I didn’t start out as a young adult libertarian. In fact, I never really gave politics too much thought until late high school or early college. You know, around the time that I was eligible to vote. As a very typical young voter, who happened to be a devout Christian as well, I easily identified with the Republican party that year as they picked George W. Bush. Really I had enough of watching the immorality on display on the Democrat side. I guess you could say I was an early values voter.
I had no real firm grasp on conservative thought and reason. I really had only listened to Rush Limbaugh before then, so that was about it. To be honest, he’s an entertaining talk show host, but he tends to lack a lot of meat when it comes to conservative thought. It just isn’t his style to bore us with the kind of things I enjoy writing about I guess. So I made typical rookie mistake of believing that “Republican” means “conservative.” Reality hit me hard later on.
Throughout much of Bush’s presidency, I was a conservative. I firmly believed that the Republicans were doing what conservatives wanted them to do. I voted for Bush again because I firmly believed in his message at the time and fooled myself into believing he was conservative. Little did I know that his brand of conservatism was nothing more than a ruse to dupe people like me into voting for him. He did have some conservative plans, but he was largely a Statist in disguise. Or he believed that what he was doing was along conservative lines.
Then I began to see how the Federal government wasn’t getting any smaller. The Republicans had the Presidency and Congress for four solid years. The Democrats had gotten more done with much less. Why were they not reducing the size of government? Why were they not following the United States Constitution when it come to the powers outlined for them?
In 2006, I was disillusioned, but still voted Republican by and large. I did believe that George Allen was a solid conservative voice, that he was unfairly attacked by a bunch of monkey-men from Jim Webb’s camp. Incidentally, he didn’t hesitate to embarrass the state of Virginia by making a scene with President Bush. That’s another story though. The point was that Republicans lost in 2006 and in my mind they fully deserved it. They failed to deliver anything to the conservative base that resembled anything related to our interests. They lost because they failed to live up to their party’s platform.
I thought they would’ve learned the lesson and come to us in an effort to inquire as to what went wrong. Instead they scoffed at us. In 2008, I became an ardent Ron Paul supporter. It wasn’t an easy choice to make. His statements on foreign policy were unnerving, but considering the length of the “wars” we were fighting, I believed that we could pull our troops out and be OK. Meanwhile, conservatives continued to support Statists like Huckabee, Romney, and McCain. They defaulted like they always do.
I had always believed in the individual and felt that while conservatism’s ideas were noble ones, they always seemed to fall short when implemented. You hardly ever heard talk radio personalities mentioning the unconstitutional nature of our Federal government. And so, I turned my back and looked out toward the only ideology that truly believes in the United States Constitution. In essence, libertarianism is the only ideology that has any regard for the system that was established by the founders.
And so while I enjoy listening to the likes of Rush Limbaugh, I firmly believe that they don’t do enough. It is time we stopped arguing like liberals when trying to make conservative points and simply call the actions of our current government what they really are: unconstitutional.