New York Post columnist Ryan Sager is one of the
sharpest young minds (with one of the sharpest pens) in the
punditocracy. He is also a genuine libertarian who is suspicious of
virtually every action take by the government, federal, state, and
local.
Sager is also — perhaps especially — distrustful of the
Christian Right. He synopsizes his thoughtful piece in the current issue of the Atlantic,
titled “Purple Mountains,” thus:
In the piece, I look at whether the GOP’s balance
between South and West is going off kilter. I argue that, yes, the
GOP is tilting too far South, leaving open the way toward a
Democratic revival in the interior West.
But that’s not
really what the article is about. The
Interior West and the South are merely geographic proxies in the
conflict Sager is manifestly more interested in: the one between
anti-government libertarians and Christian conservatives. This is
the subject of Sager’s
forthcoming book,
The Elephant in the Room:
Evangelicals, Libertarians, and the Battle to Control the
Republican Party, from which the
Atlantic piece is
excerpted.
Sager argues:
That realignment is by now complete — the GOP could
hardly dominate the region more thoroughly. But as the South has
become central to Republican Party strategy, its particular flavor
of social conservatism, moral certitude, and activist government
has infused the national party’s character. This is slowly
alienating the other major bloc in the Republican coalition:
small-government conservatives, especially those who value
individual liberty most highly.
While fissures run between these two groups in every state,
there is also a larger geography to the modern Republican Party’s
dilemma. In balancing the religious Right against the libertarian
Right, the GOP balances the South against the West. (The Midwest is
something of a muddle in between.) Bush-style big-government
conservatism has tilted the party’s regional balance and put the
West in play.
Differences between the West and the South begin with
religion….
Sager proceeds to segment the percentages of the population of
several interior West states into three relevant voting subgroups:
evangelicals (which Sager rightly asserts is a predominantly
Republican cohort), Hispanic/Latino (which he chalks up as a
majority Democrat cohort), and California expats (which he —
wrongly, to my way of thinking — likens to a “bucket of blue
paint” spilling over the West).
Irrespective of whether or not Californian expats bring liberal
values inland with them as Sager insists, or they are
fleeing those liberal values, as I would contend, did you
catch the dynamic of Sager’s trichotomy? Two liberal Democrat
subgroups and one conservative Republican subgroup are the major
players in the swing states in question. Where are Sager’s
libertarians? In his Atlantic piece Sager does not — and
cannot — enumerate them because libertarians are an unorganized,
thinly populated, and dispersed lot, making them politically
useless. The choice in the interior West swing states, according to
Sager’s analysis, is not between “the religious Right and the
libertarian Right” but between the religious Right and liberal
Democrats.
The argument then becomes: But the Religious Right’s fixation on
“guns, God, and gays” so puts off regular voters that it endangers
the already-thin Republican majority (even if this were true,
however, it would not follow that libertarian-inspired budget cuts
would win these voters back). Sager sites the GOP’s poor 2004
down-ticket performance in Colorado to make this very point. It is
a remarkably inapt example. To begin with, Colorado Republicans
nominated the more moderate businessman Pete Coors over Religious
Right Congressman Bob Schaffer for U.S. Senate and still lost the
U.S. Senate race. And Republicans lost control of the state
legislature not because of a proposed gay marriage ban, as Sager
argues, but because the state faced a crippling budget crisis
brought about by the libertarian-inspired Taxpayer Bill of
Rights. Gov. Bill Owens would have to beg voters a year later to grant him special
dispensation to increase government spending and raise their taxes
(they did!). This is not a record the libertarian Right should be
proud of.
Sager further argues:
Bush’s GOP, however, is making a Democratic pitch to
libertarian-minded voters more credible. The Republican Party is
rapidly losing its identity as the party of fiscal responsibility
and small government. And Republican intrusions into private and
local affairs — think Terri Schiavo — are making Democrats look
comparatively restrained.
Sager is correct when he argues that President Bush’s love for big
government has the potential to hurt Republicans. But he is exactly
wrong for implying Christian conservatives are responsible for
Bush-era profligacy. How can Sager, or any libertarian, argue with
a straight face that the Religious Right is responsible for the
Medicare Modernization Act, the bloated transportation bill, or the
energy bill pork platter? (As for “Republican intrusions into
private and local affairs,” Sager evidently needs reminding that
Congressional Democrats, too, voted to intervene in the Schiavo
affair and hardly stand to gain from the incident.)
Moreover, are there any political consequences to Republican
fiscal irresponsibility? Are libertarians going to run them out of
office? Hardly. To grasp the sheer political weakness of
small-government conservatives consider what happened when
Republicans acted on the myth they created about their 1994
revolution. When newly empowered Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich
tried to cut spending on several federal programs, recently
neutered (politically, that is) President Bill Clinton handed him
his hat in the government shut-down debacle. No successful
politician has attempted to reduce seriously the size of the
federal government since. That is probably because, despite
political lore, the 1994 election had a whole lot more to do with
“moral values” than “smaller government.”
Sager is not alone in overstating the impact of the libertarian
Right. Glenn Reynolds has posed arguments similar to Sager’s in the past:
It’s certainly true that the Libertarian Party is
trivial. But libertarian-leaning Republicans and independents are
far more numerous, and have less reason to stick around given that
their agendas aren’t getting much attention. What’s more, if
libertarian-leaning conservatives line up against the Republican
agenda, it’s likely to worry swing voters far more than if
criticisms come only from the usual suspects of the
left.
… and has even found his worldview confirmed by the off-year
elections of 2005:
I also think that I may have been right in suggesting
that the GOP had lost its mojo with the Terri Schiavo affair.
Things seem to have started to go south then, not only because of
the issue itself, but because of the divisive venom that so many
Schiavo partisans aimed at people who disagreed with them. I think
it was very damaging to the GOP coalition, and they’ve continued to
pay a price.
And yet, as I
pointed
out at the time, while no faction of the GOP can claim the 2005
election vindicated their respective public policy catalogues, the
“Prayerbook Right” easily outperformed the “Pocketbook Right.”
Yet despite their political impotency, the libertarian Right
appears bent on bringing down the one political movement that has
tolerated its know-it-all-ism and has in fact dragged it into the
halls of political power along with it, rather like a ball and
chain: the Christian Right. It is beyond arguing that a Democrat
Congress would ever grant a hearing to small government
libertarians come budget time. Under a Republican majority, made
possible by the rise of politically active conservative Christians,
the libertarian Right has had every opportunity to appeal for
smaller government. That its appeals have been — and continue to
be — unpersuasive cannot be the fault of Religious
conservatives.
