When we write about the right these days, we tend to use a set of dated shorthand, overlapping categories drawn from different eras: neocons and tea partyers, libertarians and hawks, the establishment and the grassroots.
These terms don’t really fit. There are multiple strands of anti-government conservatism that predate the tea party movement, and kinds of hawkishness that have little to do with the neoconservative movement. This jargon is a mess.
I propose replacing the messy old terminology with a simple new vocabulary, one that has evolved organically, which has deep and consistent intellectual roots, no pejorative implications, and which political leaders use effortlessly and without reflecting. The division that will define the Republican Party for the next decade is the split between Liberty Conservatives and
Freedom Conservatives.
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The divide also maps to real, recent policy divides. For example: U.S. intervention in the Middle East; the sequester that capped federal spending; the National Security Agency’s spying on Americans.
Freedom Conservatives back the aggressive security measures and, relatedly, oppose the spending cap. Liberty Conservatives are deeply skeptical of bombing and spying, and drove support for limited spending.
Liberty Conservatives look, first of all, to America’s founding documents. They are deeply skeptical not just of the contemporary government but of 20th-century government action...
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Freedom Conservatives are as likely to look to Lincoln as to the founders, and they may admit to having ancestors who voted for Franklin Roosevelt and marched for civil rights. The history Freedom Conservatives want to re-litigate is that of the first decade of the 21st century.
They see a role for a strong government abroad, and they are, in some senses, the heirs to George W. Bush: Pragmatic about domestic policy, deeply concerned about America’s place in the world. Their backers include Wall Street financiers and defense contractors.
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Not every issue maps neatly onto this dichotomy, and politics is not about intellectual consistency or purity. The leaders of both groups, for instance, favor compromise on immigration; the Liberty grassroots oppose it. Conservatives of all stripes have, meanwhile, blasted Obama over the current crisis at the Mexican border. And there are differences of emphasis.
The Freedom Conservative elites — from Bill Kristol to John Bolton to Sheldon Adelson — care a lot about foreign policy.
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“Liberty seems to suggest the ‘don’t tread on me, get the government off my back, do your own thing’ outlook, while freedom seems to suggest a more public, civic set of entitlements, often linked to exercising power of some sort,” Foner said.
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Presidential politics is always where American political identity is shaped, and these two identities are set to mature in 2016. The candidates are lining up on both sides: The Freedom Conservatives are represented by Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, and Chris Christie; the Liberty Conservatives by Rand Paul and Ted Cruz.
“You’re seeing skirmishes all over the place, people testing each other,” Michael Goldfarb, a Freedom Conservative (and indeed, the guy who coined that phrase), told my colleague Rosie Gray.
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More:
http://www.buzzfeed.com/bensmith/the...of-republicans
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Originally Posted by Brian4Liberty
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