Reason Magazine - Topics > Libertarian History/Philosophy

The Politics of Aspiration

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 09:00:00 EDT

The Orange County Register's Steven Greenhut has a really sharp col about possible revitalization of libertarian ideas in American politics. Snippets:

Those of us who believe in free markets, small government, peace, capitalism, civil liberties and the Constitution will lose, no matter who wins in November. The gloom already is setting in. But there's reason to be optimistic. Our ideas are the right ones. Freedom and capitalism work, while command-and-control policies do not. The question is how to get to the point where those in power begin to loosen rather than tighten their grip over the economy and our lives....
Republicans need to revive what I call the Politics of Aspiration. Instead of promoting an agenda that a) echoes what Democrats offer, only not so much; or b) is based on negativity and fear (of illegal immigration, terrorists, Godless liberals, etc.), they need to tap into the entrepreneurial feelings and desire to get ahead that lies deep within us all—rich, middle class and poor. Winning parties offer hopeful messages and sound ideas.

Greenhut then lays out key areas—ranging from corporate welfare and regulation to economic growth and defense to immigration and trade—where the emphasis should be on providing a basic framework for success and opportunity rather than particular outcomes. It's a good piece and well worth reading in full.

Check it out here.

Is the "Mushy Middle" Packed to the Seams with Libertarians?

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 07:42:00 EDT

Forget "angry white guys," "soccer moms," "NASCAR dads," etc. and get ready for a new pollster-tested and AP-approved fake voting bloc perfectly geared to a chubbazoid American electorate: "The Mushy Middle."

That's the phrase the AP is using to describe the roughly 15 percent of possible voters who represent

a complex chunk of people likely to decide the presidential election but difficult to reach and hard to please.
"Yes, we can!" isn't floating their boat. Nothing much is, from either candidate.
They aren't uniformly conservative or liberal, and they don't fit strict Republican or Democratic orthodoxy. They aren't typically engaged in politics, and they don't much care about the campaign. And like so many others, they are extraordinarily pessimistic.

Wait, there's more:

Who exactly are these power-wielding voters?
They look much like the general population. They reflect the same frustration with the status quo. A significant majority has a low opinion of Bush and Congress. They have more favorable impressions of Democrats than Republicans. Many are feeling the economic pinch. They want troops to return from Iraq as soon as possible.
Like the broad electorate, they rank gas prices and the economy as their top concerns, followed by health care, Social Security, taxes and education. Terrorism and Iraq are lower....
They overwhelmingly favor abortion rights and legal rights for same-sex couples, typically Democratic and liberal positions. But they also overwhelmingly say cutting taxes should be a high priority, typically a Republican and conservative refrain.
These voters say they are far less interested in cultural issues and far more interested in bread-and-butter subjects like health care and Social Security.
"All are a few points from the ideological center of the country, and they tend to be fiscally conservative and socially tolerant," said Greg Strimple, a Republican pollster in New York.

More here.

Hmm, fiscally conservative and socially tolerant? Could that really be where the votes are?

Just Another Hustler in the Hustler Kingdom

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 14:30:00 EDT

Less than two months ago, after former Rep. Bob Barr started to edge into the Libertarian Party's presidential race, I had an idea. Former Sen. Mike Gravel, a former Democrat, was already gunning for the nomination. It wasn't every year that politicians of the Left and the Right ditched the parties they'd spent their entire careers in to become Libertarians. I started planning an event with both candidates, jokingly promoting it on Facebook as a "great debate."

I got a call from Wayne Allyn Root.

What's this I'm hearing about a Libertarian debate?" Root said. "How are you going to have a Libertarian debate without the guy who's going to be the nominee?"

He laughed, but he was serious about this. When I wrote an early prognosis on the Libertarian race, I said Root—a sports prognosticator and gambling guru who's hosted TV shows, radio shows, and motivational speaking junkets—was running third behind Barr and movement speaker and author Mary Ruwart. Root had called to point out that he, not anyone else making a run at the nomination, was on the phone with delegates every spare minute he had. Every minute, at least, that he wasn't spending with me. "I'm calling up every one of these people who will actually be voting for the nominee!" Root said. "I talk to 25 or 30 of them every day!"

