More on the conservative - libertarian - Republican crack-up

The problems with the Republican Party becoming the party of the South means that it will become more insular and hence more ineffective. Thus it will become less appealing and to its natural allies: the Mountain State libertarians. As the recent election returns demonstrate, this Republican quandry is an opportunity for Democrats to pick up momentum particularly in what I'll call Goldwater's backyard. (That is if they can keep their hands to themselves and out of the gun closets of these new Democrats).

The southern evangelicals may have played out their hand with Terry Schiavo and stem cell research -- two wedge issues that alienate the Republicans' libertarian wing. Having had enough of southern, big government Republicanism, and not satisfied with divided government, libertarians are considering the previously unspeakable: joining the Democrats. Picking up on Cato's Brink Lindsey's dispatch in the New Republic, (sorry it's gated), the Washington Post's Sebastian Mallaby has more.

Why react to the temporary corruption of a party by abandoning it outright? Lindsey's answer is that Republicans are not merely failing to live up to their principles; the principles have altered. The party has been virtually cleaned out of the Northeast; it has suffered setbacks in the Mountain West; it increasingly reflects the values of its stronghold in the South. As a result, it has lost its libertarian tinge and grown more religious and traditionalist.

There has always been a tension between Republican libertarians, who believe that individual choices should be unconstrained by received wisdom, and Republican traditionalists, who believe pretty much the opposite. In their history of the conservative movement, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge recall that Barry Goldwater believed Jerry Falwell deserved "a swift kick in the ass;" and Goldwater's wife, Peggy, helped to found Planned Parenthood in Arizona. But for a long time the two wings of the party could paper over these differences. Christian conservatives and libertarians agreed that misconceived government programs were harming traditional values. Schools forced sex education on children. The tax system and the welfare system penalized marriage.

Those days are gone in part to the souring mood about Iraq. Is this what the neocons have wrought in the Big Tent GOP?

Marginal Revolution has more on the libertarian-conservative fissure with comments.

But Reason's Hit and Run Katherine Mangu-Ward doesn't trust the Democrats.

Meanwhile Pat Buchanan, thumping away, says the Republicans and Bush lost big but conservatives did not.