Many people claim that Republicans have moved to the right. Democrats like to claim this, so as to paint Republicans as extremists or as anti-government.
Actually, Republicans have moved away from the OLD RIGHT, as Murray Rothbard accurately told us. This means they have moved to the left. This is why Laurence Vance can continually lambaste them for the profound gap between their rhetoric and their actions in supporting statism, wars, government regulations and huge government spending. (Social issues, in my view, are not the critical factors in any party with regard to left and right, except insofar as the state attempts to regulate and prohibit certain behaviors rather than keeping its nose out of people’s business.)
The necons who have joined the Republicans or infiltrated them are leftists and internationalists, who advocate interventions. Some of them do so because they believe in American government taking moral positions in the societies and politics of other countries. Like Wilsonianism, this idea of making the world safe or creating democracies everywhere or destroying bad guys in power or creating revolutions is all leftist in orientation as contrasted with the Old Right.
Ron Paul tried to move the Republican Party back to the Old Right positions and away from big government Republican moderates and wild-eyed neocons. Rand Paul, despite his differences with his father, is on that page too. His first challenge, if he wants the nomination, is to steer the Republican Party away from its left orientation, where it cannot outcompete Democrats. His second challenge is to create an appeal to enough Americans to win an election. His problem will be running away from the record of Republicans in the past 50 years or so.
10:17 am on February 9, 2014
