Jon Chait and Jacob Weisberg have a nice pair of articles on the hollowness of the so-called conservatism practiced under President Bush and the current Republican leadership in Congress.

Here’s Chait:

The failure of intellectuals on the right to adequately define big-government conservatism reflects their failure to grasp the ways that DeLay and Abramoff became central to the conservative movement in Washington. To define big-government conservatism as a form of pragmatism or as the promotion of virtue is to miss its fundamentally corrupt nature. In truth, the most accurate definition — that is, the definition that explains the broadest scope of Bush’s big-government initiatives — is far less edifying: Big government conservatism consists of initiatives that benefit economic elites without using free-market mechanisms.

…Bush’s big-government conservatism represents the coming to fruition of a Republican strategy ten years in the making. When the GOP took control of Congress after the 1994 elections, it undertook an ironclad alliance with the business lobbyists of K Street. The most famous aspect of this alliance was the K Street Strategy, the successful Republican campaign to force business donors to abandon their traditional bipartisanship and instead hire from and donate to the Republican Party exclusively.

The less well-known, but far more important, aspect of the GOP-K Street alliance revolved around policy. By steering government largesse toward their own donors, Republicans could create a self-perpetuating money machine. Industries whose profitability relies on government largesse — and especially those that depend on favors that only Republicans support — will naturally invest some of those profits back into the political party that provides them.

And here’s Weisberg:

In this, the third year that Republicans have controlled everything, a variation on the old interest-group liberalism has emerged as the new governing philosophy. One might have expected that once in command, conservative politicians would work to further reduce Washington’s power and bury the model of special-interest-driven government expansion for good. But one would have been wrong. Instead, Republicans have gleefully taken possession of the old liberal spoils system and converted it to their own purposes. The result is the curious governing philosophy of interest-group conservatism: the expansion and exploitation of government by people who profess to dislike it.

…Today the dominant conservative interests form a rival constellation: corporations, especially in the energy and military contracting sectors, evangelical Christians, wealthy investors, gun owners, and the conservative media. In the daily business of Washington, the old pattern remains in place, only with the substitution of these new supplicants and their new benefactors in the GOP. As in the old days, lobbyists work the halls of Congress and the regulatory agencies, functioning like carpenter ants to build a federal government ever bigger in size and more intrusive in scope.

Indeed. And as Weisberg points out, gerrymandering will make it nearly impossible to dislodge Republican control of Congress until at least 2012, which means that the decadence will continue for some time to come.