It's The "Conservatives" Who Control The Government

WASHINGTON - They're spending money faster than any U.S. government in memory. They expanded the federal reach into education and hired more bureaucrats. They've expanded a big-government entitlement program more than anyone since LBJ in the mid-'60s.

Liberals run amok? Hardly. It's the "conservatives" who control the government. And that has some traditional conservatives worried, at the very moment when they enjoy a peak of power that movement founder Barry Goldwater could only dream about.

Conservatives now are under the twin burdens of governing and holding onto power. The pressure on them has deepened fissures within the conservative movement, pitting fiscal hawks against "big government" Republicans and social conservatives against business groups.

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In 1964, after Goldwater's landslide defeat, conservatives were flat on their backs, a minority within the Republican minority party. Then they organized for decades, gained great strength during Ronald Reagan's presidency, took control of the House in 1994 for the first time in 40 years, and have controlled Congress, the White House, the Supreme Court and most governors' mansions since George W. Bush came to power. Yet now their movement is troubled.

"There is a half life to political movements," said Ross Baker, a political scientist at Rutgers University in New Jersey. "They consolidate, they begin to decompose. Then they reconstitute themselves, usually with different personalities and different issues. ... They have to fall apart before you can reconstitute them."