Here is a New Yorker essay about the “implosion” of the Republican Party. These two paragraphs get to the heart of the matter:

Jeff Flake, a four-term congressman from Arizona, is one of the Republicans who have turned on the Administration. He is a Mormon, with five children, and his cheerful personality seems to have somewhat protected him from retribution from a Party leadership that doesn’t like what he’s saying. “The Republican Party has always had three tenets—economic freedom, limited government, and individual responsibility,” he told me not long ago. “If you look at any of those three issues lately, you’d be hard-pressed to say that the Republican Party really stands for any of them. Look at the growth of government. And I’m not just talking about war spending and homeland security. You can put that aside, and we’ve still grown substantially. Look at that tracking-poll question that’s always asked: ‘Whom do you trust more to manage the public’s finances, Republicans or Democrats?’ Republicans have always had a big edge there. And that has narrowed over the years, and now it’s reversed.”

Flake said that he and Representative Mike Pence, an Indiana conservative, often joke that they feel like Revolutionary War-era minutemen who arrived five minutes after the battle was finished. “You know, it took three runs for Mike to get to Congress. We both got here in 2000, we show up and report for duty, and we’re told, ‘All right, No Child Left Behind is the first mission.’ That’s the first thing we do. We arrived for the revolution, and we’re six years late. And then we thought, Maybe this is an aberration, wait until the next term, and then what is it? Prescription drugs. We were just too late.” Limited-government conservatives believe that No Child Left Behind is a federal intrusion into a matter best left to states, and that the prescription-drug bill represents the further expansion of entitlements.

Limited government. That’s the ticket.