The Republican Civil War: Pick a Side
There is a civil war going on in the Republican Party. There are many ways to define the two sides (the establishment v. the anti-establishment, managerialists v. minarchists, communitarians v. individualists, big government types vs. small government types), but they ultimately break down into two: statists and libertarians.
Statists include people like Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum (sorry, but he is) and many others.
Libertarian types include people like Ron Paul and Rand Paul, as well as newcomers like Mike Lee and Justin Amash. (Four months ago I would’ve included Gary Johnson, but he’s been driven out of the Republican Party)
The statist types accept government as the means to fix ills in society. They may disagree about the details of tinkering with specific programs, but, in the end, they support the welfare-warfare state. Big government doing big things. And while they may mouth support of free markets, personal liberty, personal responsibility, fidelity to the Constitution and limited government, their positions on big government solving problems makes them the same as Barack Obama (who often uses rhetoric supporting those same principles). The libertarians, by contrast, actually believe all that stuff. They take it seriously.
These two positions exist on a continuum, but Rick Santorum and Ron Paul exist opposed. One need only read Rick Santorum’s comments about libertarians to understand that they are incompatible.
I am slow to realize things, so it was only this week that it struck me that this conflict (which flared up so visibly two years ago) is still alive and well. I knew it when I saw that Orrin Hatch, of all people, is facing a primary challenge. Now, I have no problem with Orrin Hatch per se, but he has a problem with libertarians and felt the need to lash out against them.
People fear self-identifying as libertarian; they think it synonymous with hedonism. Indeed, it is not. It's about leaving people alone, free of government molestation (with all its consequences), to pursue their own happiness (If your definition of the pursuit of happiness is the pursuit of hedonism, I would advise you to reexamine your life).
One can be a social conservative and be a libertarian. They are not incompatible. It just means you take free markets, personal liberty, personal responsibility, fidelity to the Constitution and limited government seriously.
Libertarianism has to do with state action. If you think it’s probably a bad idea for people to smoke pot every day, but don’t think there should be a law against everything that’s a bad idea, you're thinking along libertarian lines.
Mitt Romney is clearly in the big government camp (sorry, but he is), and in that way he is no different from President Obama. He may disagree on the margins, he may tinker with the specifics, he may manage the massive government apparatus better, but his is the same overall view: governments solve problems.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war and every one needs to realize that and take a side.
Some of you who believe in limited government may think that Mitt Romney is the answer, because Barack Obama must be stopped.
I reject this. I see no virtue in replacing one statist with a slightly different one.
You say "Yes, but we have no choice. You go to war with the Romney you have."
Bunk. This is a sales pitch, used every four years by statists of both sides, and its widespread acceptance is a sign of its effectiveness, not its truth.
The first presidential election I was aware enough to pay attention to was in 1992. That year we saw a third party candidate step in and become a major contender (And don't fool yourself -- Ross Perot was seriously in the running until he sabotaged himself.) He reached a high enough level in the polls that he was allowed into the presidential debates. He was a serious candidate.
This year there is no eccentric billionaire, but we do have Gary Johnson poised to capture the Libertarian Party nomination. He is not a nobody, some random crank or a lowly congressman. He was the successful two-term governor of New Mexico.
He tried to run as a Republican, but he was excluded from debates based on polls where his name did not appear. So he jumped ship and is now running as a Libertarian.
Your response may be, "I'd consider voting for him, but he cannot win." But if everyone who said that voted for him...
We have a choice in this election: statism or freedom. Pick a side.
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Comments:
Nov '11
Re: The Republican Civil War: Pick a Side
John Murdoch
And why would it matter?
It matters because this is a pattern we see over and over. The government creates a problem, and then it uses solving that problem as a justification for it's own expansion.
Jul '11
Re: The Republican Civil War: Pick a Side
Romney= house robber.
Obama= BTK, serial torturer and murderer.
By your logic all statists are the same, by mine one candidate allows us to live and fight (yes against his mentality) and another is Woodrow Wilson on steroids without a drop of love for America.
