Hath hell frozen over?

The email came in from an aghast libertarian. "Hath hell frozen over" she inquired? After all, it seemed that Professor Robert "Robbie" George, part-hero, part-idol and assuredly the source of much of the conservative momentum here on campus, had declared his support for Senator Kerry in the race for the presidency. In a piece in the New Republic, an indictment of the President is unsealed on the charge of abandoning conservatism as it has been defined for the past.

Now, this entire exercise turned out to be, well, academic. There appear to be not one, but two influential conservatives who go by the name Robert George. The Princeton professor of politics seems to still be firmly in the Bush column. However, that does not discount the fact that given the charges levied against the President, he is unquestionably guilty as charged.

Robert A. George, the New York Post Columnist, indicts the President on two counts, one of violating the conservative mantra of small government and the other on accountability. I am not going to rehash his case but I have two quibbles with his argument.

First, the problem is not one of individual, so much as one of party. The Republican party today is a fundamentally different animal than it was 20 years ago, and leagues from what it was 40 years ago. Much to my chagrin, and to the chagrin of moderate Lincoln Chafee/Olympia Snowe-Republicans everywhere, our party is no longer one of liberty and freedom.

How can a party that passed the Patriot Act and supported the Anti-Sodomy Statute in Texas actively claim to support individual freedom? How can a party that touts government responsibility in good conscience allow no-bid contracts? How can it support an administration that has been completely unaccountable when it comes to an invasion of a faraway land? We allowed the administration to take its eye off of the ball in Tora Bora because the president told us to trust him. And now, this party refuses to hold the president and his counselors accountable for his failures in the war on Al-Qaeda (not terror, but that's another column), and in botching the invasion of Iraq pretty much from the start.

Over the past 15 years, the Republican Party has been co-opted by a new demographic. In his obviously partisan rantings, Thomas Frank recounts the political coup d'etat, where religious fundamentalism kicked General Eisenhower, Henry Kissinger and Nelson Rockefeller out of the driver's seat of the Republican Party. Faith, abortion and school prayer became the new issues that mobilized the base. Apparently states' rights, the federalist watchword that glued Republicanism together for a century, is significantly less important than prohibiting the government, any government, from tacitly endorsing homosexuality. Most bothersome of all is the ridiculous emphasis on faith as the be all end all guarantor of good governance.

We supported a president and became a party that values incorrect absolutism, whether correct or not. We're supposed to "thank God that he's the President" and not yet care when the he snaps, "look, I'm not going to debate it (the resolution to go to war in Iraq) with you" to a member of the United States Senate.

I don't want to beat a dead horse. But how best to solve the problem? I'm not sure that voting Kerry is the right answer here, as the President and the junior senator from Massachusetts are fundamentally similar people. Both have similar policies on Iraq, trade protectionism and spending. While the two candidates differ on how best to spend money, both favor enacting outlandishly expensive programs and do not feel the need to explain from where the money will come. Both support organization welfare (whether to pharmaceutical companies or organized labor) at the expense of the individual citizen. Voting for either candidate in this election expresses an inherent acceptance of these practices.

No, libertarianism may be the appropriate choice for this election (as much as it pains me to say it), but it also must be coupled with an understanding that our generation must promulgate change and bring back Republican values as they were. The best way to do that? Primary season 2006. Matthew Gold is a politics major from New York, N.Y. He can be reached at mggold@princeton.edu.