The Future of the Republicans

[NVMojo]

by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

Journalist Rick Perlstein recently asked for my forecast on the future of the Republican Party. It's an important question. American political culture takes election victory to be the ratification of truth, which is why this question is usually addressed from the point of view of whether the party will continue to hold power. I would rather address the issue of what power has come to mean to the Republicans: namely, everything.

The Republican love of liberty, which seemed to be a sincere impulse of the party's core during the 1990s, has been reduced to mere sloganeering. After many decades of balancing its ideological contradictions, the culture of the party – its leadership, activists, interest groups, and intellectual backers – has fully embraced power in all forms.

Now, pointing this out is akin to mentioning the elephant in the living room, the one which some of the guests welcome and some have decided to ignore. For the latter group, here is a partial litany of what the Bush administration has done by way of using and expanding government power: the Patriot Act, the Patriot Act II (as part of Intelligence Reform), No Child Left Behind, Medicare drug benefits, the Transportation Safety Administration, and the Department of Homeland Security, not to mention two major wars that have cost hundreds of billions, and left only destruction and chaos in their wake. Government spending in Bush's first term soared more than 29%, twice Clinton's average.

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