Apr '11
Re: The Republican Civil War: Pick a Side
I really don't get the libertarian mentality. I am very sympathetic to it, I am also very sympathetic to the strong social conservative mentality, but for as long as either side has me convinced that there's is the way to go it all falls apart when I wonder how any of it can be made to happen or if it is made to happen if it will succeed.
Everyone has some Utopian vision of the world where if everything they wanted to happen happened somehow all the problems would just solve themselves. That what causes our problems is our lack of adherence to their strict ideals. In other words our problems are caused by our sinfulness, our own inability to hit the mark, stay the course, do whats right, etc...
Yah! Ok. You're right Fred. So are the liberals, and the social cons. If all of us were something that we were not we could actually have one of the many Utopias we dream of. Where we are pious and caring, selfless and giving, industrious and creative. Well no one can be all those things. We can't have libertarian land any more than a workers paradise.
Aug '11
Re: The Republican Civil War: Pick a Side
Conservatism is not libertarianism. Conservatism, of the kind most of us espouse, is far more pragmatic and concerned with what our society should do. We place value on collective virtue, believing that this is best for all. This does place constraints on people, but makes for an ordered and polite society. The Libertarian streak in the tea party allows for interesting intellectual debate. Liberty is always an end, but not exclusively. The battle within the party is not with Libertarians, but about how to go about reversing a century of progressivism. We know that it must go, the numbers tell us this. Romney is a pragmatist, conservative surely, but not necessarily a conservative.
In the end, all three branches of government have to move right. It's a big ship and hard to steer, but in the end we need leaders who can get us there. Libertarians can certainly help steer, but in the end if we want a Conservative governance, we need conservatives at the helm.
Feb '12
Re: The Republican Civil War: Pick a Side
It's not a war. It's a massacre. Your guys can't win a single Republican primary. They will not win a single seat.
I will vote for the most conservative candidate who can win. The libertarian gloss is interesting enough, but it's not conservative, and it's not a plausible alternative anyway.
The most conservative candidate who can win is Mitt Romney.
Jul '11
Re: The Republican Civil War: Pick a Side
Valiuth:
Everyone has some Utopian vision of the world where if everything they wanted to happen happened somehow all the problems would just solve themselves. That what causes our problems is our lack of adherence to their strict ideals. In other words our problems are caused by our sinfulness, our own inability to hit the mark, stay the course, do whats right, etc...
Yah! Ok. You're right Fred. So are the liberals, and the social cons. If all of us were something that we were not we could actually have one of the many Utopias we dream of. Where we are pious and caring, selfless and giving, industrious and creative. Well no one can be all those things. We can't have libertarian land any more than a workers paradise. · 5 minutes ago
So the society filled with me, my drinking and fishing buddies, and the Swedish bikini team isn't going to happen?
Jan '12
Re: The Republican Civil War: Pick a Side
I'll only observe that the United States was founded as a Constitutional republic, not as a market or even quite as a 19th-century liberal's night-watchman state. The enumerated powers of the federal government are few but positively defined. Among these are a provision for a national defense and the power to levy certain taxes or imposts in order to sustain it, to provide standard weights and measures, and to regulate commerce among the several states. Although the last power has been horribly distorted, it has a basis in the the necessity to prevent one state from engaging in trade wars against another or allowing its citizens to export shoddy or harmful merchandise across its borders.
None of these enumerated powers coincides with the full acceptation of a libertarian society, so no Republican can be reasonably expected fully to embrace one. A state cannot operate on the principle of voluntary exchange; it must reserve the power of organizing force for the common defense and the apprehension and punishment of criminals according to objective law. The cost of certain other benefits, such as public health, cannot be apportioned. There is no room for free-riders here.
Edited on April 19, 2012 at 8:18pmApr '11
Re: The Republican Civil War: Pick a Side
We can't make people better, by helping them we can't make them better by leaving them alone. If we pray harder we don't become holier and if we give up all prayer we don't become less evil.
Nothing is going to be perfect, we don't have government and laws to make ourselves better. We do it to give us order, because really reliable consistency is the best thing we can hope for in the end. Because the worst thing that can happen to us is for the mess we are in now to fall apart.
You can't start from scratch in this Fred. You can't hope sweep the board clean of pieces and reset. We have the government we have, and our goal isn't to make anew one, but to fix the one we have without destroying it.
