Striking a Tea Party Balance

FF Symposium: Just because voters are favoring libertarian policies doesn't mean you have to adopt Ron Paul's platform.

Jonathan Rauch’s article alleging that the Tea Party will tend to have a marginalizing effect on the GOP, and that small-government politics are likely to be favored, strikes me as partially accurate, but overly alarmist. For one thing, I take issue with its assumption that voter categories are static (especially the fact that it writes off Millennial voters as irrevocably liberal, even though the gap in party ID is narrowing according to Pew). Moreover, I think the worry that conservatives are marginalizing the GOP is scarcely new, especially with regards libertarianism, which has often been seen as an electorally weak ideology. On this note, I think my fellow contributor Austin Bramwell makes a good point that believing a particular iteration of the government to not be functional is not the same thing as believing the concept of government itself to be nonfunctional.

However, we have to be very careful with this subject, since it’s not clear that either increased moderation of the GOP’s message or increased conservative messaging is necessarily what the voters want. The article points out that Republicans have been declining in market share since ’03, with one of its lowest points (graphically) being in ’08. Interesting that this decline coincides precisely with Bush’s second term, which, while it’s often tarred for being too “extreme,” was scarcely a time of fiscal conservatism. Indeed, according to Vice President Cheney, Bush wasn’t extreme enough during that time. Either way, not all GOP “extremism” is created equal.

Moreover, the article notes that while Republican-leaning independents have swung drastically to the Right on economic issues, their positions on social issues have remained basically unchanged. This may explain the success of figures like Scott Brown, who ran as basically a pro-choice extreme fiscal conservative. This combination might be incoherent in theory, but in practice, it seems to be doing fairly well. Moreover, it might blunt the advantages Democrats enjoy with some socially liberal but economically disappointed voters. I’m thinking especially of the “liberal” Republicans who are willing to forgive Ron Paul for his (copious) excesses.

Does this mean we should go Paulite? Absolutely not. Just because voters are favoring libertarian policies doesn’t mean they’re willing to go all the way with praxeology, public choice, isolation and open borders (and if that last pair of concepts seems contradictory to you, join the club). However, it may be that voters are more willing to trust a government that acknowledges its limits (or that it has any), and that does not strike me as a message designed for extremists.