Illustration by Kevin Kallaugher

ON MAY 25th a dysfunctional minor party picked a grumpy ex-Republican as its presidential candidate. This may be just another quirk in the quirky history of the Libertarian Party. But it just might be something more than this: a further sign that the Republican coalition is splintering under John McCain's feet.

The new Libertarian champion, Bob Barr, a former four-term Georgia congressman, is most famous for his poor judgment and sour temper. He led the fight to defang anti-terrorism legislation after the Oklahoma City bombing (among his achievements: preventing the government from designating foreign groups as terrorists and denying their members visas to enter the country). He championed social-conservative causes such as the Defence of Marriage Act, which he drafted, and the impeachment of Bill Clinton. His moralistic fervour faltered only when it came to his own conduct: twice divorced, he was once photographed licking whipped cream off the breasts of a particularly buxom woman. He says he was raising money for leukaemia research. (Well, he would, wouldn't he?)

The Libertarian Party is one of the perennial jokes of American politics. Barry Goldwater, a party hero, once argued that “extremism in the defence of liberty is no vice”. Many Libertarians have interpreted that as meaning that extremism in defence of liberty is a positive virtue: one of the liveliest debates in the party is whether all drugs should be legalised, and all federal taxes abolished, next Monday or next Tuesday. The party's best presidential performance was back in 1980 when Edward Clark won 921,128 votes, or 1.1% of the electorate. Most Libertarian candidates have hovered around just 400,000 votes. The party is also badly divided between what might be called its Ruby Ridge wing and its Reefer Madness wing. The Ruby Ridge wing, which has still not recovered from the terrible day when the FBI shot several survivalists at Ruby Ridge in Idaho, believes that freedom comes from the barrel of a gun. The Reefer Madness wing is more interested in keeping the government's hands off its spliffs.

Mr Barr's candidacy is not likely to heal this division. The Georgian has a solid record on guns—he once accidentally discharged an antique pistol at a gun show—but he is much dodgier on other Libertarian shibboleths. He joined the party in 2006 only after being redistricted out of his congressional nest. He once supported both the Patriot Act and the “war on drugs”, though he is now repentant. He won the party's nomination only after six ballots and five hours of voting.

Yet the Republicans would be unwise to write him off as irrelevant: instead, they would do well to consider the reasons for the enduring success of Ron Paul, a Republican who shares many of the Libertarians' views. His presidential campaign has been one of the wonders of this election cycle, powered by hyper-motivated supporters and an endless supply of small donations. Mr Paul won 24% of the Republican vote in the recent Idaho primary, despite the fact that Mr McCain has the nomination locked up. His book, “The Revolution: A Manifesto”, leapt to the top of the New York Times's bestseller list.

The libertarian pool also contains more fish than you might think. Polls suggest that 10-20% of the electorate are willing to define themselves as “libertarians” in the sense that, like this newspaper, they are “conservative” on economics and “liberal” on social issues. These soft libertarians have been strikingly willing to break party ranks, whether to support John Anderson in 1980 or Ross Perot in 1992 and 1996.

Libertarian-leaning Republicans are also hog-wrestling mad about what has become of their party under George Bush. Mr Bush has presided over the fastest growth in federal spending since the Great Society in the 1960s. He put the Republican seal of approval on the biggest intrusion of federal power into the classroom in history (No Child Left Behind), the most expensive public-works programme ever (the 2005 highway bill) and the largest new entitlement programme since the creation of Medicare and Medicaid (the prescription-drug benefit). He launched an open-ended “war on terror”. He rode roughshod over states' rights on issues such as assisted suicide. And he has expanded the government's power to eavesdrop on its citizens.





Spot the difference

Mr McCain is not Mr Bush. He has an honourable record as a fiscal conservative (he opposed the prescription-drug benefit, for example). He is Washington's leading campaigner against pork. He is a principled federalist on issues like gay marriage. But there is plenty in his record to upset small-government conservatives. He likes to think of himself as a latter-day Teddy Roosevelt blowing the trumpet of “national greatness conservatism”. He broke the conservative covenant by supporting campaign-finance reform. His defence of the Iraq war may also cost him votes from small-government conservatives.

Mr Barr and the Libertarian Party, as well as Mr Paul, are both imperfect vehicles for all this pent-up anger. But they are vehicles nonetheless. Libertarians claim that they will put their candidate on the ballot in 48 states, as they did in 2004. They have already managed 28. Mr Barr claims that (admittedly sparse) polls give him 6-8% of the electorate. He could do particularly well in his native Georgia and the libertarian-leaning West. That could hurt Mr McCain badly in states like Colorado and Nevada, which he needs to hold on to.

The fact that Mr Barr's running mate, Wayne Allyn Root, is the author of a self-help book entitled “The Joy of Failure!” takes some of the air out of this speculation. But it would be wrong to underestimate how angry many small-government Republicans are with Mr Bush. Ronald Reagan once remarked that he did not leave the Democratic Party: the Democratic Party left him. That is what many libertarian sorts now feel about the Republicans.