I am also saying that even those who claim to carry the conservative torch can backfire once they are exposed to the glitter and glamour found along the Potomac. No candidate is a sure thing to be conservative or moral or honest or constitutionally focused just because they wear the label "Republican." Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew weren't any of those things. Teddy Roosevelt was no small government conservative. George III interfered less in our educational system than George W did.

Courting Disaster.

The rationale of those who tell us to ignore our gut and vote Republican usually boils down to something like this: No matter how bad Republicans really are, conservatives have to vote Republican so that we can place conservative justices on the U.S. Supreme Court. But guess what? Democrats are told the same thing! I'm not sure that either side is really all that happy with the results.

There have been plenty of Republican SCOTUS nominees who were so atrocious they didn't even get confirmed: Clement Haynsworth, G. Harold Carswell, Douglas H. Ginsburg, and Harriet Miers. And then there's the nightmare of GOP nominees who actually do get confirmed: Ike's disastrous choices of Earl Warren (a payback for help at the 1952 convention) and William J. Brennan (chosen solely to woo northeastern votes in Ike's 1956 reelection bid), Nixon's catastrophe of the cranky and unprofessional Harry Blackmun (he gave us Roe v. Wade), Gerald Ford's pick of John Paul Stevens, and George H. W. Bush's stupefying selection of the liberal nonentity David Souter.

With selections like that, who needs Democrats?

We're told that we have to forgive the GOP for the Nixons and McCains that it hands us from time to time; that we have to turn a blind eye to what's wrong with the Republican Party. The "smart people" in charge tell us that we just have to keep our mouths shut, turn off our brains, and rally around the elephant. Sorry if I'm not thrilled by the idea of standing in line to pull the lever for a party that couldn't seemingly care less about governing by the values it pretends to stand for.

There are also those who make a more fundamental argument about why none of this matters: old-fashioned conservatism's time has passed. I hear it all the time; people say that the modern GOP has to move on and adapt. They say it has to expand beyond its traditional base, be a big tent, be progressive-maybe not as progressive as Barack Obama, but smart and tough when it comes to using government as a tool to help people. If you want to win, they say, then you have to move toward the middle-offer a little something to everyone. Be more like McCain and Romney and less like Palin and Santorum.

RINO Fun Fact.

John McCain voted to confirm ACLU general counsel Ruth Bader Ginsburg ("I would not look to the U.S. Constitution, if I were drafting a Constitution in the year 2012") to the Supreme Court in 1993. And he wasn't alone: the vote was 963.

Nope, sorry, not buying it. Decades of evidence are in to show us exactly what we get when we compromise our values to win elections: more government, more spending, more taxes, more regulations, more bureaucracy, more interference by Washington in our daily lives. If that's what winning means then you'll excuse me if I'm not excited about continuing that trend. If turning my back on my principles is a prerequisite to winning elections, then, I hate to say it, but I'd rather lose. I'd rather not be in power than have to justify using that power to do things that I'm fundamentally opposed to.

But perhaps the biggest problem for those of us who care about the future of liberty is that most people don't understand that we are being offered false choices; that John McCain as the standard-bearer of the Republican Party in a presidential election is indicative of how the conservative/libertarian chair has been taken from the table.

The truth is that we are the mark-the sucker-in a national shell game. The ball-which represents real small government, constitutional candidates-seems like it's always there, ready to be discovered, when, in reality, the operator is palming it. It doesn't matter which shell you choose or how many times you play or how closely you pay attention-the ball will never be where you think it is.

You will lose every time.

That is why understanding history is so vital to understanding the current political playing field. What the establishment is doing today is what progressives originally did when they took the chair away from constitutionalists and said: Here's your choice: Theodore Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson; John McCain or Barack Obama. Which is it going to be?

Beck Quotes a Socialist!.

I'd rather vote for what I want and not get it, than vote for what I don't want and get it.

-EUGENE V. DEBS, SOCIALIST CANDIDATE FOR PRESIDENT IN 1900, 1904, 1908, 1912, AND 1920.

Sorry, that's not a fair choice-and so it's time that we call the shell game what it really is: a scam. I don't know about you, but I don't participate in scams, I expose them. And that's what we need to do now: expose the system as not just flawed, but rigged; expose the "two-party" system as a one-party monopoly; and, most important, show America that there is another choice. We just have to pull our chair back up to the table.

"Where morality is present, laws are unnecessary. Without morality, laws are unenforceable."

-Anonymous.

CAN ANYONE NAME a modern-day politician who has actually given us more freedom and less government, or who has made our lives happier and more prosperous?

Yeah, that's what I thought.

