On January 20th, Barack Obama will take the Presidential oath of office and bring to an end the most contentious and divisive presidency in a generation, the presidency of George W. Bush.  A major reason for the Bush administration’s unpopularity has been its expansion of state power and influence in a manner not seen since the New Deal.  Republicans and political conservatives, who would normally be very suspicious of such expansions, had largely kept any such protests quiet.  Democrats and political liberals, who would normally support such expanded state intervention tended to oppose much of it.  The reasons behind conservatives’ support and liberals’ opposition provide us with a vitally important lesson in the consequences of increasing state power: there’s no guarantee that the people using the power will share your priorities when they use it.

Traditionally, conservatives have generally stood for lower taxes and less government involvement in society. Yet through laws and programs like No Child Left Behind, The PATRIOT Act, Medicare Part D, and TARP, an ostensibly conservative president has presided over an unthinkably large expansion of state power (less than a decade after President Clinton declared that “The era of big government is over,”). He’s also presided over the creation of deficits so large and enduring that we’ll likely have much higher taxes for the foreseeable future to pay for them. He has been aided (some might say enabled) in this effort at every step of the way by Republican Party leaders, opinion-makers (such as Fox News and talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh and Hugh Hewitt) and rank-and-file members, most of whom were unwilling to criticize one of their own.

Modern political liberalism (liberalism since the Progressive Era, that is), when faced with problems in society, has tended to favor solutions which expanded the influence of state power. Yet with state power expanding into areas political liberals had long-since declared it should be active in (health care, education, regulation of corporate America, etc.) liberal groups tended to oppose the changes made by the Bush administration. The reason for their opposition was that, while they had long advocated the use of state power to deal with several problems in society, they opposed the emphasis or direction of the changes made by the administration. In other words, they disapproved of expanding state power when the power was put into the hands of someone whose priorities they disagreed with.

This last point, it seems to me, is at the heart one of the central lessons to be gleaned from the presidency of George W. Bush. The lesson is that people should only expand state power if they would be comfortable with people with completely different priorities exercising it.

Conservatives — from party elites, to opinion-makers, to rank-and-file members – have only now come to realize the truth of this lesson. They are beginning to make lots of noise about the dangers of allowing soon-to-be President Obama to have this kind of power over them. But it’s too late now. Through the PATRIOT Act, the Obama administration can monitor people’s communications. Through TARP it can influence the actions and priorities of major banks and financial institutions. Through the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives it can influence the priorities and actions of churches and religious organizations who’ve accepted federal funds. Conservatives had no problem with giving this power to George W. Bush, however, because they shared most of his priorities. Well, now there’s a new sheriff in town — a man whose priorities they largely oppose – and conservatives are going to have to live with the decisions he makes because they gave him the power to make them.

For liberals and supporters of Barack Obama, however, the same lesson stands. George W. Bush was only able to turn his priorities into laws through government expansion because of the previous eras of government expansion that liberals favored. When, in 2001, there was a new sheriff in town many liberals found that they intensely disliked his attempts to write priorities which they strongly opposed into the law. Now they agree with the new sheriff again, but I hope they will remember the lesson of the last eight years. I hope, about every discussion regarding expanding the scope of state power, they’ll remember to ask, “What Would W. Do?” And I hope the answer they get gives them pause.