ALARM! :: I should have told you that movies in the afternoon are my weakness.

"Nobody should be a mystery intentionally. Unintentionally is mysterious enough."

Monday, November 06, 2006

Libertarians and Christians, again

There has been much flap as of late over the supposed tug-of-war between the social conservative/Christian and libertarian wings of the Republican party. Ryan Sager’s book, of course, and the recent Cato study on libertarian swing votersby David Boaz and my friend, office neighbor, and AFF head honcho (the group that publishes Doublethink), David Kirby, both argue against the social conservative wing and for a renewed focus on limited government. This week’s National Review features a thoughtful cover-story response to these anti-statist cries by Ramesh Ponnuru that, if possibly not out of the park, is certainly a solid triple.


Ponnuru is, unfortunately for folks like me, right, I suspect, that strict, principled economic conservatism probably doesn’t have much hope in our current political climate. On the other hand, as he points out, our national character, built on a strange mix of individual and collective, cutthroat capitalism and level-field egalitarianism, is such that we aren’t likely to turn toward wholesale statism any time soon. True blooded libertarians will probably remain frustrated for a while, but then—so will fanatical progressives. Sorry Ezra Klein.

Still, I think the split between the libertarian and the religious wings is perhaps not as intractable as Sager and others seem to think. So permit me to prove Michael Brendan Dougherty correct when he writes, in a Washington Monthly piece on AFF and young conservatives that you really ought to read, this of many recent conservative critiques of Republicanism: “At the end of the day, the arguments all seem to boil down to something similar: If it were more like me, the Republican Party would be better off. It’s failing because it’s like you.”

The libertarian bashing of the conservative Christian wing seems somewhat unnecessary and misplaced to me. As both a Christian and someone with strong libertarian tendencies, I obviously see little need for conflict between the two groups. And in fact, there are striking similarities in the way they’ve both been treated by the current Republican party. Both groups have, in many ways, been given far less influence over policy than they might’ve hoped, in part because the current Republican party knows that there’s simply no really feasible place left for them to go. Yes, libertarian types do have a disproportionate number of folks who’re primarily concerned with social and civil liberties issues rather than economic issues, and those people can find reason to vote Democrat. But there are few principled libertarians who’re willing to sacrifice the entire spectrum of economic issues for a few social ones. It’s borderline impossible to justify voting for any candidate whose party is explicitly geared toward more government involvement in the economy.

Similarly, Christians are unlikely to find much support for anti-abortion policies or for crucial freedom of religion issues in Democrats. While individual Democrat candidates may be more friendly, the party as a whole is not particularly compatible with Christians, especially seeing as how it is the party of choice for militant atheists.

And, as I’ve argued here before, both groups would be best served by more limited government. Christians may stand to make short term gains by pushing for the government to enact Christian-policy, but the majority of what they want would be best accomplished by the church. Yes, there are some touchy areas: abortion will always be a dividing line, and Christians will probably tend to be more hawkish on foreign policy. But Christians should (and often do) understand that it’s risky at best to give power to a secular entity such as government; to do so diminishes the influence (or at least possible influence) of the church. On the whole, I think, and especially in terms of domestic policy, libertarians and Christians have an incentive to work together. Libertarians, then, need to be taking advantage of this by, instead of blaming the Christian right for the downfall of the Republican party, reaching out to it and reminding it of its interest in limited government. If that were to happen, it’s likely that their combined influence would become enough that the Republican party would have to take notice and wouldn’t be able to take either group for granted as it’s done.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Spot on.

November 08, 2006 12:10 PM  

Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]

<< Home