{"id":24677,"date":"2014-03-14T08:32:09","date_gmt":"2014-03-14T13:32:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=24677"},"modified":"2014-03-14T08:32:09","modified_gmt":"2014-03-14T13:32:09","slug":"cpac-is-desperately-fantastically-magisterially-uncool","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2014\/03\/14\/cpac-is-desperately-fantastically-magisterially-uncool\/","title":{"rendered":"CPAC is “desperately, fantastically, magisterially uncool”"},"content":{"rendered":"

James Delingpole<\/a> writes in The Spectator<\/em> that the Republican party is in danger of falling into the hands of libertarians:<\/p>\n

According to the kids at CPac \u2014 more than half the attendees are under 25 \u2014 the candidate of choice is Rand Paul. To get your free, red \u2018I stand for Rand\u2019 T-shirt at his exhibition-hall stall, you had to fill out a questionnaire stating where you stood on various libertarian issues (drugs, size of government, NSA surveillance etc). I got 190 Rand points out of a possible 200, so we\u2019re definitely in the same camp ideologically. But though his speech \u2014 whose somewhat laboured homage to Pink Floyd\u2019s (clunky, fifth-form political album) The Wall<\/em> didn\u2019t work nearly as well as Sarah Palin\u2019s homage to Dr Seuss\u2019s Green Eggs And Ham<\/em> \u2014 went down a storm with the libertarian PaulBots in the audience, I have my doubts as to whether its chewy earnestness will play quite so well in the wider America beyond.<\/p>\n

On the plus side, Rand Paul\u2019s politics definitely reflect where young America is headed. For example, he\u2019s pro-legalisation of marijuana (as were 63 per cent of the CPac voters), as I suspect \u2014 in the wake of the successful Colorado experiment \u2014 almost every state in the union will be by the end of the decade. And like his dad Ron, he\u2019s against America spending money it can\u2019t afford on being the world\u2019s policeman (52 per cent of those polled at CPac agreed it was time America\u2019s allies provided more of their own defence).<\/p>\n

But this puts it him very much at odds with the hawkish tendencies of the traditional conservative mainstream (as represented, on this issue, by the likes of Rubio and Cruz). Which doesn\u2019t augur well for a US conservative movement fully united in opposition to whichever candidate (Hillary?) the Democrats throw up for the 2016 presidential election. In America, as in Britain, conservatism has rarely looked more divided: neocons v. isolationists; libertarians v. SoCons; Tea Partiers v. Rino squishes. And, just like the People\u2019s Front of Judaea and the Judaean People\u2019s Front, they loathe one another even more than they do their natural enemies.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

James Delingpole writes in The Spectator that the Republican party is in danger of falling into the hands of libertarians: According to the kids at CPac \u2014 more than half the attendees are under 25 \u2014 the candidate of choice is Rand Paul. To get your free, red \u2018I stand for Rand\u2019 T-shirt at his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,28,53,13],"tags":[431,550,83,573,517],"class_list":["post-24677","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","category-media","category-politics","category-usa","tag-conservatism","tag-libertarianism","tag-marijuana","tag-randpaul","tag-republican"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-6q1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24677","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24677"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24677\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24678,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24677\/revisions\/24678"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24677"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24677"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24677"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}