The War That Will Split the GOP

The young Paul-ites who manned the ramparts at CPAC—and delivered a stunning victory for him in the straw poll over Establishment favorite Mitt Romney—are an edgier sort that the coat-and-tie Buckley-ite young conservatives of an earlier generation. This was the antiwar crowd by way of Ayn Rand, organized under the banner of Young Americans for Liberty. Their signs protested the Patriot Act, proclaimed that “gun registration is a gateway drug,” and of course argued we should “End the Fed.” One bumper sticker I saw summed up the whole philosophy/ psychology: “Paper money => Bubble => Recession => Stimulus => Inflation => Price Controls => Shortages => Riots => Troops on Your Streets.” One of their sponsored lectures at CPAC declared Abraham Lincoln a “foe of liberty” for suspending habeas corpus and other assorted anti-Confederate sins; affiliated magazines asked “Has the Communist Manifesto Replaced the Constitution?,” while another offered an admiring multi-page profile of Senator Robert Taft, which has to be a first for this millennium.
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Taft, a defender and admirer of Joe McCarthy, wrote that “We are certainly being dragged toward war and bankruptcy and socialism all at once”—a line that could have been lifted from the latest Glenn Beck broadcast.
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Short-term partisan calculus will likely cause Republican leaders to encourage an uneasy alliance with the neo-isolationists because they hope to benefit from their aggressive dislike of President Obama in the mid-term elections. But their increased influence on the GOP could prove disastrous for a serious 2012 presidential nominee who will have to campaign as being “strong on national security” and confront an ongoing non-optional war against Islamist terrorism. Sixty years after the Eisenhower vs. Taft primary, the debate will be the same—internationalism or isolationism—and so will the stakes: General-election victory or defeat.

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