Battle of the Jewish Pundits

Mark Levin, author of Liberty and Tyranny, versus Peter Berkowitz of The Weekly Standard, played out at The Daily Dish. Levin is a staunch anti-New Deal conservative, while Berkowitz more soberly admits that the New Deal is here to stay. Levin's main rebuttal to Berkowitz's critique of the book:

I also believe that conservatism is the only real alternative to statism, and that's especially so given today's soft tyranny. Berkowitz points to Barry Goldwater's defeat in 1960 as evidence that it cannot win at the ballot box. Here again, his methods are sloppy if not troubling. Of course, Ronald Reagan won two smashing landslides in 1980 and 1984 and there was no more articulate spokesman for first principles than he.

Leave it to blogger Conor Freidersdorf to lift the glove for Berkowitz:

Ronald Reagan spent two terms in office as a popular president, yet there we were in 1988, the New Deal intact, and the federal government larger than ever. It's almost as though, for better or worse, those landslides didn't actually signify an electorate even remotely ready to return the federal government to its pre-New Deal size and scope.

Funny enough, it took a centrist liberal like Clinton to actually reduce the size of government and balance the budget. I laugh when I read conservatives or listen to Republican politicians who mouth the words, but have no concept of how monumentally impossible their vision is to implement in today's reality. Even someone like GW Bush, who hated government with a passion, sure loved to spend its money like water such that government is even bigger than when Reagan left office.