In all the vortex of commentary in the aftermath of the election, one argument in particular seems to me both plausible and troubling. I keep hearing people say, “The Republican Party has to go libertarian. Enough with social conservatism. Nobody wants it anymore. Christian America is dead and gone. We’ve got to promote an ideology of freedom, where the government just keeps its hands off all private matters, whether marriage or abortion or drugs or anything else. That will attract the younger voters.”
It’s conceivable, but I have a lot of trouble with it. Those who promote homosexual marriage have very poor track record of leaving alone the people who refuse to recognize it. They’re awfully prone to use laws to force acquiescence from businesspeople, or even churches, who don’t want to play that game. And I, personally, think that a society needs to privilege man-woman marriage in order to make it worthwhile for men to enter into marriages. Otherwise, men are congenitally inclined to wander away, and then the wife falls into the arms of the welfare state, which grows government, the very thing libertarianism wants to reduce.
I will never donate to a party that promotes abortion. And I consider drugs a societal danger. You may consider Amsterdam a paradise on earth, but I wouldn’t want to live there.
Still, a libertarian regime might be more tolerant of Christians, all in all, than the socialist one we seem to headed to.
In either case, the old republic as we knew it is gone, it would seem.
