Category: Politics

Interesting conservation going on over at the Du Toit place.

I think the big difference between our points of view is that you haven’t given up the fight, while I have. -Tamara K.

I think that pretty much the issue in a nutshell.  Kim’s answer to that is classic Kim:

And I never will. This is the last place on Earth where freedom lives, no matter how much you think it’s become corrupted and not worth fighting for.

Throwing up your hands and surrendering just because the struggle might seem hopeless… sorry, that’s just not my style.

I’ll give up when the boot’s on my chest and the bayonet’s at my throat—and not one moment earlier.

And even then, I’ll spit on the boot.

I’m actually not that convinced it has to come to that.  Polls show that somewhere between 10 and 20% of voting age Americans have libertarian sentiments.   That’s nothing to sneeze at, and if you can tap that resource, you can have a big influence on political outcomes.  The problem here is twofold.   The first is with the voting public itself.  People won’t typically spontaneously organize for political action, and libertarian minded people are typically horses that don’t really want to be lead to water.  Their philosophy can best be summed up as “leave me the hell alone”, which makes organizing them a challenge compared to people who have something to gain through the political process.  The second fold of this problem is with the activists, because every political movement needs a dedicated core set of activists to organize people to action.

Over the years I’ve come to understand libertarianism as a philosophical movement and not a political one.  The people who would form this dedicated core of activists have more energy to argue with each other, and to attend to the philosophical purity of the movement, than they do for getting their ideas out into the political arena where they can start to make a difference.   But there is hope.

If you look at the gun rights movement, it’s one libertarianish issue that’s managed to work itself into the political mainstream and be astoundingly successful once it had sufficient momentum to affect outcomes.  I think this model could be easily replicated with other issues if more libertarian activists would pick some issues that are short term winnable, and push those out into the political arena.

But the difficulty for libertarians activists is that it will mean making alliance with people who don’t buy your whole philosophy.  We have many non-libertarians with us on the gun issue, and sometimes that friction comes to the surface.  But its only through coalition building that you can get anywhere.  A lot of libertarian activists seems to be OK with this on the gun issue, but talk about replicating that system with other issues, and they get difficult. Try to talk about which issues aren’t winnable right now, they don’t want to hear it.

Liberty is a never ending battle.  We will never win.  Like the game Whack-a-Mole, it’s frustrating, and sometimes it seems like you’re doing all you can to just hold the line.  But giving up is a sure way to lose at Whack-a-Mole, so to libertarians, I offer this: “Keep whacking!”  How’s that for a motto?

Roberta X has a pretty good post up that makes the case against John McCain.  She says:

The choice between Democrats and Republicans is the choice between the noose and slow poison and the “hold your nose and pick McCain”[3] school of thought takes comfort in at least having time to dash off a few more Letters To The Editor before the end. Buncombe!

I don’t think she’s necessarily wrong here.  This may be exactly what’s happening.  Our constitutional republic may very well be death spiraling into an inevitable sea of Social Democracy, and there might not be enough people left who would rather be free than be taken care of.  I do not think it’s inevitable, however.  If we do want to reverse it, there are some thing small l libertarians are going to need to accept.

1. We’re a minority.  When you get down to it, we’re all a minority.  Very few people’s political views can have a nice neat label placed over them.  When you’re a minority, you can only exert political power in coalition with other interests, which means, necessarily, you’ll never get a candidate that’s perfect in every way, and most of the time you probably won’t get a candidate that’s even perfect in most ways.
2. The system of government set up under our constitution makes two party domination all but inevitable.  We are not a parliamentary system with proportional representation, so coalition building in our Republic happens outside of the government, in the political parties.  Groups have been known to enter and leave the coalition, often to start third parties, but these have always been short lived, and have often meant the political death for the components that followed.   Paleoconservatism walked out of the Republican coalition with Pat Buchannan, and haven’t been heard from since.  Third party politics is the political wilderness in our system of government.  Some people like it there.  I can’t say I blame them, because it can be more fulfilling than always having to compromise with other interests in a coalition, but has the Libertarian Party been able to make either of the two parties reconsider the War on Drugs, or get anyone elected who could possibly have any effect on it?  You can’t keep blaming other people because they won’t get on board.  At some point you have to look inward and start to ask if maybe you’re doing something wrong.

