The "Libertarian Moment" Is Actually Being Engineered By The Christian Right

I have consistently maintained that the Christofascists and the Tea Party are largely one and the same.  The Tea Part label simply allows the Christofascists to hide their identity given how much they are despised by sane, decent citizens.  Less obvious, however, is the way in which the Christofascists are engineering the "libertarian moment" that Rand Paul seeks to capitalize upon.    A piece in Talk Points Memo looks behind the scenes of the libertarian movement to reveal the evil machinations of the Christofascists.  Here are some excerpts:

Unfortunately, to the extent there is something that can be called a “libertarian moment” in the Republican Party and the conservative movement, it owes less to the work of the Cato Institute than to a force genuine libertarians clutching their copies of Atlas Shrugged are typically horrified by: the Christian Right. In the emerging ideological enterprise of “constitutional conservatism,” theocrats are the senior partners, just as they have largely been in the Tea Party Movement, even though libertarians often get more attention. 

There is no universal definition of “constitutional conservatism.” The apparent coiner of the term, the Hoover Institution’s Peter Berkowitz, used it to argue for a temperate approach to political controversy that’s largely alien to those who have embraced the “brand.” Indeed, it’s most often become a sort of dog whistle scattered through speeches, slogans and bios on various campaign trails to signify that the bearer is hostile to compromise and faithful to fixed conservative principles, unlike the Republicans who have been so prone to trim and prevaricate since Barry Goldwater proudly went down in flames.

What a lot of those who instinctively think of conservative Christians as hostile to libertarian ideas of strict government persistently miss is that divinizing untrammeled capitalism has been a growing habit on the Christian Right for decades. Perhaps more importantly, the idea of the “secular-socialist government” being an oppressor of religious liberty, whether it’s by maintaining public schools that teach “relativism” and evolution, or by enforcing the “Holocaust” of legalized abortion, or by insisting on anti-discrimination rules that discomfit “Christian businesses,” has made Christian conservatives highly prone to, and actually a major participant in, the anti-government rhetoric of the Tea Party. Beyond that, the essential tea party view of America as “exceptional” in eschewing the bad political habits of the rest of the world is highly congruent with, and actually owes a lot to, the old Protestant notion of the United States as a global Redeemer Nation and a “shining city on a hill.”

So perhaps the question we should be asking is not whether the Christian Right and other “traditional” conservatives can accept a Rand Paul-led “libertarian” takeover of the conservative movement and the GOP, but whether “libertarians” are an independent factor in conservative politics to begin with. After all, most of the Republican politicians we think of as “libertarian”--whether it’s Rand Paul or Justin Amash or Mike Lee--are also paid-up culture-war opponents of legalized abortion, Common Core, and other heathenish practices. As Heather Digby Parton noted tartly earlier this week:

[T]he line between theocrats and libertarian Republicans is very, very faint. Why do you think they've bastardized the concept of "Religious Liberty" to mean the right to inflict your religion on others? It appeals to people who fashion themselves as libertarians but really only care about their taxes, guns and weed. Those are the non-negotiable items. Everything else is on offer.

And then there’s the well-known but under-reported long-term relationship of Ron and Rand Paul with the openly theocratic U.S. Constitution Party, a Con-Con inspirational font that no Republican politician is likely to embrace these days.

The more you examine the evidence, the more it seems plain that the “libertarian moment” in the GOP, even it’s real, and even if it’s advanced by Rand Paul as a presidential candidate, isn’t necessarily of a nature that’s going to be wildly popular among secular-trending millennials — or among Draper’s hipsters. To the extent it has a mass base, it’s likely as much or more among conservative Christian soldiers who despise government so long as they don’t control it as among dope-smoking free-loving free-thinking anti-interventionist Reason readers. So the latter might want to think twice before climbing onto the Rand Paul for President bus, or consigning their fate to Republican politics.

