Patrick Ruffini has written an excellent post on the central dilemma facing conservatives in the U.S. and across the industrialized world during this volatile economic moment. Basically, we badly need to shrink government to a sustainable level, that is, a level that taxpayers can realistically sustain consonant with high and rising material expectations.

Note that the sustainable level will vary across societies. Loss aversion is a powerful force, and the fact that the British middle class is not accustomed to the consumption opportunities available to the U.S. middle class means that they are willing to sustain a different policy mix that entails lower risk in some domains as well lower cash wages. As Brad DeLong and Stephen S. Cohen have argued, the administrative sophistication of the French state, or for that matter of the Danish state, means that certain publicly-owned enterprises work relatively well there (e.g., the French national railways, the French nuclear energy industry) in hard-to-replicate ways. We are at a different equilibrium in the United States, and moving from one equilibrium to another is more difficult that liberals suggest.

If we really did raise the federal tax burden to the OECD norm, the least of what we’d have to do to sustain present commitments, it would have a significant impact on the texture of American life, one that some would consider salutary and that many others would not.

All this is to say that clear-eyed conservatives, as Patrick argues below, are essentially the party of austerity. If we get a conservative president — and I mean a conservative dedicated to sustainable spending levels, not necessarily a Republican or a self-described conservative in the vein of Charlie Crist — I’m guessing that he’d have to be someone like Chris Christie: a person willing to serve one term in order to do the right thing. Basically, he’d have to be what Barack Obama claimed to be. And for any politician, that’s a tall order. On to Patrick:

Conceptually, the Big Society — a mix of civil society, personal behavior, voluntarism, and community — is a positive thing that the right can attach itself to. I’ve argued in the context of health care that conservatives have faced a social policy deficit and thus a compelling rallying cry for what to do about the problems in the health care system. One route would have been to become expert at and be perceived as owning all the positive things that were already happening outside of government — focusing on prevention, improving health outcomes, and e-health to reduce costs and bring instant peer review to faulty diagnoses. This is a Big Society approach — positive and upbeat, and without more government. Incidentally, it’s a development from the Big Society — improvements in sonography — that have changed public policy outcomes on abortion by reducing them dramatically. If you’re on the pro-life side of the ledger, this is about the biggest non-legislative, non-judicial victory you could hope for. All of this is more my take on what the Big Society could mean in America than Cameron’s. In this respect, I think a focus on positive things to talk about outside of taxes could be beneficial. Without taxes, the basic conservative messaging on size of government is austerity — except even our own folks on the Hill think this is unsustainable, judging by their earmark requests. Republicans should be proactively looking to the private/voluntary sector to highlight social policy success metrics that relieve the pressure to spend money when they need a quick political fix.

Read the whole thing. We need to shift the locus of expectations and find ways to empower little platoons to deliver better “public” services. That is exceedingly difficult, and it will take much longer than a single presidential term or the life of a single Parliament. The work we’re setting out to do — undoing the damage of a profligate era — will take decades. And it won’t be fun work either. Sorry guys.