Root did talk to those delegates, missing only a handful, leaving messages on their machines. And he charmed his way into the forum I set up with Barr and Gravel. I watched as reporters flipped out cameras and digital recorders to capture the wisdom of the former senator and the lion of the Clinton impeachment, then saw Root struggling to convince them that he, too was a frontrunner. The day after the forum, Root called to laugh about the Washington Post's photo of the event, which cropped him out. "I'm going to frame that and put it on my wall." He laughed again.

In Denver, as the LP settled on its ticket, Root got his bragging rights. On the party's fifth ballot, he fell short of the party's nomination but held a stockpile of delegate votes that made more than the difference between Barr and Ruwart. He took the stage, pumping his fists. "I want to spend the next year learning from the master," Root said. "Barr/Root '08! Come on, let's bring it home!" The guy the national media mostly ignored ended up on the highest-polling (at this moment, at least) Libertarian ticket since the Reagan years.

Wayne Allyn Root is a failure. He'll tell you as much. He's "the world's most successful failure," a man who stumbled from job to job, succeeding at none of them, before he found the one that made him a millionaire. He used to be a Republican, then decided to become the Libertarian Party's presidential nominee. When he fell short, he threw his votes to Bob Barr and became the ex-congressman's running mate. What Wayne Root wants, Wayne Root gets. Sort of.

The little attention that the LP's ticket has received has centered, mostly, on Barr. The evolution of a Republican drug warrior into a Libertarian war horse is an odd, twisty story. Root's story is almost as entertaining. He is, in his own words, "the world's most successful failure." His first general-interest book (he's written six of them, most about the art of gambling) was titled The Joy of Failure, and it revealed how he'd basically talked his way into a glamorous career with a bullish sales plan papering over his lack of qualifications.

As Root tells it, he tried, and failed, at thirteen different careers. He was rejected from law school. He failed as a realtor four different times, blowing tens of thousands of dollars on brochures for properties no one bought. He managed a Manhattan restaurant, then "got bored and quit." He became an entertainment agent, signing one client, and snagging him one job—in six months. His biggest innovation was "Ivy League Home Cleaners," a maid service staffed with college graduates, none of whom, quite understandably, wanted to become maids.

Root's breakthrough came when he realized what he really wanted: to be a sports prognosticator. He decided to become "greatest sports prognosticator in the world," officially, sending out hundreds of press releases with that tagline, assuring reporters that they had to know about Wayne Allyn Root. Thanks to a few newspapers with feature holes to fill, the P.R. offensive paid off. Root founded a company (which failed) and wrote a book on risk (also a failure), but every little piece of credibility got him closer to TV personality status. Once he made it on TV, he was in: No one could take his fame away from him. His formula for success, he discovered, was something he could bottle and give to everybody. He taught it to his wife when she put on 80 pounds during her pregnancy. "She started living my program. The pounds started to melt off!"

With all of that behind him, how could Wayne Root not get into politics, the domain of district attorneys and trial lawyers and promotion-seeking chiefs of staff? "My entire life has been a PERFECT preparation for politics," Root told the Gambling Newswire in 2005. "I've spent the last 20 years giving interviews with the media. I'm on national TV more than any politician in the state of Nevada!" (This was before the still-mystifying triumph of Sen. Harry Reid.) In 2005, Root published a sort of sequel to his first self-help tome dubbed Millionaire Republican, telling readers that "thinking like a Republican," taking risks and cutting throats, was the surest path to success.

