The Republicans' main recommendation for reducing deficits is to ban earmarks. However, they did talk a good game about cutting government spending, making government smaller, etc., when they had control of the White House and Congress. This has earned them the reputation as being the party of small government. Or was that just Ron Paul? Anyway, the Department of Homeland Security wasn't created on their watch.
Tea Partysans use this apparent hypocrisy of the establishment Republicans as a rallying cry and allegedly this is a sign that they are not simply the shock troops of the Republican Party (although they welcome establishment Republicans to their rallies and national conventions and pay at least one of them – the prodigal, former Rogue-Governor – handsomely). They would happily rid the nation of the FDA, FBI, CIA, Social Security Administration, Medicare (although it seems most of the Tea Partysans are receiving it), Homeland Security, FCC (because they don't care whether porn films are shown at 7pm on all networks), etc. Back to 1790, when a muzzleloader and the Bible were all the government one needed.
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I think coherence (such as it is) will come in the form of votes for Republican Party candidates. Now these Republican candidates, running as "rogues", will appeal to already existing incoherent Tea Partysan "ideals". Once in office, these rogue Republicans will make symbolic gestures towards this new base fraction, such as speeches about succession, the introduction of Constitutional amendments that have no chance of passage (for example, one that would abolish the IRS or abolish the 17th amendment) and the like; the same sort of thing Reagan did to appease his social conservative base (i.e., support a pro-life amendment in words, but not in deeds). But they'll vote with the establishment Republican bloc, will attach earmarks for their districts and states. Business as usual, American democracy in action.
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The following passage in Steinfels's old book on The Neoconservatives seems apt as a description of the present state of contemporary American conservatism (as it is manifested by the Republican Party and its Tea Partysan allies).
In our time the classic statement of the benefits to be secured in taking one's political adversaries seriously -- and in having political adversaries worthy of being taken seriously in the first place -- is found in Lionel Trilling's preface to The Liberal Imagination. Trilling begins with the observation that has since become the commonplace we already noted: 'In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition.' Such a situation poses two dangers. First, the absence of conservative or reactionary ideas 'does not mean, of course, that there is no impulse to conservatism or to reaction.' It simply means that such impulses do not 'express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.' They may do worse, for 'it is just when a movement despairs of having ideas that it turns to force.'
Trilling’s vision of the character of opposition to the dominant liberal tradition captures almost exactly the current reaction to the liberal political order of the moment: "irritable mental gestures” which only vaguely resemble ideas sums up the Tea Party movement. However, one should notice an additional element in the current reaction against the liberal tradition (or, rather, the reaction within the liberal tradition). The motive force behind these gestures is religious, not in the sense of organized religion or any particular body of faith, but rather in the structural sense of actions motivated by the force of a collective idea that is not susceptible to the test of (its) reality. Today's conservative and/or Republican political vision is fundamentally chiliastic. And even if the predicted doomsday never arrives, the fundamental faith in fear is not shaken. The Tea Party charivari blithely staggers on.
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