That is what the great presidents have done and they have done it in the best ways they knew how. Their solutions will breed more problems or leave vital problems unsolved. That is just the way it is. Stability is success, and ideals are unstable.
Edited on April 19, 2012 at 7:52pmSep '10
Re: The Republican Civil War: Pick a Side
I don't really trust Romney to do much on behalf of conservatives/libertarians if he is elected. If you look back at past Ricochet debates I've been one of the most skeptical members.
But the notion that voting for Romney is "replacing one statist with a slightly different one" is a very low-bandwidth picture. If one uses a 4x4 pixel grid for every portrait, then yes, every face looks roughly the same; but this doesn't mean they are. There are many meaningful distinctions between the Democrats and the GOP that this notion fails to measure, such as the way Obama and the Democrats have decided that annual deficits greater than 10^12 dollars are the new normal--an order of magnitude higher than anything under Bush.
Because of this, I'm going to vote for the most conservative candidate who has a realistic chance of defeating Obama. If that's Romney, so be it.
Nov '11
Re: The Republican Civil War: Pick a Side
Valiuth:
You can't start from scratch in this Fred. You can't hope sweep the board clean of pieces and rest. We have the government we have, and our goal isn't to make anew one, but to fix the one we have without destroying it.
Fine. But Mitt Romney is not the solution. He's a managerial progress. As president he'd float along and give us more government. He is not the solution to our problems.
Mar '11
Re: The Republican Civil War: Pick a Side
Libertarianism is the perfect solution for an imaginary world.
Mar '11
Re: The Republican Civil War: Pick a Side
DocJay
So the society filled with me, my drinking and fishing buddies, and the Swedish bikini team isn't going to happen? · 19 minutes ago
Not if your wife votes.
Apr '11
Re: The Republican Civil War: Pick a Side
This "everyone to the left of this line is utterly statist and everyone to the right is utterly libertarian" absolutist thinking is nuts.
Aside from healthcare, the Romney and Johnson achievements are pretty similar. School choice (note that Johnson didn't follow the libertarian doctrine that there should be no state education), budget "cuts", vetoes (both issued between 700 and 800 vetoes), and the creation of a surplus.
I put the "cuts" in quote marks because unlike Romney, who actually cut spending, Governor Johnson increased the size of government by the best objective metric. He took over from FY1994, which saw a $9.41b outlay in 2003 dollars. He left with the FY2003 budget spending $13.4b.
Cutting the rhetoric, and the symbolic moves like the failed efforts to legalize pot, Romney was more successfully libertarian than Governor Johnson, who increased the size of government.
Romney cut government. Johnson greatly increased government.
Granted, Governor Johnson was far more ambitious in the stuff that he said he wanted but was never going to get. If your definition of libertarian is "daydreamer", then by all means toke up and mark your ballot. Otherwise, vote the best available libertarian, vote Romney.
Apr '11
Re: The Republican Civil War: Pick a Side
We need to take a sober look at our options and ask one question: "What is the best possible alternative to the re-election of Obama?" It is Romney. For all his flaws, it is Romney.
To say that all Romney will do is to slow down the socialist drift in the country is to badly miss the point. Once we have slowed the socialist drift we can begin to focus on reversing it, which is a tall order. But we must first slow before we can reverse.
I cannot agree with those who want to take their balls, go home, and vote for Gary Johnson this November. A small improvement over Obama is nevertheless an improvement. Man up, folks. Vote smart. That means stop banging your high chairs and vote for Romney.
Mar '12
Re: The Republican Civil War: Pick a Side
I think libertarians flatter themselves to call their attempts at influence within the GOP a "civil war". One might call it an insurgency, but it's a weak one at best. Libertarians don't know how to persuade, organize, or win elections. If they did there would be more than a handful of libertarians holding office. There is not civil war going on. There are a tiny minority of idealists who don't understand human nature who like to spout chicken little-esque rants of gloom and doom, while spewing bromides about freedom. They're generally a whiny bunch of dogmatists who like to stamp their feet every couple years at election time and whose greatest political accomplishment is getting democrats elected in places where a republican should win, by running third party candidates who siphon off just enough republican votes to doom the voters to a few more years of liberalism.
