You may have seen the Harvard Salient profiled recently here at College Insurrection. I was perusing the site today and found this post about conservatives and libertarianism very interesting.

Conservatives and the New Libertarianism

It may be safely said that last week was the worst for the conservative coalition in some time, arguably even worse than Election Day 2012, opening as it did the floodgates for the federal validation of gay marriage.  The termination of Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act is cold comfort at best.  Nevertheless, last week’s court decisions do suggest a direction for American conservatives and the GOP moving forward.

Both the Voting Rights Act decision and the DOMA decision, with their emphasis on individual states’ sovereignty, reflect the libertarian tendency that has come to the fore of the American political consciousness in recent years and its distaste for the orthodox politics of both the Left and the Right.  The first party to capitalize on this attitude will see favorable realignment across all geographic sections and most interest groups.  Currently, the Republicans are best poised for this transformation for several different reasons.  First, they have very little more to lose—legal protection of traditional marriage is a lost cause, as is the criminalization of marijuana and other soft drugs.

However, embracing the position of pushing such decisions to the state level gives hope for the overturn of the Roe decision, which would be a significant victory.  Further, embracing the legalization of marijuana and so rejecting the expensive War on Drugs would dovetail nicely with a generally conservative economic platform, calling for heavily reduced federal spending and regulation.  Calling for the end to the War on Drugs is also remarkably consistent with Republican opposition to the Obama administration’s surveillance activities, as the latitudinarian search-and-seizure policies of the War on Drugs are the direct intellectual ancestor of NSA’s PRISM program.

In an even more bizarre twist of fate, the Republicans are also in the best position to take advantage of the new isolationism of the American people, the foreign-policy outgrowth of the new libertarianism.  At the moment, the Democrats are the party of Libya and Egypt, the party of botched foreign escapades.