A man named Dr. Paul beat an establishment candidate in a Republican primary to join a “revolution” in Washington that was a mixture of consistent anti-statist ideology and a reflexive conservative populist uprising against a Democratic president.
It did not take long before the revolution was quelled, in no small part by its own leaders. Big government conservatism returned and Republicans began jacking up federal spending on programs they not long ago promised to cut or even abolish outright.
No, not Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., though I could just as easily be writing about him. His father, Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, was lured out of retirement to return to Congress — and the GOP, a few years removed from serving as the Libertarian Party’s presidential nominee — by the “Republican Revolution,” a “libertarian moment” ahead of its time.
Even the Democratic president all these would-be budget-balancers and entitlement reformers ran to slay declared the “era of big government” was over.
In his inaugural column for the Atlantic, conservative writer Kevin Williamson argues that the more recent libertarian moment associated with the younger Paul was behind the times. “The GOP finds itself in the throes of a populist convulsion, an ironic product of the fact that the party that long banqueted on resentment of the media now is utterly dominated by the alternative media constructed by its own most dedicated partisans,” he writes. “It is Sean Hannity’s party now.”
What do the free-market investment newsletters say about buying low and selling high? Around the time the New York Times Magazine, Politico and Williamson’s current employer ran their big pieces exploring whether libertarianism had reached the big time, I published a book about the political prospects for limited government.
I didn’t exactly sugarcoat where things stood — President Barack Obama had just been re-elected as I finished writing, and I conceded the deck was stacked in favor of those who wanted to grow government — but I had a few suggestions for how things could be better in the future.
Compete in Republican primaries against low-quality, squishy incumbents. Try to replace them with rabble-rousing, anti-establishment alternatives who were willing to rock the boat a little bit. Alter the political incentives for the GOP incumbents who survived. Run as populists.
What could possibly go wrong?
Clearly, things did not work out as I had imagined or hoped. The immediate future belonged not to Rand Paul but Donald Trump, whose take on populism was rather different than the free-market variety I proposed.
Whoops.
Still, the libertarian moment was exactly that — a moment. Merriam Webster’s online dictionary defined that to mean “a minute portion or point of time,” “a comparatively brief period of time.” Few of us were predicting the dawn of a “libertarian era.”
The specific politicians who were considered to usher in comparatively libertarian politics themselves fused their politics with conservative populism. Paul was arguably both more of a libertarian and a right-wing populist than his son, for both good and for ill.
In 2016, movement conservatives had their best opportunity since 1980 to beat an establishment Republican for the party’s presidential nomination. Trump dashed it. If he hadn’t run, perhaps a Rand Paul still couldn’t have capitalized. Maybe Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, could have, however.
But the Old Right conservatism of Robert Taft gave way to the more New Deal-friendly and interventionist “Modern Republicanism” of Dwight Eisenhower (the man who was president when National Review wanted to stand athwart history, yelling “Stop!”).
Barry Goldwater was as libertarian in his economics as anyone since Calvin Coolidge when he won the Republican presidential nomination in 1964. He was destroyed by Lyndon Johnson of Great Society fame.
Goldwater was followed by Richard Nixon, who was re-elected in a 49-state landslide — and imposed wage and price controls, created the Environmental Protection Agency, and declared we were all Keynesians now.
Nixon was himself eventually followed by Ronald Reagan, who was also re-elected in a 49-state landslide, picking off the one state that had voted for George McGovern in 1972. He was no libertarian, as the drug war shows, but neither was he a Keynesian.
One President Bush raised taxes and won a war in Iraq, another increased spending and lost one, dashing a generation’s trust in the GOP’s national-security competence.
Sean Hannity cheered when Bush 43 launched that war. It was his party then. He cheered when Donald Trump denounced it.
Russell Kirk liked to write about the “permanent things.” The phrase seldom described political victories or defeats.
We know under what conditions limited-government conservatism thrives — opposition — and that it recedes when Republicans get to write the checks. Can an opposition figure someday survive long enough to seize their governing moment?
Nobody can be certain. The political incentives in a mass democracy and deficit-funded welfare state favor those who call for immediate government action in response to any crisis. That was also true when the Republican-controlled postwar “Do Nothing Congress” sacrificed its majorities to trim Washington.
All it takes is a set of Republican leaders willing to take as many political risks repealing something like Obamacare as Democrats were willing to pass it in the first place.
Those leaders did not exist in sufficient numbers after the last election. That was one moment. As those free-market investment newsletters also advise, past performance is no guarantee of future results.
