Tom’s Big Picture

The real conservative movement has always been a coalition between libertarians and social conservatives.  Both groups have been sold out and used at times by Republican Party elites.  Many leaders of the grassroots have themselves been grafted into the Washington establishment.

The mainstream libertarians castigate Paul for daring to declare that Caesar has no clothes: every tax cut achieved by the libertarian wing of the party has been neutralized by the hidden tax of inflation, as the government simply prints the money they need instead of taxing it.

The evangelical social conservatives delude themselves of their influence.  About the only measurable difference they’ve made is starting a war with Iraq, half-convinced Saddam was the anti-Christ, even dusting off the Nostradamus to justify their pre-ordained conclusion.  Devoid of hope and alienated from the culture of their country, much of Christian activism has become a rapture cult about as practically relevant as the Heaven’s Gate people out in California.  For if all hope is pinned in the rapture, then if they are wrong about the rapture, the strategy is suicide.  We have the Iraq War because the power elite (or rather the Likud wing of the power elite) wanted it for Israel, and American evangelicals served as the useful idiots to move it along.  Witness Pat Robertson’s early endorsement of Rudy Giuliani, cross-dresser and supporter of gay rights and abortion, as an example of evangelicals’ decadence in their Israel Uber Alles delusions.

And now it is 2008.  Libertarians and social conservatives, having abandoned principle long ago, get bland liberal John McCain as the nominee, a recycled rerun of Bob Dole (the scary thing is that unlike Dole, McCain is crazy, and will probably win against the Democratic nominee, as the idiot white liberals indulge their multi-culti fantasies by nominating Barack Hussein Obama; they had their shot at a southern white boy, John Edwards or even good-old-boyish Bill Richardson, who would have fooled enough of our people to have defeated McCain, but their fantasies got the better of them).

The continued enthusiasm for Paul and Huckabee, however, represents a remnant among Republican primary voters.  This remnant has denied McCain majorities in many states and is a thorn in his side as he tries to convince us that this year’s choice between two evils is not a toss-up.

The enthusiasm for Huckabee, as I’ve documented, is unwarranted, but represents a healthy form of identity politics among evangelicals.  He’s our ess-oh-bee, dang it, and we want to be represented by him rather than a Yankee from Massachusetts.

Paul, on the other hand, has very much to admire.  Problem is, he advocates an early Virginian and Jacksonian libertarianism with the language of a third-generation German Pennsylvanian.  Germans are a great people, arguably among the greatest, but theirs is a culture with low emotional content, an objective voice so-to-speak and this comes across with Paul.  Everything is abstract, to the point that he would not attack his opponents.  To backcountry Celts, this smacks of weakness.  To my Celtic brain, if they’re so wrong, why the heck are you so nice to them?   We’ve got Martin Luther passive-aggressively nailing theses to churches (a very German thing to do) when we really need William Wallace to work up the Celts for war and unite the clans.

Paul is a great man, the greatest in our government, but I don’t think he is the man.  He’s too great, really, to ever lead a mass democratic movement.  Doesn’t he know you can’t just go around telling the truth anymore?  I mean, he just came out and said that we were to blame for putting ourselves into a ant’s nest in Iraq.  We started a land war in Asia and we’re bleeding to death financially from the occupation.  But, Mr. Paul, don’t you know you can’t go around saying that?  Blame it on the neocons or another scapegoat, but never tell the voter he is responsible for self-inflicting his problems.  That’s not a winner politically.

Divided into libertarian and evangelical camps, this remnant will continue to suffer defeat.  As a member of both groups, I think we need each other.  It’s clear at this point that the libertarians have the money; Paul gets about 10% of the vote but has more money than anyone.  The evangelicals have the votes, but Huckabee can barely keep his campaign afloat.

But what we really need is a leader who understands both groups and the two most powerful themes in politics: us versus them and something for nothing.  This person will have to be astute enough to sell something to the American people that they don’t really want to buy, yet be pure enough to deliver on it once in office.

Rather like someone innocent as a dove and wise as a serpent.  The odds are against it, but to paraphrase Huckabee, we’re long past the point where the odds were for us.  We need a miracle.