We all hear a lot of talk from politicians about their deep concern for the ideals of the Founders-even President Barack Obama pays lip service to streamlining and shrinking government-but when it comes to action, those who actually believe in the core principles of the Constitution always come away disappointed.

Always.

As journalists Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch explain in The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong with America: "[W]e are held hostage to an eighteenth century system, dominated by two political parties whose ever-more-polarized rhetorical positions mask a mutual interest in maintaining a stranglehold on power." And the only way to end this stranglehold is to disconnect government from our morality, from our prosperity, and from our lives in general.

Most of you reading that last sentence are probably nodding your heads in agreement. It sounds great-maybe even easy; after all who wants government in their lives? The problem is that human nature is a very worthy adversary. To disconnect from government we also have to strip away all of the feel-good rhetoric and lofty promises made by politicians and instead demand real change and real accountability. We have to stop supporting the newest "savior" politician and stop hitching our futures to the best-run campaigns or the most charismatic establishment candidates because they are "most electable." We have to stop being distracted by the gotchas and rumormongering of the mass media, which cares more for its own ratings than the future of our country. But, most of all, we have to stop thinking about politics and start concentrating on ideas. Electoral maps, delegate counts, and brokered conventions may all be fun for political insiders on twenty-four-hour news channels to dissect and debate, but they do nothing to change our actual course as a country.

Lip Service.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi came up with an interesting angle to celebrate the passage of Obamacare. Democrats, she claimed, "honor the vows of our founders, who in the Declaration of Independence said that we are 'endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.' This legislation will lead to healthier lives, more liberty to pursue hopes and dreams and happiness for the American people. This is an American proposal that honors the traditions of our country."

When the National Labor Relations Board decided that it could dictate by fiat where companies could move and produce their goods, nixing Boeing's decision to build its Dreamliner 787 fleet in union-free South Carolina, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid claimed that the NLRB "acts as a check on employers and employees alike" and was consistent with the "spirit of checks and balances" the Founding Fathers had envisioned.

And Barack Obama, during his inaugural address, also invoked the Founders, saying that their "ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience's sake."

It all goes to prove that while it's very easy to quote the Founders' words, it's much harder to actually govern by them.

YOU JUST MIGHT BE A LIBERTARIAN.

I'm proud to say that I'm a libertarian-and you might be one, too. In fact I believe that most Americans are libertarian at heart. Most Americans understand individual struggle and individual reward. Even though we are teaching them that everybody gets a trophy, most still understand that the government usually screws things up. But let's get away from the words and labels for a minute and instead talk about ideas.

When you boil it down, libertarians believe that government is best when it governs least. We don't believe government should try to make life more "fair" or force you to lose weight or "nudge" people into wanting to use solar panels. We believe that citizens should be making those decisions for themselves. In other words, a libertarian is an antiprogressive. Like the Founding Founders, libertarians are classical liberals, people who believe that limited government, the rule of law, individual liberty, freedom of religion (not from religion), speech, press, and assembly, and free markets represent the most moral kind of government.

Libertarians also understand a fundamental truth about this country: the most pressing problem we face isn't a lack of fairness, or private-sector corruption in the business world, or unfettered capitalism, or a diminishing work ethic, or China, or fill-in-any-other-issue-here. No, the most pressing problem we face is that the balance of power in this country has tilted toward the political class. Turning that around will require rethinking everything we've been conditioned to believe about how Washington and the two-party system work.

Going in the Wrong Direction.

According to the Wall Street Journal/ Heritage Foundation "Freedom Index," the United States' economic freedom score dropped to 76.3, which puts us in tenth place worldwide. The score is 1.5 points lower than last year, "reflecting deteriorating scores for government spending, freedom from corruption, and investment freedom." In the Cato Institute's Economic Freedom of the World index the United States also placed tenth. Cato noted that the United States "has suffered one of the largest declines in economic freedom over the last 10 years." In other words, if you like small government and a free economy, we're going in the wrong direction.

When most people think of a "libertarian" they think of . . . I don't know . . . a cult of hippies who barter their heroin for prostitutes. In other words, people tend to not take them very seriously. Part of the problem is that many Americans just don't understand what it means to be a libertarian. If they did, they might quickly come to the realization that they're actually one of them.

ADULT CONTENT.

Yes, we all know that libertarians also understand a thing or two about irrelevance and unelectability. I'm sure you can visualize a typical libertarian presidential stump speech: "Ladies and gentlemen, if you elect me president I swear on my sacred honor to do absolutely nothing for my fellow Americans. I want you to do it all for yourselves!"

Of course, that's not the reality. While liberal policy works great for bumper stickers ("I Support Teachers, Not the Koch Brothers"), libertarian policy works great in the real world. Unfortunately, you can't put a libertarian's view of foreign policy or the government safety net on the back of your Prius-and that makes it a lot harder to break through the "gotcha!" world of sound bites and tweets that we now live in.

