CPAC who?

Ron Paul won the straw poll. At last, our long national nightmare of unprincipled hypocritical conservatives is over?

Except Sarah Palin managed to get up in front of a collection of tea partiers and rail and ramble about the importance of the military establishment and the police state mentality. And almost every speaker at CPAC was a hypocrite, either directly supporting, voting for, or indirectly supporting through their contact with Wall Street, the very things they say were useless and wasteful programs carrying us toward socialism (this includes people like Glenn Beck, Palin, etc). Maybe these conservatives had discovered their religion of fiscal restraint by the time the auto bailouts took place. But it's kind of too late by then to fight for their honor and expect us to take it seriously. I myself have rather ambivalent views that would be difficult to explain to the average person and probably take me outside the Paul-ite consensus. I'd have preferred to use monetary policy to provide stimulus to the economy in the short run simply because the banking system required it in order to continue to function, and the banking paralysis was a key player in the aggregate demand drops we suffered both in 1931 and in 2008. A direct loan to specific banks however did not make sense and regardless of what Obama, Paulson, or anybody else in government says now or at the time, did not need to be done. Walking people through the economics behind the Great Depression is not exactly fun and will result in many a glazed look in the eyes of the listener. So it's much easier to look annoyed when the government "wastes" hundreds of billions of dollars, and I can accept that this is the public reaction. What's not funny about all that is that the same government that wasted that money is composed in part by the people who are now telling us how dumb that was who helped spend it. That shit is just aggravating.

The fault lines once you get outside of the fiscal messaging of restraint and budgetary control continue to mount. I don't take it seriously that Paul and his various acolytes were briefly accepted into the fold because the economics have taken the forefront for the time being. I am myself am now more of a Gary Johnson fan, I like my obscure cranks who are at least principled politically (makes them easier to judge at least without as much of the hypocrisies). Still, you need look no further than their own messages once you escape the budget to find out that nobody in the GOP/conservative wing of the country takes Paul's libertarianism/Constitutionalism seriously. Police powers: More, screw those inconvenient old mutterings in the 4th and 8th amendments. Have you seen those evil terrorists and criminals who hate us all? They don't care about our stupid laws and neither should we! Gays: Burn in hell and we need a federal amendment to protect the majority straight people! DADT: keep it. Flag burning: we need an amendment! Censorship: get Miley Cyrus off the air (we're not satisfied to rally against gangsta rap like idiots, we're now policing the Disney channel's content)! Schools: Must "teach the controversy"! (this is one point I get really annoyed with Paul and have thus moved onto the Johnson train. The Civil War/federalism debate and gold standard stuff doesn't get me hot either) War: Bomb Iran! America's global might and empire must remain supreme! Israel: can do no wrong! We should wear their colours proudly too! Immigrants: go back where you came from and speak American! These are basic policy positions of the various wings that make up the GOP establishment. Most of them are so radical to any sensible form of libertarian as to be considered insane.

And that division is even before you get to the point where most of that establishment presided over and indeed fueled a massive growth in government spending, even for their supposedly reviled social welfare purposes. Or the hypocrisy of claiming to be a party based on "limited government" while having and demanding ever more legal and enforceable power over the individual on the matters of social taste and culture. I'll give the Democrats some credit. They may not have been able to pass their agenda as successfully while in power so far, but at least most of the time they're honest about what they want to spend more of the taxpayer's money on when they're not in power (education, health care, etc). You ought to know what you're getting if you're measuring the policies on the merits of cost/benefits and so on (naturally in many cases I am opposed). Though I think we can agree the frustration and failure over the diminishing power and lack of accountability over "national security" policies has been a considerable and spectacular problem of that same messaging.

I can sympathize the common libertarian's feeling of being out in the political wilderness. It would be nice, for us anyway, if a major political movement took our views more seriously and actually tried to implement some of them in order to restrict the powers of the state in many crucial ways. But the reality is that neither political party is likely to be the vehicle in which to defeat a government too often beholden to powerful (often corporate) interests. The same party and movement that will embrace such views will fail to execute them once in office because it has major sponsors to keep happy rather than principles to uphold. Thus the appropriate place for the libertarian is generally to watch the lions try to kill each other and find it amusing when political parties spout off about different rhetorical things as though there was some great principle being violated all while they themselves did the same thing not long ago.

Watchdog. Gadfly. Annoying policy crank. "You want jobs?" Don't look at the government, they actually cannot do anything significant about it in the short run. That sort of thing. That's us. There's a reason that sort of view is unpopular. Maybe it's a little too cynical. Maybe it's a little too honest or principled to work in politics. You're supposed to promise the moon and deliver a fossilized piece of horse dung in politics and that's not something "we" do. If that's the case, so be it. Accept and embrace the role as the outsider and quit pretending that somehow all these unreasonable people who want government big enough to control our social lives or to provide for social welfare for all (not merely the poor and downtrodden), have somehow repented of these views and conceded their folly on the road to some libertarian Damascus. Reading Ayn Rand won't make these people convert into a libertarian overnight (and in my view, won't even make people into very good libertarians, it certainly doesn't appear to make people into very good people). So we should not get too excited when Paul wins a straw poll (with no real opposition anyway, I mean seriously, Romney? Palin?) or when Ayn Rand and Hayek book sales go up through the roof. Wait for the results to see if there's any real payoff from such things. Hayek and Rand have been around a long, long time in political terms. History has shown there won't be much of a victory parade worth mentioning.