The Right’s Right
ryan sager
…No, the arrogance that will prove problematic, ultimately, was that directed at the libertarian-leaning conservatives by the social conservatives. The message in that regard was clear: We Christians can do this alone, y’all who ain’t down with J.C. best be running along.
That was the message when Tamar Jacoby of the Manhattan Institute, who was on a panel to defend President Bush’s proposed immigration reforms (supported by no less a conservative institution than The Wall Street Journal), was loudly booed by the anti-immigrant crowd. That was the message when a representative of the Log Cabin Republicans was booed and then asked by a student, “You people [homosexuals, that is] already have the right to live together, you got the sex, what else do you people want?”
In fact, if there was anything particularly striking about this year’s [Conservative Political Action Conference], it is to just what extent Republicans have given up being the party of small government and individual liberty.
Make absolutely no mistake about it: This party, among its most hard-core supporters, is not about freedom anymore. It is about foisting its members’ version of morality and economic intervention on the country. It is, in other words, the mirror image of its hated enemy.
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All of this met with wild applause from the audience. And so there we have the most conservative of conservatives fully buying into economic protectionism — not to mention the minimum wage, which a past generation rightly saw as a destructive and outrageous intrusion into the free labor market.Then there was the speech by Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, another CPAC rock star. Santorum made the revealing choice of referring to marriage as “the ultimate public good” — i.e. a product or service that the government must provide because the free market won’t. [more]