Libertarians for Romney?

Not only was I not a fan of Andrew Breitbart's, I was of the considered opinion that he was tremendously damaging to conservatism. Although he was far from being solely responsible for it, Breitbart became the face of a movement that serious conservative thinkers like William F. Buckley wouldn't recognize.

As Buckley or George Will have repeatedly demonstrated over the decades, there is no shortage of serious and factual ways to criticize liberals. But with the ascendancy of Breitbart, it became okay to mislead, selectively edit and, when all else failed, lie outright. He and his followers regularly engaged in hysterical rhetoric that more closely resembled what you would have heard from Democratic activists in the 1960s and 70s.

However, nothing succeeds quite like success, so Breitbartism spread like wildfire, first through the Tea Party, then the GOP as a whole. If you know anything about history or political science, it's virtually impossible to take these people seriously. People whose intellectual forefathers (and I use the word "intellectual" advisedly) were castigated and shunted aside by Buckley are increasingly taking over the movement and driving it into the ground so rapidly that it staggers the imagination.

One of the reasons that Barack Obama is winning this election instead of being ten points behind is the hysteria with which supposed conservatives attack him. Descriptors like "collectivist" and "communist" are used to attack the President, and most sane people just don't see it. Actual socialists despise Obama, to say nothing of doctrinaire Marxists.

In fact, President Obama isn't even an especially liberal Democrat. He could have used the TARP "stress tests" in the early months of his administration to nationalize or break up the criminal banks that destroyed the economy, and there were no shortage of liberals and Democrats who implored him to do just that. It's easy to forget this, but Cap and Trade and the Affordable Care Act started their lives as Republican policy proposals in the early 1990s. Bill Clinton refused to even debate either because he saw them as too "right-wing."

Average voters might not know that, but they certainly feel it. They instinctively feel that Barack Obama isn't anything even close to being the second coming of Leonid Breshnev or Raul Castro. Christ, he doesn't even match the rather tepid socialism of Salvador Allende.  Obama's lowest-ever job approval rating was in the mid-30s, and there's just no rational way to assert that roughly 37% of the American electorate is Marxist. I would actually have a hard time believing that that large a segment of the population actually knows what Marxism is. God knows that most Republican bloggers don't.

You haven't heard much from the Bretibart Empire since its founder's passing in March. This is mostly because Andrew himself was a showman. He knew how to play the media and make it pay attention. Without him, all that's left is paranoid raving on a very flashy and expensive blog. It's writers are little more than a collection of intellectual misfits who regularly insult the intelligence of anyone with a high school diploma. Oh, and they have a few radio talk show hosts, just to make sure that folks who didn't make it through high school get their intelligence insulted.

That brings me to Kurt Schlichter, one of Bretibart.com's writers. Over the last week, he's posted a missive so breathtakingly dishonest that it really does have to be read to be believed. It is in two parts, which you can read here and here.

Mr. Schlichter seems to understand that Mitt Romney's bid for the presidency is an increasingly losing proposition. With all of his nonsensical wailing about "collectivism," he seems to understand that he isn't going to draw many conservative Democrats and independents to his cause. So, he's going to the last place left to him, libertarians, who he also refers to interchangeably as "Ron Paul fans."

Before I go further, I should describe myself for newer readers. Because I oppose radical or revolutionary change, I describe myself as a conservative, as opposed to a libertarian. I'm also of the mind that several libertarian proposals are simply impractical. But I have strong libertarian leanings. I don't believe that government - and especially federal governments - should be doing between a third and half of what they currently are.

I don't believe that the government should be involved in social or lifestyle issues, since those are always better left to even the most irresponsible of individuals than they are to a bureaucracy. In recent years, I've come to the conclusion that American foreign policy has become too expansive to be either militarily practical or economically affordable.

Just as Schlichter refers to libertarians and "Ron Paul fans" interchangeably, he also does so with "conservative," "Republican" and "Tea Party." I believe that's misleading.

When you explore their positions, you quickly learn that Republicans aren't interested in small government at all. The Tea Party, which was supposed to be a reaction to "big government conservatism," let their mask slip after their success in the 2010 midterm election. For all intents and purposes, they're little more than an extension of the religious right that failed a few courses in introductory economics.

Three quarters of the Republican coalition doesn't differ with the "collectivist" Democrats on the imposition of government power, just on what areas of life it should be applied. There's no end to the ways that Republicans want Congress to impose its will on both the states and the individual. A party that truly believed in the Tenth Amendment would never have passed the Laci Peterson Act. No libertarian would reverse four thousand years of legal tradition, to say nothing of "family values," in a vain attempt to raise Terri Schiavo from the dead.

Even after two disastrous military adventures in a single decade, in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Republicans still want to go to war with practically everyone in sight, the consequences be damned. And when libertarians (and about a third of traditional conservatives) object, they're dismissed out of hand and ridiculed.

There's no separation between military and budget policy in the GOP, either. As much as they howl about the coming economic doomsday, Republicans insist on not only preserving current (and ridiculous) levels of Pentagon spending, they want to expand it, precisely so they can bomb first and ask questions later.

The GOP, as we saw from 1981-'86 and 2001-'06 don't represent libertarian values in the budget. Republicans, to their credit, are fantastic at cutting taxes. However, they unfailingly increase spending while doing so, thereby giving birth to awesome deficits. I've said this over and over again, but most of "Obama's five trillion in new deficit spending" is neither new or even Obama's. They reflect the growth of policies passed by President Bush and the Republican Congress combined with the exploding disparity between spending and revenue that resulted from the Bush tax cuts.

