Of course, there are no conservatives who want Big Government to enact their agenda. In fact, the conservative agenda is to get rid of big government..
BULLSHIT.
The Intellectual Incoherence of Conservatism
Conservatives, Buckley wrote, were duty-bound to promote "the extensive and productive tax laws that are needed to support a vigorous anti-Communist foreign policy," as well as the "large armies and air forces, atomic energy, central intelligence, war production boards and the attendant centralization of power in Washington."
As for most of the leaders of the so-called Christian Right and the "moral majority," they simply desire the replacement of the current, left-liberal elite in charge of national education by another one, i.e., themselves. "From Burke on," Robert Nisbet has criticized this posture, "it has been a conservative precept and a sociological principle since Auguste Comte that the surest way of weakening the family, or any vital social group, is for the government to assume, and then monopolize, the family's historic functions."
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You fail to make an important distinction. Traditional conservatism as informed by Lockean sociopolitical theory eschews positive rights, powerful centralized government, military adventurism and foreign entanglements. It's socially conservative in terms of natural and social contract law, but only insofar as the sanctity of human life and the integrity of the biological family of nature are concerned, as these are the first principles of private property. In that same vein, it holds that the central duties of the government are to provide for domestic policing, national defense, border security, and basic, public infrastructure for communication and transportation, for example, as distinguished from libertarianism. Beyond that, for the most part, it aggressively asserts ideological and economic
laissez-faire.
Mainstream American conservatism of today is a different animal, infinitely superior to progressivism, to be sure, but hardly the stuff of traditional theory. Think Jeffersonian democracy, which emphasizes the values and principles of republicanism or think the core membership of the Tea Party, the social conservatives who lean toward libertarianism.
Generally, American orthodox Christians of today have no interest whatsoever in the government controlling education beyond coordinating its funding, whether it be under their thumb or lefty's. Quite the opposite is true. The most passionate proponents of school-choice are orthodox Christians. You've been duped.
In the meantime, as long as lefty insists on exerting initial, ideological force (or coercion) in the public schools as he resists educational freedom and strives to monopolize funding, Christians reserve the natural right to exert defensive, ideological counterforce in the same. Your characterization of their justifiable response is shortsighted and biased.
Indeed, the father of Anglo-American conservatism Edmund Burke did understand that "the surest way of weakening the family, or any vital social group, is for the government to assume, and then monopolize, the family's historic functions", including education. Orthodox Christians have understood this since Christ, while the Jews have understood this since Moses.
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An aside:
I've never been a fan of Nisbet, who's generally regarded to be a conservative sociological philosopher of sorts, as he criticized the construct of individualism on the grounds that it undermined the force of community resistance against the usurpative tendencies of the central government. Nisbet never really understood the dynamics of individualism within the community for the common defense of a free people . . . anymore than his decidedly collectivist mentor Durkheim did, whose mentor was the collectivist Comte, who influenced Karl Marx's thinking.
Nisbet failed to distinguish the difference between the radical individualism of the secular, Continental European tradition and the rugged individualism of the Anglo-American tradition. The former, in terms of governance, is inevitably collectivist and statist in nature, as it asserts the government-empowering abuse of positive rights against the prerogatives of free association and private property.
Unlike Nisbet, Burke knew the difference, as he more comprehensibly understood the fundamental realities of human nature and the real-world sociopolitical dynamics thereof within the framework of a representative republic of inalienable rights. Burke greatly admired Locke and his political theory.
