E.J. Dionne tries to guilt-trip conservatives for their fealty to absolutes

Spoken like a true Beltway pointy-head.  The WaPo columnist starts from the particular, discussing Scott Walker's mover from suggestions that he was cool with illegal-alien amnesty to a more the-law-is-the-law position, and moves to a conclusion about the Pub electorate:

The shortage of philosophical adventure and the eagerness of GOP hopefuls to alter their positions to make them more conservative have the same cause: a Republican primary electorate that has moved so far right that it brooks no deviation. What makes it even harder for the candidates to break new ground is that the imperatives of orthodoxy are constraining even the thinkers who are trying to create a “reform conservatism.”

Ah, yes.  "Philosophical adventure."  That's just what a world descending into relativism-caused chaos needs.

And it should come as no surprise that he has a fondness for "reform conservatism."

Where, for example, is the candidate willing to acknowledge that, like it or not, there’s no way that anywhere close to all Americans will be able to get health insurance unless government plays a very large role? Where is the Republican who will admit that if the party had its way on further tax cuts, many programs Americans like would fall by the wayside?
The reform conservatives were supposed to remedy this shortcoming, and they have issued some detailed proposals. But their efforts remain largely reactive. Last week, Yuval Levin, the intellectual leader of the movement, joined a symposium in Reason, the sprightly libertarian magazine, to reassure others on the right that reform conservatives are — honest and true! — no less committed than they are to “limited government,” to rolling back “the liberal welfare state ” and to reducing government’s “size and scope.”
It’s not surprising that Levin’s fervently anti-statist Reason interlocutors were not fully persuaded. What’s disappointing to those outside conservatism’s ranks is that the reformicons are so often defensive. 

With occasional exceptions, they have been far more interested in proving their faithfulness to today’s hard-line right than in declaring, as conservatives  in so many other democracies have been willing to do, that sprawling market economies need a rather large dose of government. Conservatives, Levin says, are “eager to build on the longstanding institutions of our society to improve things.” Good idea. But somehow, the successes of decades-old governmental institutions in areas such as retirement security, health-care provision and environmental protection are rarely acknowledged.

Some successes.  "Retirement security," gummint style, is going to go broke in about a decade, and has a rate of return that would get any investment advisor canned by his clients.  "Health-care provision" is likewise awash in unfunded liabilities, the sheer interest on which is going to consume all the tax revenue the government takes in very shortly.  And "environmental protection" has proven to amount to the rankest kind of tyranny, as per the posts here on the EPA.

Robert Tracinski at The Federalist  has the number of this "reform conservatism" that E.J. would have us think he admires:

The key premise of this non-reforming “reform conservatism” is the idea that it’s impossible to really touch the welfare state. We might be able to alter its incentives and improve its clanking machinery, but only if we loudly assure everyone that we love it and want to keep it forever.

And there’s the problem. Not only is this defeatist at its core, abandoning the cause of small government at the outset, but it fails to address the most important problem facing the country.

“Reform conservatism” is an answer to the question: how can we promote the goal of freedom and small government—without posing any outright challenge to the welfare state? The answer: you can’t. All you can do is tinker around the edges of Leviathan. And ultimately, it won’t make much difference, because it will all be overwelmed in the coming disaster.

We're not taking the bait, Mr. Dionne.  If there were three of us left in post-America who did not think government should mitigate such conditions of human life as sickness and old age, the principle that it shouldn't would be no less immutable.