Why 'conservatism' is dead

This article, published as we mark the 50th anniversary of Eisenhower's warning about the 'military-industrial complex,' does a good job highlighting why there isn't much of a true small-government faction left in our political spectrum these days:

How much of the Department of Education has to do with actual education? How much of the Department of Agriculture has to do with actual agriculture? How much of the Department of Health and Human Services has to do with either actual health or human services? Most conservatives would agree that despite any arguable good they might do, these and other federal agencies epitomize the sort of inefficient, self-serving and special interest-laden mass bureaucracies characteristic of big government. Most conservatives are highly suspicious of such departments’ functions and even necessity, mocking liberals who reflexively defend them as fools whose blind faith in government knows no bounds.

But when it comes to the Department of Defense it is conservatives who are often the most foolish, exhibiting something worse than a mere blind faith in government: The Pentagon has become their church...

So-called “defense” spending is the big government conservatives tend to love, and the degree to which they refuse to ask questions about foreign policy or wholly trust Washington leaders with such policy, is indicative of conservatives’ comfort with this particular brand of statism.

In the same way that so many on the Left consider the post-New Deal state an integral part of liberal identity, many on the Right have come to consider support for the military-industrial complex inherently conservative, often conflating the plight of “the troops” with the agenda of a military bureaucracy that regularly abuses our soldiers.

One only needs a Pentagon structure to project power worldwide (again, I note: no other nation has divided the ENTIRE WORLD into geographic combatant commands). That is not "defense." It's empire. We simply choose not to speak that name. Meanwhile, our southern border remains troubled and nearly devoid of troops, compared to the far-flung outposts we've established on our various fools' errands.

This, on the other hand, is a proper example of defense...