I don’t think there’s any particular rise of social libertarianism on the right. I haven’t seen any gay acceptance, or rejection of bellicose religionism, or acceptance of reproductive rights or multiculturalism or anything. It seems to me like what is alleged to be “libertarianism” on the right is mostly about gun rights and tax protesting, and maybe legalized weed. They’re people who think the Republicans are too liberal.
This was taken from a blog post by George Packer:
This is a good summary of all the past movements that were on the same intellectual grounds as today’s economic libertarianism. Hofstadter described it as the politics of paranoia. The success of libertarianism and its influence on the Republican party will depend on whether the philosophy can run on more than just the paranoia of the American public.
If we accept that the current libertarian movement is the result of government paranoia (which I think it is), then it will suffer the same fate as all the movements listed in the quote above. It will end up harming Republicans severely if they do not dissociate themselves from it. It’s hard to argue that any of the above political figures ended up doing more good than harm to the movements they were associated with.
The new stripe of libertarianism running through the country looks to me like nothing but a retrenchment of hardline conservatives who recognize that the extreme culturally conservative rhetoric just doesn’t carry much water anymore. They don’t really care much for civil rights or personal freedoms but they aren’t willing to torpedo their other goals just to keep pot or gay marriage illegal. It’s about abandoning the cultural hardline to focus on the financial hardline. Should the stars ever align to where cultural hardliners and financial hardliners fortunes are once more united, they’ll rush right back to homophobia and social control. That is the kind of libertarianism that I see becoming popular nowadays.
You’re not paying attention. At the CPAC conference, there was much disgruntlement from the rank and file about the organizers allowing the Birchers to take part. At one point during the conference, a speaker got up to give a talk on stopping gay marriage, and he was booed off the stage. The Log Cabin Republicans, a gay conservative group, has been gaining in influence. There are very popular bloggers in the Tea Party movement who are gay. And I swear, Glenn Beck sets my gaydar off like a wailing banshee, and no one seems to mind.
Seriously, I think you guys are projecting what you want to believe the new right is, or you’re letting your partisan leaders define them for you. But I spend a lot of time around these people, and read a lot of their blogs and web sites, and I’m not getting the gay hatred or the heavy religous vibe at all.
Andrew Breitbart is one of the big new heroes of the right, and he’s about as pro-gay as you can get short of giving out free reach-arounds. “Red Eye”, a late night talk show starring Greg Gutfeld, is now getting more viewers than CNN’s prime time lineup. And that show’s pretty damned gay. It’s also funny as hell sometimes. (Typical Gutfeld introduction of a guest: “This is Penn Jillette - if he were a drum, I’d bang him in front of a crowd.”)
Speaking of Penn Jillette - he’s a tea party supporter, and he’s overtly hostile to religion and pro gay marriage. Here he is talking about it to Glenn Beck. And, in they were played in to the tune of ‘cat scratch fever’. Does that sound like the old religious right? That’s actually an interesting video, because it’s being filmed live in front of a large open air crowd, and you can hear their reactions to what they’re saying. You’ll note that there’s no love at all for Republicans.
These are all people who were in the dirty basement of the Republican party a decade ago. They were pretty much marginalized. Now they’re major figures in the movement.
Of COURSE you have your old conservatives around - the religious right, the anti-gay crowd, the ‘famly values’ yammerheads. And there’s enough of them that you can always find a nice juicy shot of a redneck with a sign that says “Jesus says hell no to homos” for your blog. The point is, these people have lost most of their power in the party, and the center of gravity has moved towards the more educated, more libertarian, more fiscally conservative, younger people.
Just like the Democratic Party has seen a new wave of enthusiasm from younger people, and the old blue-dogs and get-along warhorses are losing their power, a similar shift is happening on the right.
The cause of both is the same - the rise of blogs, web sites, and other internet tools which allow people to form networks and gain power and influence without being controlled by the old gatekeepers.
Just to nitpick, he got booed off the stage for criticizing CPAC for inviting GOProud, a conservative gay group, to the conference. But you’re right that previous CPACs probably wouldn’t invite a gay group, even a conservative gay group, to their conferences.
That’s pretty much what Lind is saying. But he is also saying that economic libertarianism does not have the electoral appeal its supporters think it does, and that that wing taking over the GOP will effectively marginalize the party.
The wild card is whether this sort of infighting will become a noticeable political story. If it does, and if the result is a visible marginalization of the Religious Reich yahoos, it may cause a fairly large number of people who turned away from the GOP for that reason to give them another shot.
But then where will the RR yahoos go? They’re declining in numbers, but still a sizeable, vocal and organized bloc. 24% of Pubs think Obama may be the Antichrist, and the RR share of the GOP base is probably larger than that.
Do the libertarians have( or can they get) the financial backing that it takes to become prominent?
What they need, besides an ideology consistent with the real world, is organization - unfortunately that concept is antithetical to their ideology.
Well, remember, we’re not talking about the radical Libertarian Party here, but about the comparatively more moderate small-l libertarian wing of the GOP. Now, even those libertarians will ruffle some corporate feathers if they remain consistent to their principles, which are hostile to government regulation of business and industry but also hostile to government sweetheart contracts, industry bailouts, etc. Assuming they could somehow find a way around that, and assuming they became the new face of movement conservatism, yes, they probably could claim most of the financial backing that now flows from the corporations to the movement.
I give you Rand Paul.
The rise of any group to political power is always great for the opposition. Clinton gave the GOP control of both houses, something Reagan could never do. Bush was good to the Democrats and Obama is great for the Right wing. Events have led to the libertarian part of the right wing to have greater prominence than before but this is not substantively different than what has happened before. If they are able to take power they will suffer a backlash too.
The independent voters control who has the power in this country. The independent voter is not that concerned with idealogy but is disgusted at the mess in Washington. Every couple of years the independent voters wake up, get disgusted with what is going on in Washington and blame it all on whoever is in power. Then they vote in whoever promises to change Washington and go back to sleep.
Yes. The religious right still commands the loyalties of about a quarter of the population, more so than any other non-party actor in the landscape, and is only poised to grow larger. They are the ones with the Jesus Camps and the prison ministries and all the other nakedly strategic recruiting tactics. And, in case you haven’t noticed, Mormons and fundamentalists tend to breed litters, and liberals don’t.
Just because it would be so nice if theocracy disappeared from American politics, and maybe you don’t have to see these people in your daily life, doesn’t mean it’s going to happen.