Edited on April 19, 2012 at 8:37pmJun '10
Re: The Republican Civil War: Pick a Side
Doug Kimball: . . . Conservatism, of the kind most of us espouse, is far more pragmatic and concerned with what our society should do. We place value on collective virtue, believing that this is best for all. This does place constraints on people, but makes for an ordered and polite society. The Libertarian streak in the tea party allows for interesting intellectual debate. Liberty is always an end, but not exclusively. The battle within the party is not with Libertarians, but about how to go about reversing a century of progressivism. We know that it must go, the numbers tell us this. Romney is a pragmatist, conservative surely, but not necessarily a conservative.
In the end, all three branches of government have to move right. It's a big ship and hard to steer, but in the end we need leaders who can get us there. Libertarians can certainly help steer, but in the end if we want a Conservative governance, we need conservatives at the helm.
Amen. Romney does not equal Obama. Obama: raise taxes; Romney: lower them. Obama: implement Obamacare; Romney: repeal it. Vote for Johnson if you must, but Romney and Obama are not the same breed of cat.
Oct '10
Re: The Republican Civil War: Pick a Side
Fred, this isn't worthy of you. You sound like a sophomore on Christmas break straightening out his backward parents with truths they just don't get. This is a liberal-like tantrum.
"It's Statist vs. Libertarians."
"Johnson could win. Could too, and when he doesn't, he'll take lots of votes from Obama."
Enough with this self-righteous grandstanding. The Tea Party is a new phenomena, give it a chance to exert some influence. We're trying to educate the public about small government and suddenly you decide it's the moment to demand purity from the candidates? The advice from Limestone Cowboy to start on the local level is absolutely sound.
Like a lot of conservatives, I have strong libertarian leanings. If I thought the Libertarian platform (or Gary Johnson as a politician) had any chance with the public, I'd vote Libertarian this go-round. But they simply don't, not yet. If you do, I suggest you're either naive or just trying make a point. I look forward to the day when the two dominate parties are Republican and Libertarian, but we're not there yet. Don't make the road longer.
Jun '10
Re: The Republican Civil War: Pick a Side
An imaginary "utopian" world. Something always goes wrong on the way to utopia.
Apr '11
Re: The Republican Civil War: Pick a Side
dogsbody: I dont really trust Romney to do much on behalf of libertarians if he is elected. If you look back at past Ricochet debates I've been one of the most skeptical members.
But the notion that voting for Romney is "replacing one statist with a slightly different one" is a very low-bandwidth picture. If one uses a 4x4 pixel grid for every portrait, then yes, every face looks roughly the same; but this doesn't mean they are. There are many meaningful distinctions between the Democrats and the GOP that this notion fails to measure, such as the way Obama and the Democrats have decided that annual deficits greater than 10^12 dollars are the new normal--an order of magnitude higher than anything under Bush.
On a 4x4 pixel grid, everyone looks the same, including Governor Johnson. Suggesting that there's some big difference because you want there to be is like those people who say that all Republican Presidents have refrained from massive attacks on government benefits except Reagan. The data doesn't fit the model. You zoom in, and Governor Johnson looks worse in every way except the "libertarian" label on his lapel pin.
Sep '11
Re: The Republican Civil War: Pick a Side
Fred Cole
John Murdoch
And why would it matter?
It matters because this is a pattern we see over and over. The government creates a problem, and then it uses solving that problem as a justification for it's own expansion. · 38 minutes ago
Fred,
I think you're ducking the question. Is federal government support for foster children--specifically, foster children of wards of the D.C. prisons, who are thus a federal responsibility--constitutional?
And if not, what then?
And--how about whether mandating that Massachusetts change the color of the left-hand line on a divided highway (from white to yellow) represents an unconstitutional arrogating of power. Yes? No?
It's wonderful to talk high-minded policy. The practical fact of the matter is that you have to govern, and governing involves dealing with issues like poor, black, mentally-disabled children of violent felons who have been left--literally--on the courthouse steps. And whether it makes sense to enact a uniform set of traffic standards across the country, so drivers from New York don't end up driving the wrong way on a divided highway in Massachusetts.
Are these constitutional, or not?