Conserberaltarians
Jesse Walker | December 8, 2006, 9:10am
Virginia Postrel
zeroes in on what has bugged me the most about the response to Brink Lindsey's "
Liberaltarians" article:
...it seems much clearer to me than to many other commenters that Brink Lindsey's TNR article is proposing an intellectual and policy alliance/debate, along the lines of the fusionism on the postwar right, not a short-term partisan political coalition to win the 2008 election. The stuff about 13 percent of the vote is mostly news-peg boilerplate. That's how you get TNR and the WaPost to pay attention. It's as irrelevant today as it was in the 1950s just how many libertarian-identified voters there are. The point is to talk seriously about policy ends and means and the role of market processes in serving liberal (in all senses of the word) values.
I'll add that just as libertarians have more to offer than a pathetic voting bloc, the left has more to offer than the pathetic Democratic Party. I really don't see much hope at all for turning the Democrats in a libertarian direction (though I'll cheer on anyone who's willing to try), but I know plenty of people who reflexively vote Democratic (when they vote at all) but are easily 80% libertarian in their own attitudes. Call them
Whole Earth Catalog libertarians, Santa Fe Institute libertarians,
bOING bOING libertarians. They appreciate spontaneous order, entrepreneurship (many of them are entrepreneurs themselves), decentralization, free expression, and peace. The hard-core do-it-yourselfers among them (and the veterans of the New Left) also appreciate the widespread private ownership of guns. They might not agree with everything in Brink's article, but hey, neither do I. That's fine. It's a big tent.
Another pet peeve: Why does this have to be discussed as a "divorce" from the conservative movement? A divorce from the Republican Party, sure -- my hat's off to Ron Paul and a few others in the GOP, but the Republican establishment is as hostile to liberty as the Democratic leadership, maybe more so. But there's plenty of 80%ers on the right, too, and I'm as happy to hang out with them as I am to hang out with friendly liberals, friendly leftists, and friendly counterculturalists. There are many lefts, and there are many rights. We don't have to marry any of them, and we don't have to divorce any of them either. Insert the free-love metaphor of your choice here.
Postmodern Sleaze | December 8, 2006, 1:34pm | #
"Post, what exactly has the religious right been able to accomplish? Aside from Pat mouthing off I mean."
Aye, not much. The thing is, there's a lot that they *would* do, given power. If the power grid that the Freedom Dems put together several months back, the reason they haven't is that the modern GOP is pretty firmly divided between real conservatives and nasty authoritarians; the former have been holding the latter in check.
On the other hand, I look at liberal proposals- and it doesn't look like there's much that they would actually do that doesn't amount to a lot of subtle tweaks and changes to the current system. I've looked at their lists of national proposals, and found myself going... "that's it?" It looks like something that would have been proposed by a moderately conservative Republican circa 1975. Which is about where I stand.
I agree with David Brin here; we need to distinguish between Liberals and Leftists, and realize that the first have a lot in common with Libertarians, while the latter do not. (For the record, like Brin, I'm more or less somewhere between a Libertarian and a Liberal.) I hang out with a lot of real Leftists- they think I'm a right wing lunatic. They don't think the Democratic party is much better.
But I'm simply not scared of the American left, because, compared to the fundies, there just aren't enough of them to constitute a real threat. There are probably ten fundamentalist Christians in this country for every real socialist. I don't find them terribly worrysome these days; just really, really silly.
Then again, I've lived in South Dakota and New Mexico all my life. I'd probably look at things differently if I'd grown up in San Francisco or Santa Monica.
Eric Dondero | December 8, 2006, 1:54pm | #
The proof is in the pudding. How many libertarians were elected this year as Democrats? Answer: 1 (Joel Winter to the NH House).
How many libertarians were elected this year as Republicans? Hundreds, perhaps low thousands. (And btw, in NH at least 40 libertrarian Republicans were elected to the NH House, yet Winters gets all the attention).
Virginia makes it sound Ron Paul is a "fluke" the only elected libertarian Republican in the country.
What about Jeff Flake of Arizona?
How about Governors Palin, Otter, Crist and Sanford?
The Republican Liberty Caucus arguable just had its most successful year ever, and is more organized and has more members than ever before. And ironically, there are some libertarians out there now calling that we throw in the towell and go with the Dems.
Do you all know how long it has taken to build a viable libertarian wing of the GOP?
The RLC is now 15 years old. 15 friggin's years. The group is finally getting accepted by the Republican Party.
How long would it take for a libertarian group to become viable in the Democrat Party?
You all want to wait another 15 years?
Why should we, when we have the RLC???