Few things are as amusing as the supposed Republican devotion to the constitution. Like GOP appeals to libertarians, you only see any evidence of that during even numbered years. Whenever given the chance, Republican presidents violate the Bill of Rights, often without consulting Congress, in the name of the "unitary executive theory," which also only seems to apply when Republicans are in office. If you believe in Republican fidelity to the Constitution, you just haven't been paying attention.

Kurt Schlichter, like Republicans generally, has a very childish and historically inaccurate view of libertarianism in the GOP. First, he seems to think that dissatisfaction with Romney is predicated on the treatment of Ron Paul. That serves magnify his arrogance and that of his party.

Of course, he brings nothing to the table for libertarians to support Romney other the boogeyman of Obama. He almost seems to admit that as soon as the election is over, the snake-handling and war-mongering wings of GOP will resume their control and libertarian policies and philosophies will return to being ignored when they aren't actively abused. The best part is that Mr. Schlichter spends a minimal amount of time pretending that anything other than that will happen.

Schlichter posits that libertarians have more in common with Republicans than they do Democrats. Of course, this is utter nonsense. Republicans and Democrats have a more common view of the role of government than either does with libertarians. I suspect that more and more libertarians are coming around to that view. It's hard to disagree with the Libertarian assertion that a choice between Democrats and Republicans is really no choice at all.

If Romney loses, it won't be because of anything that libertarians did or didn't do, although it would poetic justice if it worked out that way. If Barack Obama get's reelected, so what? Obama and Romney are both going to blow apart the military and destroy the economy, they're just planning on doing it in slightly different ways.

On top of being incredibly patronizing, calling libertarians who refuse to support Romney "the pouters, the angry and the attention seeking," Schlicther makes profoundly illogical argument: that libertarianism can't survive without Republicans.

More likely, the opposite is true: libertaianism can't survive being associated with Republicans. Libertarians have a constant world-view and, as we saw through the Bush years, Republicans don't. To this day, the GOP refuses to accept responsiblity for anything that happened during those years except in the most dismissive way. Continuing to associate politically with people like that ultimately makes libertarianism irrelevant.

Moreover, Schlichter's argument presupposes that the the Republican party itself survives as a long-term proposition, and I'm far from convinced that's the case.

All the way back in 2007, I wrote that demographics are going to be the death of the GOP. Republicans have insisted on being increasingly hostile to Latinos, just as Latinos were becoming a larger part of the electorate in key Republicans states. It wasn't all that long ago that California was a swing state, having voted for Eisenhower, Nixon and Reagan twice. Proposition 187 fixed that forever.

Then the Democrats got smart and wrote off their quixotic struggle to win back the South and started focusing on the Mountain West and Southwest. And it worked, too. By 2010, you could drive from the Canadian border right into Mexico without setting foot in a state with a Republican governor. In doing so, they're also gaining ground in the former Confederacy, having a surprisingly good chance of winning Virginia and North Carolina this year.

Bush's 2007 immigration reform bill, McCain-Kennedy, was supposed to fix that, but the Republican House caucus was overtaken with animalistic stupidity and vitriol. Consequently, McCain did twenty points worse with Hispanics than Bush did, and Romney's taking 10% less of the Latino vote than McCain did.

New Mexico, Nevada and Colorado are becoming deeper purple and Arizona is becoming increasingly competitive. In less than twenty years, you're going to see that happen in Texas, at which point the GOP simply ceases to exist as a winning national political party. There just aren't enough Electoral College votes in the Deep South and the plains states to elect a president.

If you've been paying attention to Fox News and Republican blogs, you've already gotten a preview of what's going to happen when Romney loses. The narrative that he isn't far enough to the right is already developing, and the psychopaths are more than strong enough to fix that in the 2016 primaries. To keep a base that doesn't know that Medicare is a government program happy, the GOP is going to nominate a completely unelectable Neanderthal. As I write this, my money's on Santorum.

Schlichter makes a wholly unconvincing argument that if libertarians don't submit to a one-sided marriage of convenience with Republicans they'll become the Greens. In actual fact, that couldn't be further from the truth. In order to keep the supply-siders and snake-handlers in their tent, they've managed to dramatically shrink their demographic and geographic reach over the last decade. And there's absolutely no evidence to suggest that they'll reverse that suicidal trend once Romney loses and every reason to believe that they'll double down on it.

Maybe I'm overstating my case about the death of the GOP. But you'd do well to remember that I made exactly the same noises about the Liberal Party of Canada. I'd tell you to ask them how they're doing, but I'm afraid they wouldn't hear you from inside their oxygen tent.

Like power, history abhors a vacuum. Just as the abolitionists created the GOP out of the ashes of the Whigs, something will rise from the ruins of the GOP. Libertarians are uniquely positioned to do that in the next twenty years.

Kurt Schlichter speaks a great deal about libertarian principle but goes on to erect an endless parade of straw men in an effort to convince them to abandon it. And for what?  To elect somebody that most of the Republican party can't stand?  Mitt Romney isn't better than Barack Obama, he's just a different kind of bad. The fact that he has an R beside his name only matters if you're utterly without principle.

Were I able to cast a ballot in this presidential election, I would do so for Gary Johnson on the Libertarian ticket. If you're reading this, I hope that you'll consider doing so, as well.