Lets roll the clock back a few months, say, to May. Libertarianism seemed to be gaining traction with many in the GOP, Rand Paul, running a campaign as a libertarian-ish Republican candidate for the GOP nomination for President, was polling well, and the Republicans en toto seemed to be coalescing their focus on the major issues facing the nation. The sluggish economy, the chaos wrought by the Affordable Care Act, the unbridled power grabs by regulatory agencies like the EPA, and President Obama’s hubristic accretion of power into the Executive Branch via his “pen and phone” were drawing the attention they should from the GOP faithful. A libertarian might have reason to hope the GOP would break free, just a bit, from its reactionary ways and embrace just enough liberty to make a positive difference. That hope was a glimmer, it was faint, it recognized improbability, but it was there.
Along came the summer. Obama sent a signal that illegal immigrants are to be more welcomed into the US – or at least that’s how the conservative press reported it. The Supreme Court ruled that the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment covered gay marriage. And Donald Trump, as blustery and self-promoting as ever, threw his hat into the GOP presidential nomination ring. That hat landed with a great big kaboom, and suddenly everything changed.
No longer were the GOP faithful focusing on the economy, or the regulatory state, or the Affordable Care Act, or the size of government. Instead, they embraced the Donald, whose message was “I’ll round up and deport all the illegals.” Illegal immigration, they proclaim, is an invasion, a crime wave, and a movement to fundamentally transform the US into a Latin country. Meanwhile, they raged, and raged, and raged some more, about gay marriage, and found an unlikely poster child in a county clerk in Kentucky. Gay marriage, they proclaim, is the doom of society, the final nail in the coffin of Christianity in the US, the death knell of the traditional family, and the end of all the values they hold dear. Such hyberbolic doomsaying is normally the province of Malthusians, Book-of-Revelation types, enviro-leftist fanatics and itinerant revivalists, but a good chunk of the Right has gone all-in on this one.
Lets take a deep breath, however, and look at some numbers. The current population of the US is 319 million. Wikipedia cites the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender population of the United States at about 9 million people, and other sources suggest that’s about right. The most widely accepted estimates of the illegal immigrant population in the US come in at 11-12 million. Together, these two populations total about 21 million people, or about 7% of the nation’s total.
Seven percent.
We could easily discount this figure quite a bit, first by noting that 60% of illegals have been here a decade or (much) longer and that the Republic has survived their presence, then by observing that (excluding what may have happened the last few months) the illegal population has been slowly ebbing since 2005, and finally considering that not all gays are going to be getting married (only about half the total adult population is married as it is), but even if we don’t, the Right’s expenditure of so much energy on the “doom” that seven percent of the population is purported to be bringing to the nation’s integrity is just irrational.
Rationality isn’t a big driver in politics, unfortunately, else libertarianism would be much more popular. Instead, we have the equivalent of a professional wrestler leading the GOP pack, primarily through talking tough and declaring himself to be the guy who’s going to lay the smackdown on, well, everything. Illegal immigrants, legal immigration, career politicians, Mexico, China, ISIS, all are going to wither under The Donald’s emphatic You’re fired! slug line.
Is Trump’s message one that’s likely to carry him to the GOP nomination? If you asked me a month ago, I’d have said “no chance,” and shared my predictions that he’ll fade as the emotional appeal wears off and conversations get more serious. But, now? Anything seems possible.
If he’s nominated, can he win? That’s a different question. Any GOP candidate will have to draw from voter ranks outside the party faithful, even if all those faithful remain faithful to a man whose ideas on economics and trade have precious little connection to conservative principles. While some will be swayed by the “gotta beat Hillary/Bernie/Joe no matter what” argument, there will be people whose noses can’t be pinched hard enough to tolerate a Trump vote.
As for the nontraditional voters, the party’s embrace of this seven percent delusion is going to turn many off. We can presume that not many gays would voting GOP anyway, no matter who the nominee is, and jokes and slippery-slope worries aside, illegals can’t vote. But, there are many others who will look at the GOP’s continued dyspepsia over illegal immigration and gay marriage, and conclude that the party has gone down the rabbit hole of homophobic white nativism. Those are the votes that will sting when they stay home or vote for someone else.
Libertarians, especially, are likely to abandon even the tiniest thought of backing the GOP should the Repubs continue down this path. We’ve seen libertarianism becoming more popular and mainstream of late, especially among young people, and I and others have argued that the GOP could capture a lot of those minds and votes with a shift in that direction on some issues. Rather than compromise in search of common ground and in order to build the voting base, though, the GOP is prioritizing the issues most antithetical to libertarian beliefs. Come election time, the Repubs will insist that the libertarians must vote for whomever the GOP nominee is, and when we don’t they’ll call us stupid names like LIBertarian and liberaltarian, or tell us to just come out and admit that we love Hillary and Obama. I suppose that’s what passes for cleverness or wit over on that side of the divide.
The rise of Rand Paul’s polling numbers a few months ago offered some glimmer of hope that the nation could be rescued from rapacious government – a rescue that would be remarkable in that the past offers scant examples of such a possibility. Their subsequent decline and the embrace of the idea that gay marriage and illegal immigrants are what’s going to destroy the country – this seven percent delusion – by so many in the GOP ranks has smashed that hope on the jagged rocks of history.
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