Some sections of the book didn't hold up so well. "This professional prognosticator," Root wrote then, "believes that the GOP will dominate American politics (on all levels) for the foreseeable future." But by mid-2006, Root was telling Republicans that they were throttling their message and their voters by building up big government, and by cracking down on gamblers. By early 2007, he was exploring his Libertarian Party bid. And by the time he took the stage with Bob Barr, on a national political ticket at last, Root was crowing about making his old party irrelevant, for reasons no other Libertarian had thought of. Like:

"There are 50 million poker players in this country, and 12 million online poker players. For the first time, they have a candidate they can support!"

And:

"I am the first small businessman to run on a national ticket!"

And:

"I'm a home school parent, and education is, to me, the civil rights issue of our time!"

The Pulitzer-winning historian Walter McDougall has diagnosed the United States as a "nation of hustlers." He means it in a good way; Americans are Horatio Alger heroes, constantly scheming and one-upping and finding new ways to win. If you're a skeptic, you might think see Root's success as a confluence of lucky breaks, impossible to repeat for anyone not gifted with superhuman salesmanship or—as my colleague Jesse Walker has put it—"the deportment of a Ronco pitchman with a squirrel in his pants." If you buy McDougall's theory, stop rolling your eyes at the guy. Wayne Allyn Root wants you to be able to become the next Wayne Allyn Root. And you should take him up on it.

"I'm an S.O.B.," Root likes to joke. "A son of butcher. America needs an S.O.B. in the White House!"

David Weigel is an associate editor of Reason.

This article originally appeared at The American Spectator.

Obama as the End of Identity Politics as We've Known Them

info@reason.com (Terry Michael) — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 15:00:00 EDT

We are nearing the end of American identity politics as we know it.

Bearing that gift to those who prize the individual over the tribal is a messenger who shared a Hyde Park neighborhood with Milton Friedman, though with a public record that suggests he is more statist than classical liberal.

But Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), can’t be categorized that simply. He is, rather, an intellectual and ideological work in progress. Not stuck in cable-babble caricatured time, he may be traveling the circuitous path many “liberal-tarians”—or libertarian Democrats like me—treaded as we grew and found our way back to the self-reliant values that informed our pluralistic democracy. We lost those values in the Industrial and Progressive eras, when advocates of centralized planning prized society’s perfection over individual liberty. While Obama’s positions don’t exactly channel the Cato Institute, his departure from usual Democratic Party left-liberalism is reflected in the left’s suspicion of him for not having all the 162-point plans of Sen. Hillary Clinton, or spewing the syrupy populism of trial lawyer to the underclass, Sen. John Edwards.

To me, this suggests the beginnings of a journey away from the Great Society mind-set of the Democratic Party. I was a 1960s teenage political junkie who wanted to complete the New Deal, with wealth redistribution and “social justice” managed from Washington. I morphed into a 1980s DLC centrist, embracing mushy “progressive” politics as a halfway house from statist liberalism. Now in my own sixties, I have rediscovered the founder of my party, Thomas Jefferson, in an information era in which we are desktop-empowered to seek our own way and make our own choices, much like the agrarian age inventors of our political system.

I can’t claim to know exactly where Obama is on this ideological continuum. He may not even know. But in his personal evolution, he has moved from the white world of boy Barry in Hawaii and Indonesia, to left-liberal enclaves at Ivy League colleges engaging with young conservatives, to a kind of noblesse oblige organizer bearing the white man's burden (half, in his case) on the streets of Chicago. He went from a young state legislator too aloof, in too much of a hurry for his colleagues in Springfield, to a failed U.S. House candidacy against former Black Panther Bobby Rush, hobbled by an inability to translate the language of the Harvard Law Review to the vernacular of the street. From that latter experience, he drew lessons allowing him to grow as a politician, hearing and incorporating some of the style of the black preacher—including the one who was to later cause him so much grief. He returned to Springfield after that failed congressional bid a different man.

He seems to be a grounded but still searching, an intellectually curious 46-year-old, with a breadth and depth of life experience that will help him make informed choices in a pluralistic democracy that demands its leaders split a lot of differences.

