The fact that Ron Paul won the straw poll at the 2010 CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) has raised the issue of whether or not libertarians will be welcomed in the post-Obama GOP. Although Paul is unlikely to become the Republican nominee for President in 2012, he’s one of the few members of the GOP to inspire much enthusiasm amongst America’s young voters, and without young voters, the GOP will truly become the Grand Old(timer’s) Party. Paul’s victory at CPAC elicited boos from those who disagree with his policy stances, particularly in the area of foreign policy, as well as his stance on Homeland Security and the Patriot Act, and talk show host Rush Limbaugh complained that because of Paul’s victory, CPAC wasn’t conservative anymore.

Frank Gaffney, in a blog entitled “GOP’s Job #1?” (March 9, 2010 ) has argued that “national security must be Job #1” for the GOP, and he bemoans the fact that several recent conservative documents (e.g., the Conservative Action Project’s Mount Vernon Statement and the Tea Party-inspired Contract from America) have relegated it to the back burner of priorities. Regarding the former, Gaffney wrote: ‘the official agenda was largely bereft of any discussion of the threats to our nation, constitution and society arising from today’s totalitarian ideology – what authoritative Islam calls “Shariah.”’ While I certainly agree with Gaffney that the threat of militant Islamism is perhaps the greatest international threat to America (and to Western Civilization), Gaffney is perhaps ignoring the public’s 15 minute attention span, and the fact that fiscal concerns have become predominant for a very good reason: America is in the midst of the greatest financial collapse since the Great Depression and millions of Americans are still currently jobless.

Gaffney then goes on to blame this recent conservative neglect of national security concerns on libertarian incursions into the GOP, particularly in the person of one Grover Norquist. I don’t know much about Mr. Norquist, being more of a philosopher-historian by discipline, than a political operative. Apparently, in Gaffney’s opinion, Norquist is an anti-tax activist, who has become “increasingly associated with policies and initiatives that are strikingly at odds with the national security convictions and practices” of conservatives. I certainly don’t agree with many of the positions Gaffney has ascribed to Norquist: For example, open borders, ‘efforts to promote in the name of GOP “inclusion” individuals and organizations associated with the Muslim Brotherhood,’ or alliances “with such prominent Leftists as Katrina vanden Heuvel, publisher of the Nation magazine.” On the other hand, I do believe that one can be critical of the War on Terror, as in the case of conservatives like Diana West, while at the same time opposing the threat of Islamic jihad and the imposition of Sharia sensibilities in the West. Many of the greatest advocates of the War on Terror, such as George W. Bush himself, have been remiss in anticipating the real threat of Sharia at home, in America and in Europe. And I would further add that the only reason that Sharia can pose such a threat in the West is due to the fact that the fifth column of Left wing Political Correctness has made the West vulnerable, to a suicidal degree, to that very threat.

In the far right publication (Pat Buchanan was one of the founders), The American Conservative, an article entitled Libertarianism Is Real Conservatism (author unknown) appeared on March 9^th, 2010, arguing that at its inception in 1945 the modern conservative movement began with a libertarian revolt against the post-War/New Deal consensus. This is well-documented in perhaps the most authoritative history of the movement, George Nash’s The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America. Heritage Foundation (a conservative think tank with strong Neocon influences) President Edwin J. Feulner, Jr. has said, “Nash’s work is one of the very few books that must be read for a full understanding of the conservative movement in America.” Yet Austrian economists F.A. Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, both political libertarians, had a profound impact on the early movement, including even upon traditional conservatives such as Russell Kirk and William F. Buckley. (Although Kirk extolled the virtues of Austrian economics, he eventually sparred with libertarians such as Frank S. Meyer and Murray Rothbard.) Following Nash, the article maintained: ‘Few actually used the word “conservatism” in 1945, a term that began to gain popularity when Russell Kirk’s book “The Conservative Mind” was published in 1953 and with the founding of William F. Buckley’s National Review in 1955.’ The article also cites the influence of libertarian Albert Jay Nock, and this writer would add that the influence of classical liberals such as Garet Garrett and John T. Flynn who opposed the New Deal, as well as proto-libertarian New Deal opponents such as H.L. Mencken and Frank Chodorov, were also prevalent amongst the Old Right precursors of the conservative movement. None other than conservative icon Ronald Reagan is reported to have said, “I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism.”

So why the rejection of libertarianism by spokesmen for the contemporary conservative movement? As the article observed:

Dismissing libertarianism as not real conservatism is like dismissing filet mignon as not real steak. . . . . Indeed, advocating for “limited government” without employing some degree of libertarianism would be logistically impossible.

It certainly seems to be a factor in the Republican and some conservative criticism of libertarianism that many Big Government Republicans are not really committed to the conservative and libertarian principles of liberty and limited government. They have no intention of rolling back any New Deal or Great Society programs, and the big spending Republican Congresses of the Bush years give adequate support for that contention.

