So, I wanted to give a brief account of the talk I gave on Wednesday to a group of libertarian-minded Hill staffers.

I was kindly invited down to D.C. after this column on CPAC ran on Tech Central Station. Ike Brannon, the chief economist of the Joint Economic Committee, runs a fairly informal group that used to be called the Libertarian Lunch, but now is called…well, they really need to get themselves a name. It would make it a lot easier to explain to my boss where I was that day.

Anyway, over lunch with about 20-30 people, I gave some remarks, and was joined by John Mitchell of Reader’s Digest. Mitchell represented the “conservative” half of the conservative-libertarian divide.

I laid out an argument as follows:

There’s always been tension in the conservative-libertarian coalition, but these days people are sensing something different. President Bush’s full-on embrace of big government conservatism, married to radical social conservatism, has left the libertarian wing of the party with precious little reason to stay in what’s been described as our “marriage” with social conservatives.

Reason’s editor, Nick Gillespie, has dubbed it an abusive relationship, where libertarians keep getting slapped around but also keep coming back. (This got a big laugh.)

So, the question is what libertarians should expect from the Republican Party going forward.

As of now, there’s little reason to expect any retreat from the BGC direction it’s been moving in for the last four years. Witness, in the last couple weeks alone, the steroid hearings and the Terri Schiavo circus.

The Republican leadership, in the White House and Congress, seems relatively in love with the idea of a “permanent majority,” to be achieved by wooing union members with expanded middle-class entitlements and a tone on “values” issues more in line with them than that taken by the Democrats.

But, for all this approach’s appeal as far as vote-getting potential, I don’t see it working terribly well in the long term.

First of all, the Republican Party hasn’t made that much progress so far with union members, or blacks and Latinos, with its government-and-God strategy. Even with its advantage on the War on Terror, it won a pretty thin victory in 2004.

What’s more, I see no reason to believe that the Democrats will remain at their current disadvantage on national security for long. Republican successes in the War on Terror could make a lot of people forget about terrorism in 2008. Also, a Hillary Clinton candidacy could close the gap on this issue pretty quickly — she’s spent years building up a hawkish record.

And so, where do I think the Republican Party should go? I think it should work on selling small government conservatism and expanding the base for the same. Part of this, going forward, would be to link the Republican Party to a more inclusive set of social policies. Even young conservatives are not on board with the current gay-panic conservatism — and it’s making it harder and harder for more moderate folks to call themselves Republicans at all.

The question of what more the Republicans can do to sell small government is of course a very serious one — and one that, honestly, I don’t think libertarians have a very good answer to yet.

But we’re working on it. Or at least we should be.