I mean, this is a group [Republicans], don't forget, that gave its presidential straw ballot to Ron Paul, Ron Paul, and Rand Paul and Rand Paul. So, they have abandoned what - their libertarian values and instincts to embrace [Donald] Trump.
f you analyze it I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism. I think conservatism is really a misnomer just as liberalism is a misnomer for the liberals - if we were back in the days of the Revolution, so-called conservatives today would be the Liberals and the liberals would be the Tories. The basis of conservatism is a desire for less government interference or less centralized authority or more individual freedom and this is a pretty general description also of what libertarianism is.
The differences between Rand Paul and millennials are vast - not just on economics, but on social issues that matter to young people, too.
Rand Paul tried hard to upstage Donald Trump at the first debate, talking tough about his guns and his right not to register them. But with his pixie-ish perm, Paul does not impress me as the gunslinger type. Rand Paul is the RuPaul of politics. He would do better to defend his right to carry an unregistered blow-dryer and curling irons.
Sen. Rand Paul is a Different Kind of Republican. He will drag the party, kicking and screaming, toward a new kind of conservatism that appeals more to today's youth, who embrace liberty and are skeptical of foreign intervention.
Donald Trump descends in a very powerful way from longstanding tenets of American conservatism, they're just not the movement conservatism we associate with Reagan.
The very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism.
For nearly a decade Democrats have sought a religious wedge issue that could separate big chunks of white evangelical voters from their Republican home. Now they've found it, and are thrusting at the Social Darwinist/Ayn Rand underbelly of American conservatism.
Some may try to argue that conservatism and libertarianism are contradictory perspectives. But I disagree.
If Rand Paul does run for president in 2016, his campaign will have a credibility that Ron Paul's three bids for the Oval Office lacked.
If libertarianism were easy to explain, and it weren't easy to exaggerate the effects of libertarianism, I think it would have been done already. Many many very intelligent people have applied themselves to crafting an agenda that people could grab ahold of. But the problem of course is that libertarianism isn't political. It is kind of anti-political. It wants to take a lot of things out of the political arena.
There's an oft-used shorthand for the technologist's view of the world. It is assumed that libertarianism dominates Silicon Valley, and that isn't wholly wrong. High-profile devotees of Ayn Rand can be found there.
I remember a time at Yale when my work was being critiqued by Paul Rand. Mr. Rand told me only to use Helvetica as a display face never in text, then he squinted, leaned in, and whispered in my ear, "because Helvetica looks like dogshit in text".
In my early twenties the nature of conservatism itself changed. When I identified as a fourteen-year-old conservative, it was closer to what we today think of as libertarianism - conservatism, at least for me, had been defined by Jeffersonian credos like "the best governed are the least governed" and "I have sworn eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man" that were very idealistic and romantic to a kid.
To the credit of the Republican Party and the conservative movement, people have been expelled or marginalized. Pat Buchanan in the '90s. Ron Paul, Rand Paul in the first decade of this century. Bill Buckley famously expelled the Birchers in 1964. It's been a movement that's tried to maintain its boundaries.
Social conservatism, business conservatism: the one side constitutes the other, like some infernal Mobius strip.