Eric Dondero | December 9, 2006, 9:56am | #
Response to Jesse Walker:
I'm assuming that was a typo in your post and you meant to say "libertarian" and "Republican" not "Democrat."
Gladly, I'll give you proof on the newly elected libertarian Governors.
Reason Magazine, a publication which I adore, gave newly elected Idaho Governor a 6-page article in the November issue talking about how libertarian he was. The word "libertarian" was dropped in the article in relation to Otter about 20 times.
Crist? He's stridently opposed to a state income tax. He's a self-professed "Fiscal Conservative, yet Socially Tolerant." His running mate Rep. Jeff Kottkamp has strong ties to the libertarian James Madison Institute in Tally, and was called a "libertarian free marketeer" by the Palm Beach Post.
Let's see now, Mark Sanford of SC, he's next right?
Well, if you had been reading www.mainstreamlibertarian.com on a daily basis you would have known that Sanford was severely attacked in the last few days of his campaign by both the liberal media and the Democrats, who had accused him of being... Horrors... "not really a Republican but a Libertarian" who wanted to severely cut back government. Sanford never denied the charges.
Sarah Palin? Now this is where you really stepped in a big pile of Alaska Carribou shit.
Sarah has been Mayor of Wasila for 8 years, during which time she cut property taxes no less than 4 times!!! Sarah is friends with Vic Kohring of Wasila, who is the longest serving libertarian state legislator in the United States. Sarah attended the May meeting of the Libertarian Party in Anchorage last year seeking LP support. During the final days of the campaign she received it. She plastered the endorsement all over her web site. For two days IT WAS THE NUMBER ONE ENDORSEMENT LISTED OUT OF 10 ON THE SARAH PALIN WEB SITE, even topping groups like the Chamber of Commerce and NRA. Sarah bragged about LPers backing her to everyone she could find the last day of the race. On election night she bearhugged State LP Chairman Jason Dowell and publicly thanked LP Gubernatorial candidate Billy Toien.
Sarah is the youngest Governor elected in Alaska history. She just was innaugurated and her special guest speaker was none other than former Governor Wally Hickel. You many remember him as the elected Governor of the Alaska Independence Party.
The Anchorage press talked about how all Gov. Palin talked about was "relying less on monies from Washington" and "Constitutional principles."
Eric at www.mainstreamlibertarian.com
you | December 10, 2006, 8:51pm | #
The Rise of the Religious Right in the Republican Party
Then in 1988, when we won with the Bush senior campaign and carried the highest total of evangelical votes ever in American history, we lost as we always do -- the Republicans -- we lost the Jewish vote and the Hispanic vote and all those votes. We lost the Catholic vote. We were the first modern presidency to win an election and it was a landslide and not win the Catholic vote. It was barely, but we lost the Catholic vote.
How did we do it? We carried 82 percent or 83 percent of the evangelical vote. I remember when it was all over-- this was one of the reasons I got a job in the White House -- but I remember when it was all over, there was great shock from me and others saying, "Whoa, this is unhealthy." We immediately began going after the Catholic vote.
While at the same time, we were frightened by the fact that we lost all these votes and still won the White House. The message did come home.
My God, you can win the White House with nothing but evangelicals if you can get enough of them, if you get them all, and they're a huge number. ...
from:
The Jesus Factor
Social Democrats, USA
Copyright: 1996, SD, USA
Kristol described the current Republican coalition as consisting primarily of two main strains: economic and social conservatives. The economic conservatives are anti-state and the social conservatives are anti-liberal who view liberalism "as corroding and subverting the virtues that they believe must be the bedrock of decent society." He believes that the differences between the economic conservatives and the social conservatives produce "tensions" between the two groups. Kristol's long range view is that the social conservatives represent "an authentic mass movement that gathers strength with every passing year."
from:
Splitting the Republican Coalition
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This leads to the issue of the role of the state. Neocons do not like the concentration of services in the welfare state and are happy to study alternative ways of delivering these services. But they are impatient with the Hayekian notion that we are on "the road to serfdom." Neocons do not feel that kind of alarm or anxiety about the growth of the state in the past century, seeing it as natural, indeed inevitable. Because they tend to be more interested in history than economics or sociology, they know that the 19th-century idea, so neatly propounded by Herbert Spencer in his "The Man Versus the State," was a historical eccentricity. People have always preferred strong government to weak government, although they certainly have no liking for anything that smacks of overly intrusive government. Neocons feel at home in today's America to a degree that more traditional conservatives do not. Though they find much to be critical about, they tend to seek intellectual guidance in the democratic wisdom of Tocqueville, rather than in the Tory nostalgia of, say, Russell Kirk.
from:
The Neoconservative Persuasion
