Is GOP Foreign Policy Getting More Libertarian, or Is it Just Anti-Democrat Opportunism?

That was, more or less, the question bandied about in The
Independents aftershow on
Monday, featuring former Reagan-administration deputy defense
secretary K.T.
McFarland and New York Times Magazine politics
reporter Robert Draper, author of a
recent profile of the libertarian movement:

When I
interviewed Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.)
one year ago, during the run-up to what many believed was
imminent U.S. bombing of Syria, he assessed the foreign policy
divide within the GOP like this:

We’re losing, on a good day, 70/30 among the Republicans. But we
win every day among the grassroots, probably 80/20, 90/10.

In the case of Syria, the Rand Paul wing emerged
politically victorious that time. But as any cursory

search of the Reason archives will attest, the foreign
policy civil war within the GOP is fierce and ongoing, and will
include
constant Republican attacks on Paul, as well as
periodic hawkish
embraces of Hillary Clinton.

So I reckon that the 30/70 math still applies in 2014, and is
subject to even worse showing within two years, no matter how

anti-interventionist the public may be trending. Why?

Because of the nature of power and tribalism. That is to say,
when your tribe’s not in power, you tend to be more sympathetic to
anti-authoritarian critiques. Republicans in 2014 are with a
straight face
suing the president over the abuse of executive power, less
than six years after a Republican presidency that exuberantly
expanded the stuff on basic principle. On the reverse angle,
Democrats in 2014 are psyched up to support a hawk with a lousy
civil-liberties record not six years after filling every available
airwave criticizing the “imperial presidency” of Darth W.
Cheney.

It is in that sense that I believe David Frum is probably
correct in his otherwise (in my judgment) incorrect
assessment of Draper’s piece, when he says this about the
GOP:

The “libertarian moment” will last as long as, and no longer
than, it takes conservatives to win a presidential election
again.

That’s assuming, of course, that the winner ain’t Rand Paul….

There’s a reason why critics from both
right and
left want to quarantine societal libertarianism as a finite
political subset within the Republican Party: That way it can just
go away, next time the electoral pendulum swings. And they may be
right, in the narrow sense of how professional pols actually behave
once in power.

But skepticism about U.S. military interventionism runs a lot
deeper throughout the country as a whole than among the people most
invested in two-party politics. (See pollster Scott Rasmussen’s
interesting 2012 piece for Reason, “Ready
to Cut Military Spending,” for some details about that
politician/populace gap.) As Jesse Walker
wrote here last month,

In 2014, more Americans are skeptical about military action than
at any other time in the last half-century. It is not impossible to
get a majority to back certain sorts of intervention abroad. But it
hasn’t been this hard for a long time. 

Late last year, the Pew Research Center released one
of its periodic surveys of American attitudes about foreign policy.
Fifty-two percent of the country, a record high, endorsed the idea
that “the U.S. should mind its own business internationally and let
other countries get along the best they can on their own.” Only 38
percent disagreed. This marked a striking change: Even in 1976, a
year after the fall of Saigon, the people who disagreed with the
statement narrowly outnumbered the ones who agreed with it. And
Pew’s results are not out of step with the data in other surveys.
When Politico published a poll of
likely voters in battleground races this week, for example, 67
percent said that American military actions “should be limited to
direct threats to our national security.”

One of the main points that Nick Gillespie and I emphasized in

The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix
What’s Wrong With America, is that new technologies,
combined with the both the growing number of political independents
and the growing deployment of independence as a political
weapon, make it harder and harder for the two parties to govern in
ways measurably out of sync with their respective bases.

So yes, the GOP’s recent increase in intervention-skepticism
should not be trusted even one little bit. But in a presidential
election featuring an “unapologetically
hawkish” front-runner, there’s a significant opening for a
candidate with foreign policy attitudes more in line with the
American people. A contest like that has the potential to be more
than mere “moment.”