Republicans must join the 21st century

A look at the campaign websites for the Republican candidates in Nevada shows the number one issue is to stop the proposed Nevada Margins Tax. What else would a party whose sole reason for existence is to limit the size of government be expected to do? One Northern Nevada Republican senator has nine “NO!” issues on his campaign literature.

Many are now asking what else Republicans have besides “Just Say No!” The era of William F. Buckley is over, and in 2014, history has already run past his attempt to stand athwart it with a Stop Sign. The small government accomplishments of the Republican Party are strikingly similar to the mediocre accomplishments of the public school system they vilify. People have elected Republican presidents and congresses and governors galore, yet government has continued to grow only marginally slower than when the Democrats are in power. In fact, the last time the Republicans held both the Congress and the White House, government grew on right-wing steroids.

If any leg of the three-legged conservative stool—defense, fiscal policy and social issues—is being sawed off, it’s the social conservative leg. The youth who attended the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) this March are not your father’s Republicans. The millennial generation is the first generation to grow up with friends who have never been in the closet. More than half of Republicans under 45 favor legalizing weed and gay marriage.

But older Republicans continue to demonstrate they just don’t like people different than they are. Controversies over GoProud and Atheist Republicans at CPAC coincided with clumsy attempts to carve out discrimination law exceptions for religious belief. Other Republicans wasted political capital passing new abortion restrictions that will never pass judicial review.

This year’s CPAC showered Sen. Rand Paul with love, and he won the presidential straw poll running away again. Sen. Paul is making a concerted effort at minority outreach, and while the CPAC panels on the drug war and gay marriage leaned very heavily libertarian, the workshop on minority outreach was sadly nearly empty.

Conservatives have a belief system based on appreciation of established order and social hierarchy. Yet they also claim to believe in free enterprise, which is marked by social mobility and creative destruction. Donald Trump unfortunately got CPAC applause for warning that “immigrants are coming for your jobs”—as if there are only a limited number of jobs and you own yours—and worse that “immigrants” (code for Latinos) will never, ever vote Republican.

Conservatives seem to be at once for freedom and against it, for small government except when they are for big government.

Republicans were warned that most Latinos want an orderly and fair immigration policy, including a secure border, but the one thing they will not support is mass deportations. Yet Republicans spend most of their time talking about fences and barbed wire and self deportation and not a lot about an actual market-based immigration policy that improves on the freedom of mobility that labor markets and human flourishing require.

Worse, they want all American employees in a federal database that will likely produce more false positives for American workers than there are illegals, while making hiring a federal privilege. Can anyone believe their outrage at the new federal medical databases that Obamacare is creating when they want to do the same for immigration policy?

Republicans will have to decide what conservatism means today or continue to bleed party membership. I am betting they will have to move in a more libertarian direction to be a successful national party again.