Conservatives can complain for only so long that the Republican Party sold them out before people begin to suspect they’re not really serious about promoting limited government and individual liberty.

Not long ago, American Conservative Union Chairman David Keene criticized the GOP in an Examiner op-ed, writing that “conservative politicians have tried to retain the rhetoric of small government while governing in a way barely distinguishable from their Democratic opponents.” However, he wondered if this is the result of conservatives’ abandonment of the core principles on which their movement was founded.

Perhaps more surprisingly, even conservative icon Rush Limbaugh confessed (for good reason) on his radio show that none of the top Republican presidential candidates — Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney and John McCain — “revs him up,” but he nevertheless failed to mention anyone who would.

The problem here is not with political parties, per se, but with people who actually believe politicians will put the voters’ interests before their own. For all their supposed differences, the Democratic and Republican parties have one very significant and overriding commonality: They are full of career politicians who love to spend the taxpayers’ money on entitlement programs and special interests in order to get re-elected.

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By and large, Democrats use tax dollars to subsidize individuals, and Republicans use tax dollars to subsidize corporations, but it’s all welfare. Both parties also exhibit little resistance to spending billions on social engineering programs, whether to fund education, fight the “drug war,” combat smoking or enforce drunken driving laws. Perhaps worst of all, Democrats and Republicans alike believe Congress is justified in using federal tax revenues to bankroll pork-barrel projects and state-level initiatives.

This is never going to change until advocates of limited government convince their alleged spokesmen to start putting our money where their collective mouth is.

Which is why if conservatives truly are interested in promoting liberty and smaller government, they will dump the current GOP. That doesn’t mean they can’t vote for Republicans, or for any candidate for that matter who actually espouses principles of economic and individual liberty. But as the federal government has grown and the GOP has moved to the left, conservatives have been increasingly revealed as tolerant and even supportive of big government.

If conservatives want their gripes to be taken seriously, they must be willing to endorse a candidate for president who lives by those libertarian principles they now claim are missing in their leaders. It’s as simple as that. But they’ll not find them among the “typical politicians” of the “McRomliani” stripe.

The good news is that these reform candidates are out there. The Jeff Flakes, Ron Pauls, Tom Coburns and Mark Sanfords may not have the name recognition and panache that are so often favored by our party elites and pundits, but that’s hardly relevant due to one plain fact: No political party can do anything it isn’t empowered to do. Put another way, if conservatives were serious about reform, the GOP would have to provide it.

By backing mainstream Republican presidential contenders, however, conservatives are demonstrating that they want the luxury of grumbling about their party even as they do virtually nothing to fix it. Indeed, it’s quite evident that conservatives today are defined by the GOP, not the other way around.

If conservatives refuse to champion a small-government candidate for 2008, that’s their prerogative. I just wish they’d finally admit they no longer stand for limited government and individual liberty.

Trevor Bothwell maintains the Web log, Who’s Your Nanny?