Away from Reagan?

George Will challenges conservatives to move beyond the legacy of Reagan and return to a more realistic - some would say gloomier - conception of humanity and politics. Money quote:

"An unmentionable irony," writes Diggins, is that big-government conservatism is an inevitable result of Reaganism. "Under Reagan, Americans could live off government and hate it at the same time. Americans blamed government for their dependence upon it." Unless people have a bad conscience about demanding big government -- a dispenser of unending entitlements -- they will get ever larger government. But how can people have a bad conscience after being told (in Reagan's First Inaugural) that they are all heroes? And after being assured that all their desires, which inevitably include desires for government-supplied entitlements, are good?

I've always appreciated George Will's sensibility. In the past few years, he has become an invaluable voice for reasonable conservatism, unmixed with the wild-eyed fantasies of the neo-con or theo-con contingents. Too bad he's in the minority.