Jonathan’s last point is that I changed my tune and that it’s weird for me to deny it. But he’s relying on how he remembered the original debate and I simply think his memory is faulty or he’s being deceptive by mischaracterizing the nature of our disagreement.

Rather than revisit all that, I’ll just clarify. What was so annoying about Chait’s argumentation — then and now — is its profligate deployment of strawmen. His reified “true conservative” is a confabulation of how he thinks conservatives think. It would be at least tolerable if he said “some conservatives.” But he doesn’t. Again and again he insists that his peculiar understanding of conservatism is definitional and fundamental to conservatism. He compounds this by setting this assertion against a backdrop of his even more freighted depiction of liberals as clear-eyed assayers of fact. He simply refuses to believe that liberals don’t have a psychological or ideological attachment to big government just as large as conservative fondness for limited government. What distinguishes conservatives from liberals in this regard is not degrees of ideological taint, but degrees of intellectual honesty. Conservatives tend to admit their biases — as do many liberals. But Jonathan refuses to admit his.