On the other hand, the American Conservative article posits that the reason for the Republican and conservative rejection of libertarianism (and one could add, traditional or Paleo-Conservatism), is the ascendency of the Neo-Conservatives, defined as “ex-Socialists who migrated Right as a reaction to the 1960’s counterculture, and who today are devoted to promoting the maintenance and expansion of America’s global empire.” To quote Nash, Neo-conservatives ascribe to a “neo-Wilsonian ideology of global democratic capitalism.” The above article continued:

[N]eoconservatives consider perpetual war a positive good precisely because they believe it is America’s mission to export democracy around the world. . . .

Questioning the cost or wisdom of waging perpetual war is considered unconscionable or even “unpatriotic” to neoconservatives, which is why they are so dismissive of libertarians who insist on questioning foreign policy.

I find myself somewhere in the middle of this squabble on the right. For one thing, it should not be the role of America’s foreign policy to export democracy around the world: Democracy doesn’t work unless it comes from the will of the people themselves; it cannot be imposed from without, and America cannot afford to continue being the policeman of the world. One of the factors in the collapse of both the British and Roman empires was the fact that they became overextended militarily. On the other hand, it seems to this writer that many libertarians have minimized the threat posed by militant Islamism to the West and to Western institutions, and concomitantly they seem to minimize the threat posed by the Palestinians and Arabs to Israeli sovereignty and survival. I do envision it to be an important aspect of America’s foreign policy role to be that of defender of Western Civilization and liberties, and Israel is definitely an ally and member of the West. However, that stated, isn’t it about time that the Europeans began paying for their own defense, and stopped riding on America’s coat tails, all the while criticizing her whenever convenient? That said, there is much room for debate and disagreement as to when it is appropriate for the United States to become involved in international disagreements or to intervene militarily, in its defense of the West. Washington was correct to warn his successors of “entangling alliances,” and as Steven Hayward, author of The Age of Reagan has observed, Reagan was very circumspect about involving the United States in military engagements abroad. For the Republican Party to ascend from its status as a minority party to the majority, it would behoove them to subordinate these disagreements to the greater good of uniting conservatives and libertarians with the goal of defeating and rolling back the socialistic policies and programs of the Obama administration and Democratic Congress. To my way of thinking, this is the GOP’s Job #1.

The grassroots Tea Party movement has largely arisen as a response and reaction to the polices of excessive spending and indebtedness pursued by the Obama administration, and as a result, the Republican Party has been rejuvenated with off season election victories in Virginia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts. The financial meltdown of 2008 has led to a renewed focus on America’s fiscal profligacy, and budget deficits and the National Debt have again become the focus of political debate, much as they had been in the Congressional Elections of 1994 that brought the Republicans to power in Congress. These factors have lead to a renewal of libertarian concerns, both economic and political, on the right. In a previous post at GM’s Place, Conservative Populism: An Alternative to Obama’s Road to Serfdom (June 10, 2009), I advocated a return to conservative populism, in the form of an alliance between conservatives, libertarians, Reagan Democrats, and the Religious Right, with the unified focus of defeating the Obama/Democratic hegemony in American politics. The Tea Party has substantially contributed to making this alliance a reality. In 1992, libertarian Murray Rothbard advocated a strategy of “right-wing populism” (“A Strategy for the Right” ). He was rather prescient in his view of what the left wing and “establishment” conservative response would be, which is equally applicable to their reaction to the Tea Party movement:

Whenever liberals have encountered hard-edged abolitionists who, for example, have wanted to repeal the New Deal or Fair Deal, they say “But that’s not genuine conservatism. That’s radicalism.” The genuine conservative, these liberals go on to say, doesn’t want to repeal or abolish anything. He is a kind and gentle soul who wants to conserve what left-liberals have accomplished.

The Tea Party movement has had plenty of detractors, not only in the Left wing media, but also amongst “respectable conservatives” such as David Brooks and Sam Tanenhaus, editor of the New York Review of Books and author of The Death of Conservatism. Brooks likens the Tea Party movement to the New Left of the 1960s, while in Tannenhaus’s view, a true conservative would conserve the progressive gains made by the left; only a radical would want to repeal them. I’ve argued at length against such a vision of conservatism previously at GM’s Place ( Critique of Sam Tanenhaus’s “Conservatism is Dead” ) in September 2009, so I won’t belabor the issue.

It is perhaps worth quoting again from Jonah Goldberg’s blog entitled “Reading Tea Party Leaves” (March 17, 2010 ), which suggested that the Tea Party Movement, “far from being a bunch of wild eyed radicals, really constitutes a ‘restoration movement.’”

Restoration and destruction are hardly synonymous terms or desires. And maybe that’s a better label: a political restoration movement, one that reflects our Constitution and the precepts of limited government.

Hopefully the grassroots populism of the Tea Party movement can help heal the rift between conservatives and libertarians so that the Republican Party and fellow travelers may gain a Congressional majority in 2010. If not, America may be in for further doses of Obamaite statism, which could cause irreparable damage to the Republic.

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Tags: conservatism, Democrats, Financial collapse, Libertarians, National security, Obama, Republicans, Tea Party

This entry was posted by Mark Amagi on Sunday, March 21st, 2010 at 11:50 AM and is filed under Obama, Politics, Tea Party. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.