(also read the eventual companion piece, "the reason I can't be a Democrat")
There are some internal contradictions in Republican ideology that I simply can't get around.
"Government doesn't do things well. Private industry can do things better than the government, so we should shrink the government and let private industry take over the things government used to do."
That's a pretty concise and agreed-upon distillation of Republican policy, right?
If that's so, how can Republicans be for the death penalty? If the government doesn't do things well, how can you entrust them with the right to take a life? Republicans freely admit that legislators are crooked. Do they think that DAs, prosecutors, and judges aren't?
And how can Republicans be for an expanded military presence? How can they be for drone strikes, which have killed the wrong people on many occasions, and which make children "fear the sky"? What about their support for military actions that primarily benefit certain contractors? Isn't that basically the government picking winners and losers in private industry? Or is the military a branch of the government that is above reproach?
How can they be against the legalization of drugs? They're against regulations on companies, but they're for regulations on what we can put in our bodies? They believe that the government should have a say in whether we can use things that grow naturally?
The one thing I can conclude from all this is that the real thing Republicans stand for is "making the government smaller, except for the parts that benefit us or hurt people who aren't us". Normally, someone who's well-off isn't getting the death penalty. And well-off people aren't going off to war, but they do own stock in military contractors. And they're not getting in trouble for having illegal drugs, but they do own stock in pharmaceutical companies.
If Republicans could be honest, and say "if government really does suck at everything, we need to cut back on the military," they would come a long way with me. Or if they said "government is too error-prone; we should get rid of the death penalty." Or "government is too intrusive; we should eliminate drug laws." But I think they're too beholden to a moral-values faction that does not ideologically belong with their libertarian wing.
They think that if they split, they would lose to Democrats. But the way I see it, if there was an honest libertarian party that didn't try to pull any of the Republicans' anti-science, anti-gay-marriage, pro-military-adventures bullshit, it would peel off a significant number of Democrats. They'd have a fighting chance.