Embracing Libertarianism Will Not Save the GOP

There are some in today's Republican Party who claim that Libertarianism offers the best new hope for the GOP.  While there may be libertarians in the GOP, the bulk of the GOP base is the antithesis of the libertarian agenda of maximum personal freedoms with minimal government intervention.  It is no coincidence that the anti-gay agenda of the GOP base (and the political whores in elected GOP positions) flies directly against the arguments made by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, in amicus briefs which have sought to see state bans on same sex marriage invalidated.  The GOP base wants to regulate and control everything except for businesses/corporations.  True libertarians take a a 180% opposite position.  David Frum argues that the GOP is insane if it believes that embracing libertarian themes will save it from being anathema to most voters under 30.  Here are highlights:

Has the libertarian moment finally arrived? Robert Draper asks that question in the Sunday New York Times Magazine. His answer: Yes! Young voters are leaning libertarian, he says, and a Rand Paul presidential candidacy could energize those voters for the GOP.

Spoiler alert: Draper’s wrong, emphatically wrong. Young voters are not libertarian, nor even trending libertarian. Neither, for that matter, are older voters. The "libertarian moment" is not an event in American culture. It's a phase in internal Republican Party factionalism. Libertarianism is not pushing Republicans forward to a more electable future. It's pushing them sideways to the extremist margins.

Every serious study of the political attitudes of voters under 30 has discovered them to be the most pro-government age group since the cohort that directly experienced the Great Depression. Young voters are more likely than their elders to believe that government should intervene in the economy to create jobs. They support government aid to education and healthcare more than any other age group. Their voting behavior tracks their values: Under-30s massively voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012.

The claim that young voters are trending libertarian rests on three principal data points:

1. Young voters are more permissive on issues like same-sex marriage and drug legalization than their elders.
2. Young voters are marginally less supportive of Medicare and Social Security in their present form than are older voters.
3. Young voters are more alienated from institutions than their elders, including the two existing political parties.

But these points don’t add up to libertarianism. They don’t even present an opening to libertarianism. They reveal (modest) generational self-interest, social liberalism, and political demobilization.

Libertarianism is not rising in the country, but since 2009 it has exercised increasing influence inside the Republican party.  One measure of the libertarian rise is the waxing fortunes of the Paul dynasty

Despite the self-flattering claims of libertarians, the Republicans' post-2009 libertarian turn is not a response to voter demand. The areas where the voting public has moved furthest and fastest in a libertarian direction—gay rights, for example—have been the areas where Republicans have moved slowest and most reluctantly. The areas where the voting public most resists libertarian ideas—such as social benefits—are precisely the areas where the GOP has swung furthest and fastest in a libertarian direction.

Nor is it the strength and truth of libertarian ideas that explains their current vogue within the Republican Party. Libertarians have been most influential inside the GOP precisely where they have been—and continue to be—most blatantly wrong, such as when they predicted that the cheap money policies of the Federal Reserve would incite hyperinflation or that the United States teetered on the precipice of a debt crisis.

Libertarianism diverges from ordinary conservatism in many ways, but perhaps most fundamentally in this: Whereas ordinary conservatism emphasizes the inefficiency and ineffectiveness of government action, libertarianism presents government as alien and malign. 


Like all political movements, libertarianism binds together many divergent strands. It synthesizes the classical liberalism of the 1860s with the human-potential movement of the 1960s. It joins elegant economic theory to the primitive insistence that only metal can be money. It mingles nostalgia for the vanished American frontier with fantasies drawn from science fiction. It offers three cheers both for thrift, sobriety, and bourgeois self-control and three more for sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll.  It invokes the highest ideals of American constitutionalism—and is itself invoked by the most radical critics of the American state and nation, from neo-Confederates to 9/11 Truthers.

The libertarians interviewed by Robert Draper talk about their movement’s exciting, bold ideological vision. Yet the true secret to its post-2008 appeal is just the opposite. Those conservatives who succumb to libertarianism do so in despair, not hope. Instead of competing to govern the state, many now feel that their only hope is defend themselves—with arms if necessary—against an inherently and inevitably hostile and predatory state.

Conservatives who still want to compete, win, and govern must trust that this despair will pass. The “libertarian moment” will last as long as, and no longer than, it takes conservatives to win a presidential election again. Unfortunately, the libertarian moment is itself the most immediate and the most difficult impediment to the political success that will be libertarianism’s cure.