Engaging the Welfare State

Ross Douthat highlights this essay from William Voegeli and makes a perceptive point about center-right engagment with the FDR-LBJ consensus:

In other words, a conservative welfare state would eliminate our current network of universal entitlement programs, and replace them with cheaper, means-tested programs that, well, spread the wealth – that spend your tax dollars to provide temporary assistance to the unemployed, underwrite health care costs for the aged and very poor, set an income floor underneath American seniors, and so forth, rather than taking money from the middle class with one hand and giving it back to them with the other. Whereas if conservatives back themselves into a corner where they’re denouncing any kind of redistributionism as pure socialism, they’re undercutting their ability to push for this vision of a more means-tested welfare state – because that push, if it ever has any chance of succeeding politically, will have to rely on explicitly redistributionist arguments to succeed.