It’s not that conservatives’ work was finished with that reform: The federal government has grown by astonishing amounts since then. Education has become more nationalized. Businesses are more harshly regulated. Far more ordinary business activity, and indeed far more of ordinary life, has been defined as criminal, though most people don’t know it. A myriad of niggling taxes and fees have been created or hiked in fields from communications to health care to energy. Half the 1996 welfare reform lies gutted. Food-stamp use and abuse has exploded. The federal government imposes homosexual marriage on states by executive (and judicial) fiat. The feds force explicitly race-based policies and bean counting on states, municipalities, schools, and even private businesses. Farm subsidies behave like the Hydra’s heads, with two emerging or expanding for each one newly limited.

The military has been grievously weakened in size, its standards and culture enfeebled via political correctness, its respect for faith trampled by Obamite hostility, its mission made uncertain and its sacrifices wasted by a commander-in-chief who actually disbelieves the worthiness and efficacy of his own policies and orders. (Even the signal success of the “surge” in Iraq was controversial — even on the political right — and then, of course, it was squandered by Obama.)

The culture has suffered. By numerous indices, America has become less free — but far more crassly libertine and, worse, accepting of ever-more crudity in the public square. Pornography has gone mainstream. Modesty has nearly vanished and, where still remnant, is treated by “mainstream” culture almost as a species of strange perversion unto itself.