The GOP'S Big Tent: Ripping Apart?

Human Events Online has an interview with Ryan Sager, author of The Elephant in the Room: Evangelicals, Libertarians and the Battle to Control the Republican Party. Some choice quotes by Sager:

"Whether it's the Patriot Act, domestic surveillance, the war in Iraq, or a host of other issues, there's a lot about the War on Terror that gives libertarians cause to be anxious. And with the Republican Party concurrently abandoning small government when it comes to both fiscal and social policy, there's not much about the GOP left for libertarians to love."

"Sometimes the problem has been poor salesmanship, but mostly it has just been an easy abandonment of principle. Instead of real education reform, we have No Child Left Behind, which is a joke. Instead of real health-care reform, we have the Medicare prescription-drug benefit, the first new entitlement in a generation. No one's talking about legislating all of the conservative movement's beliefs. But how about starting with at least one or two?"

"The Republican Party has been blessed to see the utter self-destruction of the Democratic Party since September 11, 2001. Yet, somehow, it's managed in the time since both to abandon its principles and to put its congressional majority in mortal danger."

"I think the question is no longer will libertarians start defecting to the Democratic Party, but how many already have, and how many more will it take before we start seeing a major upheaval. Remember, fewer than 70,000 votes among Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico would have swung the Electoral College to John Kerry in 2004. While proper, self-identified "libertarians" are not very numerous, libertarian-minded voters are a significant bloc in America's West."

"Taxes have been cut, but when you explode spending at the same time, you're just guaranteeing a future tax hike. The health-savings accounts tucked into the Medicare bill may yet prove to be a significant free-market reform of health care, or at least the seeds of one, but they could have been won at a less drastic cost. Other than that, the GOP has been busy ending free speech in America with the McCain-Feingold bill, increasing education spending without winning anything in terms of school choice, and passing massive, pork-laden bills such as the farm and highway monstrosities."

"There's no way to end wasteful spending entirely. What would politicians do all day? And to the extent a certain amount of horse trading helps the party achieve its policy objectives, well, that's a price many would be willing to pay. But earmarks in Washington, D.C., have exploded from 1,400 in 1995 to 14,000 in 2005 -- a ten-fold increase. The Republican Congress has allowed pork to become its reason for getting out of bed in the morning."

"Remarkably, less money seems to get wasted when we have divided government than when one party holds both the presidency and the Congress. The parties, in effect, serve as a check on each other. That's something a lot of small-government voters are thinking of going into the midterms."

"In 2000, Democrats held none of the governorships in the eight states of the interior West -- that's Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming. After 2004, they now hold four, and could pick up another one or two in 2006."

"There are a number of demographic and ideological trends at work in the interior West -- California and the rest of the Pacific Coast are already gone to the GOP -- that I go into in some depth in my book. But, basically, the region is more libertarian and less Evangelical, meaning voters there are increasingly disaffected with the direction of the GOP and open to a pitch from the Democrats."

"The party's been tilting too far toward southern conservatism, concerned with religion, tradition, and morality, and too far away from western conservatism, which puts a premium on freedom, independence, and privacy. If the GOP keeps tilting toward the South, I think it's in serious trouble. If it tilts back West, I think it can avoid catastrophe."