It’s worth pointing out that I’m still, according to my state, registered as a Libertarian.  I have been for the past 10 years, just about.  My flirtation with the LP didn’t last long, after I realized that Libertarians weren’t about creating a political movement, but instead were mostly interested in making sure people who weren’t sufficiently pure remained outside of their “movement”.  They couldn’t see how people who were 70% with Libertarians might be able to work with them to help advance the 70% of their agenda they might be able to agree on.   It was 100%, or nothing, and if you couldn’t accept that, well, you’re not a real libertarian are you?

Sometime around 2002, I started to realize that I don’t have much room to complain about the state of things, because I’ve basically not been participating in the process that ends up giving us the candidates we all end up having to vote, or not vote for.  I didn’t vote in primaries, I didn’t donate money to candidates I liked, and I didn’t do anything to try to help candidates I liked get nominated or elected.  I just bitched about the choices I had to make in the end.  In my adult life, starting with voting for George H.W. Bush over Bill Clinton, I have never felt good about anyone I’ve ever pulled the lever for.  I didn’t feel good about voting for Harry Browne in 2000, because even by that time I had come to realize the Libertarian Party was mostly full of shit.   I didn’t feel good about voting for Dole, George W. Bush, and I won’t feel good about voting for John McCain.  I’ve never not pulled the lever for Arlen Specter, because although I’ve despised him, I’ve despised every person that’s ever run against him even more.

I decided this election year that I’d do things differently.  Despite very early misgivings, I donated to Fred Thompson’s campaign.  Those hopes were quickly dashed as the campaign season started.  Fred was too late getting in, and was early getting out.  Living in Pennsylvania, there’s not too much else I can do.  Our race doesn’t come around until April, so we’re irrelevant.

I’m starting to understand the wisdom of former House Speaker Tip O’Neil, who famously qipped “All politics is local.”  If liberty minded people want candidates who more closely represent them, they have to work to front those kinds of people at the local level first, and get them elected.  National political leaders most often start small, and this is certainly an area I’ve been deficient, and am looking for ways to remedy, without having to become a party hack that supports the party no matter what.

Libertarians have to understand that politics is not primarily a process of principles and ideas.  It is more closely likened to a strategy game, than to a debating society.  In a game, you will not always win.  There will sometimes be periods when you lose. There will sometimes be periods when you might appear to be losing, but suddently see an opportunity to execute a strategy your opponent won’t see coming.  Sometimes winning will require you making risky moves,  Sometimes your opponent yesterday will be a friend tomorrow.  The real risk for libertarians is that a lot of people who start playing this game forget the reason they started, and they find themselves playing for the sake of playing.  That describes a lot of politicians in power today.

Every libertarian knows what their overall goal is; a lot more “leave me the hell alone” and a lot less of the typical shit we’ve seen from government since the progressives took over most of the institutions.  To that end, we need to pick a handful of issues that we can push in the mainstream today, that advance the cause of a more limited government.  It will require slaughtering an awful lot of sacred cows, and I know enough about how libertarians think to know they won’t want to do that.  So the mainstream will keep ignoring us, and will keep nominating socialists, and people like John McCain.  We’ll choose to see all of our issues and concerns addressed or none of them.  We may quite likely end up spiraling into the sea of Social Democracy, but I’ve never met a libertarian who is serious about doing something to stop it.  They insist on pushing a button to get the plane flying perfectly off onto the right heading and at the right altitude, rather than applying a little left rudder here, and right aleron there, in order to methodically get the plane out of the spiral, and onto a truer heading.  I do think we have to start fixing this soon, because the sea is starting to get pretty big in the cockpit window.  Some suggest just letting the plane crash, because what doesn’t kill us will just make us stronger.  I tend to think it’ll just make us dead, and I’m not ready to accept that the idea of limited, constitutional government has no traction left in main stream politics.