Talk-Polywell.org

The Republicans’ inability to engage the Tea Party or the broader libertarian insurrection has been a problem everywhere, but in California, where the Tea Party never happened, the party of Reagan and Prop 13 has almost no libertarian mojo. Given the California GOP’s crisis of demographics and relevance, that’s a real problem. Pawlenty acknowledged as much in a conclusion that tried to embrace the range of conservatives from social cons and defense hawks through Tea Partiers and libertarians. “We don’t have a big enough Republican Party in California,” Pawlenty said, “to be throwing people overboard.”

This captures the predicament of the California GOP. The party is marginal and becoming more so, but the leadership is deathly afraid of the one proven source of Republican energy and enthusiasm – because that source is considered too marginal. If the California Republicans continue distancing themselves from the libertarian movement, they will continue to suffer, and so will everybody else who has to live in a state where one party has absolute power and the other refuses to compete.

http://reason.com/blog/2012/02/26/t-paw ... ech-of-cal

It was once considered a part of the Republican Party until Nixon drove them out with wage and price controls.

Scupperer wrote:

It was once considered a part of the Republican Party until Nixon drove them out with wage and price controls.

It started much earlier than that with Teddy Roosevelt and the Progressive infiltration of the Republican party; that's where the first major splinter occurred between libertarian R and Diet Marxist R (now know as Establishment R). Nixon was just another swing at the chisel in the stump.