The Iowa caucuses highlighted a little-known fact about the Republican Party: it is really a coalition of three different groups. First and best-known are the “conservatives,” represented by Rick Santorum and the 25 percent of Iowa caucuses who voted for him. Conservatives tend to be fiscally conservative, but are more reliably socially conservative, meaning they tend to oppose such things as gay rights, abortion, and recreational drugs.
The second group is the libertarians, represented by Ron Paul and the 21 percent of the caucuses who voted for him (although Gary Johnson, who was ignored by the media and the party, is closer to being a true libertarian). Perhaps even more than conservatives, the libertarians are hard-core fiscal conservatives. But they are social liberals, favoring gay rights, legalization of recreational drugs, and (for the most part) legalized abortions.
The difference between conservatives and libertarians was brought out in the late 1960s, whenDavid Nolan created the Nolan chart, defining political beliefs along two axes instead of the traditional “liberal-conservative” axis. Nolan’s chart pointed out that the fact that someone was fiscally conservative or liberal did not necessarily predict whether they would be socially conservative or liberal.
This led a group called Advocates for Self Government to publish the world’s smallest political quiz, whose ten simple questions allowed people to place themselves in the liberal, conservative, or libertarian (socially liberal and fiscally conservative) groups. Nolan called the fourth group–people who were socially conservative and fiscally liberal–”populist” even though there is no party or political movement currently going by that name.
When the world’s smallest political quiz was introduced, Cato Institute founder Ed Crane pointed out that there should probably be a third axis having to do with foreign affairs. At one extreme of this axis, people oppose U.S. involvement in foreign military operations except in self-defense or when directly attacked. At the other extreme, people support U.S. military actions for humanitarian reasons or to promote democracy in countries now ruled by dictators.
Advocates of the latter view call themselves neoconservatives and form the third group that makes up the Republican Party. This is a strange name because historically it was liberals, starting with Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, who advocated U.S. military action that was not strictly for self defense, while it was conservatives such as Henry Cabot Lodge and Robert Taft who opposed such actions. It was only after the Viet Nam war that people on the left tended to oppose military actions that were not strictly for self defense while people on the right began to support them. The name neoconservative is even stranger considering that the first people to use that name were social and fiscal liberals who considered themselves hawks.
George W. Bush famously campaigned for president saying he did not support “nation building” (a neoconservative concept), but then allowed the neocons to run his administration. Today, Mitt Romney and the 25 percent of Iowa caucus voters who support him are the best representatives of the neocon wing of the Republican party. Like the original neocons, Romney is a fiscal liberal–supporting government health care–and a social liberal–supporting such concepts as smart growth–and a foreign affairs hawk.
As the Antiplanner has previously noted, the real agenda of the tea parties was to toss the neocons out of the Republican Party and rebuild the Reagan coalition of conservatives and libertarians. The successful nomination of Mitt Romney as the Republican’s presidential candidate would be a failure of the tea parties and that coalition. If that happens, conservatives and libertarians would be better off allowing Obama to win a second term while they concentrate their efforts on having Tea Party Republicans take control of Congress.
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