The Two Libertarians

Mark Thompson in reply to Patrick says:

In fairness, I can think of a number of other libertarian successes beyond tax rates and de-regulation – Milton Friedman’s input is one of the biggest reasons we don’t have a draft anymore, and while liberals have certainly been the more powerful force in the SSM movement, libertarians have played a key role there as well. Libertarians have also played a big role in blocking and undoing firearms prohibitions, and it was libertarians who were behind Heller. And of course the tide finally seems to be turning on significant portions of the War on Drugs. But on the whole, yeah, libertarian influence has been clearest on questions of tax rates and (unfortunately uneven) deregulation.

This is mostly because of the nature of coalition politics – as with most elements of the two dominant political coalitions, libertarians wound up being largely integrated into the GOP coalition by virtue of something approaching an historical accident. What officially bound the GOP was anti-communism, and obviously the libertarian economic message dovetailed nicely with that. But more importantly, from the modern libertarian movement’s inception in the mid to late ’40s until the last 15-20 years, it had a huge amount of common ground with the Chamber of Commerce types who have traditionally formed the core of the GOP’s power base. Over-regulation of the economy really was a major problem back in the day – indeed, the totally screwed up health care system we have is largely a direct outcome of the over-regulation back then.

The ties between the libertarian movement and the GOP thus actually predate the close ties between religious conservatives and the GOP.

Anyhow, while I do think that institutional reform of Congress is a good idea in general, I don’t think it’s going to be necessary – or, if implemented, successful – in breaking the “rhetorical logjams that we’ve ossified into our discourse.” (I like that way of phrasing the problem, BTW). I think it could break legislative logjams, but I don’t think it would have much impact on polarization. In fact, it could actually make polarization worse if it was primarily aimed at reducing veto points, which would reduce incentives for cross-party compromise – there’s little reason to negotiate with the other party if you can just pass a bill that’s acceptable to all the elements of your party.

But I do think that this “rhetorical logjam” will be broken at some point in the next few years under its own weight. I continue to maintain that the reason things are so incredibly polarized right now, and have been for the last several years, is that pretty much the only thing binding the GOP’s coalition together is reflexive opposition to Obama.

Most importantly for our present discussion, there’s absolutely nothing other than opposition to Obamacare that still binds either TL or ML libertarians to the GOP’s traditional Northeastern business power structure. I mean, other than platitudes about small government, I really struggle to think of a significant issue where Rand Paul and Chris Christie are reasonably close to agreement – maybe some social issues that they don’t much care about but that particularly animate religious conservatives, and thus are good fodder for pandering. I can think of plenty of areas of agreement or potential agreement between Paul and religious conservatives, and between Christie and religious conservatives, but not between Paul and Christie.

The GOP is messed up right now because, without any common primary interests, it has to act as if every secondary and tertiary interest of every one of its constituent groups is a litmus test matter of principle. I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again – if you have too many principles, you have none. When a party is healthy and has a common agenda that binds it, then its constituencies are free to try to advance their other issues outside of that agenda by negotiating and working with whoever is willing to discuss those issues, regardless of whether that means talking to members of the other party – and not just centrists from the other party, either.

But when one party’s got nothing binding it together other than “we’re not them,” while simultaneously needing to insist that every issue is a binding litmus test issue, it becomes near-impossible to have any kind of cross-party coalitions – not just legislatively, but also even at a grassroots level.

In the long run, of course, this is an untenable position – the purpose of politics is to govern, and you can’t govern if you can’t do anything affirmatively because you’re worried that literally anything you do will infuriate part of your coalition. At some point, you’ve just got to bite the bullet even if it means alienating a part of your coalition. What’s remarkable is that the GOP has been able to avoid biting the bullet for as long as it has, but the flipside to this is that for awhile it’s made the country more polarized than it’s been since the Civil War.* Still, I do think we’re finally reaching the point where the bullet is being forced into the GOP’s teeth whether it wants to bite it or not.

*I don’t know enough about this to say so definitively, but it seems to me that the GOP’s present problems are not dissimilar from the problems that the Democrats faced in the run up to the Civil War, which led to the most ineffective Presidential administration in history, Buchanan, who I think may have failed so miserably largely because he was unwilling to do anything that would infuriate a sizable portion of his coalition. I suspect a President Romney would have been disastrous for similar reasons, albeit on a much less consequential scale.Report

Mark Thompson in reply to Patrick says:

@morat20 Great points. I’ve wondered for awhile what would have happened under Bush without 9/11. For all of his problems – and they were myriad – he really did seem to be serious about his concept of “compassionate conservatism” and did really seem to understand that this would have required building a broader coalition. The other thing of course that killed him in that regard was the manner in which he became President, which both made broadening the coalition impossible and meant that he needed to tread with greater caution on issues that could irritate his base. What little capital he had in that regard was basically blown on Medicare Part D, which did not pay the political dividends he probably had hoped for. When he was finally able to pivot back to domestic issues in his second term, he didn’t have nearly the political capital he would have needed to privatize Social Security (but made the ill-advised decision to spend what he had on pursuing that right after his re-election), and then didn’t have any capital left at all to strongarm conservatives into signing on to his immigration reform packages.

I think that Huckabee in 2008 presented himself as a potentially worthy candidate to restart those efforts, but you’re right that he’s now said too much as a commentator to gain any traction in that regard if he tries again.
@michael-cain Dismantling programs certainly counts as something affirmative (though for our purposes, dismantling PPACA alone doesn’t since it’s still being implemented and in any event hasn’t yet become an established part of life). However, while your understanding probably describes a chunk of the “Right,” I don’t think you could reasonably say that there’d be anything close to unanimity on the Right to also dismantle Medicaid and Medicare. As I recall, the conservative health care proposals that actually had or have strong GOP support are/were basically just significantly limited versions of PPACA. The only additional elements, IIRC, are limited to permitting insurance sales across state lines and medical malpractice reform. The potential effects of permitting insurance sales across state lines may or may not be significant – the potential effectiveness of med mal reform is minimal – but if those are the only items of health care reform that you can get your coalition to agree on, then you’re not going to be able to treat the issue very seriously.Report