialized in history textbooks. One phrase that won’t make it, also spoken in the State of the Union, is “the Age of Possibility.” Once upon a time, liberals were confident that they were ushering in an Age of Enlightenment. Then came the Age of Progress. Then the Age of Aquarius. But the Age of Possibility? Not even the Age of Probability?

In any case, this will not be the Age of Clinton. It’s possible, of course, that Clinton’s gambit will pay off in the fall campaign. He is infinitely willing to stoop to conquer, and conquer he may — though the odds still look very good to us that he will be a one-term president. But with one term or two, Clinton has no serious role in shaping the new era. That is the conservative opportunity. And that task demands a different approach than did the previous conservative work of resistance and opposition.

The task of conservative governance requires intellectual boldness. Thinking through the path to a relimited government and a re-moralized society will be more challenging than elaborating the critique of the welfare state. The road to serfdom is easier to identify than the road to liberty. The intellectual habits of opposition — excessive pleasure in a “gotcha” approach to the left, a corresponding susceptibility to infatuation with silver bullets of the right — will have to give way to a more serious but also more ambitious conservative intellectual enterprise.

At the same time, the fact of conservative governance requires a greater understanding of the day-to-day necessities of practical accommodation and political prudence. To sink the boat of liberalism, it was necessary to fire away. To ride the new tide of conservatism, it is necessary to keep the boat afloat and steer it through the rapids. That may mean slowing down occasionally, tacking to the center at times, and reassuring some of the more reluctant passengers that the boat is in good hands. This will require a new suppleness in conservative political strategy and a new evenness in conservative temperament — it will even mean, as the Wall Street Journal editorial page (!) allowed this week, occasionally realizing that there is a ” time for patience.” But these are tasks for the weeks, months, and years ahead. For now, conservatives should remember: Magnanimity in victory — but not too much.