CNN has run a poll for nearly two decades asking Americans the same question: "Some people think the government is trying to do too many things that should be left to individuals and businesses. Others think that government should do more to solve our country's problems. Which comes closer to your own view?"

In 2011, a record number of people reported that they believed government is doing too much. That number has been tracking higher and higher-from around 40 percent in 2000 to over 60 percent today. Another recent poll, this one by Rasmussen, found that a majority of likely voters are worried that the federal government is doing too much rather than too little when dealing with economic troubles.

Of course, simply having a desire for Washington to "do less" doesn't automatically make a person a libertarian. Far from it. But when you dig deeper into the polls, you realize that a majority of voters have, economically speaking, very strong libertarian beliefs. For example, among all voters in the Rasmussen poll, 77 percent say they want government to cut deficits. Seventy-one percent say they want government to cut spending. Fifty-nine percent say they want the government to cut taxes.

That's a nice start.

Though long-term polling shows that there was a temporary spike in the public's acceptance of government intervention after 9/11, concerns about the police state and antiterror measures have recently reached all-time highs. More voters seem to be turning toward the idea of individual freedom in almost every category they were asked about-from the police state to the government being the arbiters of morality.

But the most visible sign that libertarians are entering the mainstream isn't a poll, it's a person: Texas congressman Ron Paul, quite possibly the most popular libertarian politician in modern American history. Congressman Paul has raised millions of dollars and has deeper support from young, enthusiastic voters than perhaps anyone else in America. And, no offense, but I doubt we can attribute his success to his electric personality or political skills. No, it must be something else, like his ideas, his message, or his love for, and unwavering defense of, the Constitution.

Young people are getting excited about liberty. But I think it's even more than that. I think voters are also looking for something pure, something real, something consistent-something outside the partisanship we see every day.

And these voters are different from most. Blind allegiance to a party or the "presumptive nominee" is not part of their equation. For example, fewer than 50 percent of Republicans who voted for Ron Paul in the 2008 GOP primary ended up supporting John McCain in the general election. It turns out that Ron Paul is pretty popular among those who consider themselves independents-and that also happens to be a pretty good place to find libertarians.

Since the last presidential election more than 2.5 million voters have decided that neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are making much sense. I think the only thing shocking about that is that it took them this long to figure it out. When USA Today analyzed the trend, it found that the number of registered Democrats had declined in 25 of the 28 states where voters have to register by party. Republicans lost voters in 21 states and the number of independents has increased in 18 states.

This trend becomes even clearer when you look at eight swing states where party registration is required. These are the battleground states that hold the key to elections-and they're changing. The USA Today report shows a decline of 800,000 in registration for the Democrats, while Republicans' dipped by 350,000. Voters who identify themselves as independents have increased by 325,000.

I'm giving you all of this data to make a simple point: the two parties just aren't doing the job-and people are finally beginning to realize that there's got to be another way.

There is.

Small-Tent Ideology.

It's odd that people instantly acknowledge that the Democratic Party, for example, is a "big tent" under which people with views of all stripes can reside. You can have a "Blue Dog" right next to a radical-and no one blinks an eye. Same thing on the Republican side-Jim DeMint can share the stage with John McCain and everyone gets it. Unfortunately, that same perception doesn't seem to translate to libertarians.

The reality is that there are "small l" libertarians and "big L" libertarians. Small l libertarians believe in the basic tenets of liberty and try to make those ideas work within the framework of political reality. Let's make it easy and call them "commonsense libertarians." A "big L" Libertarian, on the other hand, is a purist who demands the most stringent interpretation of libertarian thought. They are, you might expect, what the media focuses on most-and they are also completely irrelevant when it comes to politics.

NO, YOU DON'T HAVE TO SMOKE CRACK TO BE LIBERTARIAN.

I can hear it now: That's all wonderful, Glenn, but I am definitely not a libertarian! Libertarians believe in legalizing crack and prostitution, they're isolationists and crackpots, and conspiracy theorists-not to mention antiwar activists and apologists for Islamic radicalism. Like you said, Ron Paul is a libertarian and he basically wants to shut down our army!

The key to understanding the libertarian argument is to realize that most libertarians don't believe simply in personal freedom at all cost; they believe in personal freedom at a very significant cost: responsibility.

Take alcohol, for example. Libertarians would not be in favor of banning alcohol, of course, but just because they don't want to ban it does not mean they think that drinking every night is a great idea. Put it this way: there are few things I love more than freedom of speech, but that doesn't mean I love everything (or anything, actually) that someone like Van Jones has to say. Just because you want something to be legal does not mean you have to personally embrace it.