SayUncle posts about the NRA being powerful in the Republican coalition, and we are. But he seems surprised Bush scored so highly, along with James Dobson and Pat Robertson.
Libertarians are political exiles. We are not a small group of people, if you believe polling data, but politically we have very little power. Want to understand why I focus on the gun issue? It’s a libertarian issue where I can win. I can’t win on anything else, because no one listens to libertarians. Why? Quite simple. Libertarians don’t vote in sigificant enough numbers to make anyone care about them. The Libertarian Party is a joke, and in the Republican coalition, we don’t turn out voters.
Gun owners turn out voters because people are passionate about the issue, and because it’s a good unifying philosophy that can get a lot of different types of people to vote together on an issue. In other words, it helps keep the Republican coalition together.
But being on a mission to save the second amendment doesn’t get people fired up nearly as much as being on a mission from God, and that’s why religious people turn out in large numbers to vote Republican. God might not have told them to do it himself, but they will use their churches, civic organizations, and social networks to get people out to the polls on election day, and get them to vote their values.
It sucks being out in the political wilderness, where I wish that I could focus on other libertarian issues I care about, if anyone in power would just care about them, but they don’t.
The tumbleweeds are pretty, at least.
You’re not alone, but your not in a crowded house, either…
In reality, libertarians don’t really exist.
Essentially, libertarians are GOPers who don’t want to have to defend their party’s allegiance to the religious right. Show me a GOPer who is an atheist or agnostic and I’ll show you someone who describes themselves as a ‘libertarian.’
In the end, it’s a massive cop-out because almost all self-described ‘libertarians’ would rather eat broken glass than exist in a truly libertarian society. Instead, they prefer to be ‘libertarian’ when it’s convenient to explain away a departure from conservatism; a ‘libertarian’ is a GOPer who likes to smoke dope or frequent hookers or the like.
The dope smoking guys that enjoy whoring I think tend to go with the LP :)
There are “left-libertarians” and an awful lot of “anarchist libertarians”.
Socialists seem to despise them in particular (just a feeling I found while reading a Slashdot political thread).
I’m not really sure where I fit in.
Pro-Gun
Pro-Choice
Pro-Social Services
A progressive who likes guns? :)
KathyH…. for some reason every comment you post here gets picked up by the spam filter. I have no idea why it keeps doing that, but it’s very strange. Do you have that problem on any other blog? Have you ever tried posting at The Bitch Girls? She uses the same spam filter I do.
I just tried posting to Bitch Girls and it appears that it got caught in the spam filter there as well.
I suppose it could be the e-mail address. I’ll try changing it on this one.
I had the same problem when I was using spamgourmet as an email redirector. Apparently, WordPress (or one of its plugins) updated a blocked domain list to include “problem” domains.
I think it is part of Akismet’s block lists, or part of WP-Deadbolt.