A New Year’s Resolution For Conservatives : Revolutions tend to get carried away, to lose sight of their goals, to get big ideas.

It’s hard enough to keep my own New Year’s resolutions without proposing any for anybody else, but . . .

House Republicans, fresh from victory in November’s elections, have charted a new course for American government: smaller, less expensive and in some ways, less intrusive. There was nothing particularly new in the party’s “contract with America”--most of it had been proposed before and simply buried by the Democrats who ran Congress--but if even half of the contract becomes law, there will be a fundamental change in government.

That’s the good news. The bad news is, revolutions tend to get carried away. As new leaders come to the fore, they tend to forget what the revolution was about and substitute new and quite different goals for the ones that united them in the first place. It happened in the French Revolution. It happened in the civil-rights movement, which started as a quest for inclusion and equal opportunity but ended up with many of its leaders advocating quotas and separatism. It happened in the women’s movement, which turned with a fury on its founders when they denounced the political correctness and intolerance of more recent years. It can happen to Republicans, too.

Conservatism is a philosophy of diffused power, both at the state and national levels. Republican insistence on a presidential line-item veto and (during the Reagan and Bush years) presidential supremacy in foreign affairs are at opposite poles from the fundamental tenets of political conservatism.

Republicans should remember that centralized government is the domain of liberals, not conservatives.

Even more worrisome is the tendency of some Republicans to insist on more, not less, federal intrusion into our personal lives (who people sleep with or live with is not a matter for the government, nor is whether the terminally ill choose to end the agonies of dying.

As a minority, Republicans were often forced to concentrate on what they were against and to forget what they were for. When Democrats in Congress pushed legislation that went too far in expanding government, Republicans voted against programs they might have supported if the proposals had been more modest. Now, they will write the bills. As they do, they should remember that true conservatives are conservationists, not despoilers of nature; that conservatives believe in small business and entrepreneurial opportunity, not in protecting the excesses of multinational corporations; that conservatism is about protecting the individual from the armed force of the state, not about expanding police power; that conservatives believe in the dignity of the individual--male, female, old, young, gay, straight, black, white; that the Constitution is a restriction on the government, which has no authority other than that granted to it, and that Barry Goldwater is right when he tells liberals and conservatives alike to butt out of everything else.

If America is to be a home of civilized discourse, the ball is in the Democrats’ court. Unaccustomed to losing (they stacked the rules to make sure they didn’t), resentful of having their prescriptions challenged (they fixed the rules to take care of that problem, too), liberals have engaged in a two-month spectacle of denial and whining. And they have resorted to their stock in trade: a blend of disdain, vilification and hate-mongering.

Newt Gingrich was roundly denounced when he referred to the President and First Lady as “counterculture McGoverniks.” When asked if they remembered how another Speaker, Tip O’Neill, had denigrated another President, Ronald Reagan, liberals were stunned: They hadn’t noticed.

When the Democrats held their presidential nominating convention two years ago, a big-state Democratic governor who opposes abortion was denied the opportunity to address the convention. Annoyed that people who would be affected by legislation dare to question its wisdom and attempt to block it, the left rails against “special interests.”

Democrats, too, should consider a resolution for the new year. Put the arrogance and nastiness on the shelf. It is possible for men and women of decency and compassion to think you’re wrong about a few things. For the most part, Republicans endured their years in the minority with dignity. It’s time for Democrats to rediscover a little dignity themselves.