Compromise is a word doctrinaire libertarians find more appalling than appealing. But there's a lot that is appealing in Barack Obama.

Look at his health care plan. While it certainly won’t satisfy free-market purists, it relies on private insurance coverage, encourages portability and choice, promotes competition, and allows purchase of prescription drugs from other countries. It wasn’t by accident he proposed fewer government mandates for purchasing coverage—and was pummeled for it in every debate by the politician who, back in 1993, seemed to seek personal control of a big chunk of our economy. Though drugs and crime can be political minefields for an urban black candidate who has acknowledged marijuana and cocaine use, Obama has no hard line positions in favor of neo-prohibition and has made promising comments about pulling back from America’s status as one of the world’s most prolific jailers. Immediately, his election will restore America's reputation around the world as an opponent of interventionist elective wars.

But perhaps most important to libertarians, his election will put the Jesse Jacksons, the Al Sharptons, and the white identity politics liberals out of business. No longer will they be able to peddle victimology or mau-mau their way through the political landscape, demanding diversity training, minority contracts, or other tribal reparations from bigots they find behind every bush. The myth of unassimilable “minorities” dies when a majority white nation selects a leader “of color,” just as religious social distance was diminished when a majority Protestant country chose a Catholic a half-century before.

There is no perfect leader in the wings. I'll settle for one whose election will signal the end of the world of racial politics as we know it. And, with a nod to R.E.M., I'll feel fine about it.

Terry Michael is director of the non-partisan Washington Center for Politics & Journalism. He came to Washington in 1975 as press secretary to newly elected progressive Sen. Paul Simon (D-Ill.), was a press spokesman (1983-87) for the Democratic National Committee, and now offers “thoughts from a libertarian Democrat” at his blog.

Dirty Harry Libertarianism

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 09:33:00 EDT

The Guardian has a fun interview/profile of Clint Eastwood, in which Bronco Billy snarls at Spike Lee ("A guy like him should shut his face"), gleefully defends Dirty Harry ("Being a contrary sort of person, I figured there had been enough politically correct crap going around"), and says the following about his ever-confounding politics:

In 2005, he vowed he'd kill Michael Moore if the documentarian ever showed up at his house, the way he had doorstepped Charlton Heston in Bowling for Columbine. This March he was sacked from Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's California state parks commission for objecting to the building of a toll road through a national forest. But though he has been associated in the public mind with Republican viewpoints, he's something of an individualist. "I don't pay attention to either side," he claims. "I mean, I've always been a libertarian. Leave everybody alone. Let everybody else do what they want. Just stay out of everybody else's hair. So I believe in that value of smaller government. Give politicians power and all of a sudden they'll misuse it on ya."
Has he declared for anybody in this electoral cycle? "You know, I haven't really," he says. "My wife used to be an anchorwoman in Arizona, so she knew John McCain and she liked him and I kinda liked him. In fact, we sort of supported him when he was running the first time against Bush eight years ago. But we haven't been active as yet. It's kind of a zoo out there right now. So I think I'll kinda let things percolate."

Whole thing here.

Thursday Morning Links

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 08:15:00 EDT

* Cato embraces micro radio.

* The Nation discovers the Ron Paul Republicans.

* A socialist reads Hayek.

* Debbie Nathan reads Comstock.

* A child of a commune peers at the children of the FLDS.

There's Libertarian—and then there's libertarian

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 10:42:00 EDT

The New York Times reports on "Libertarians Dream of Being the Tie-Breaker," featuring a misidentified yours truly. Snippets:

"We are in the beginning of a libertarian moment," said Nick Gillespie, editor of Reason, the libertarian monthly....
There is the Libertarian Party and then there is the libertarian—small-"L"—state of mind. Those who do not necessarily vote with the party but identify with some of the core libertarian philosophy—a small government with minimal reach into people's personal lives, and minimal foreign entanglements—may be a potent, if unpredictable, group of voters....
According to the poll, conducted by InsiderAdvantage, 8 percent of registered voters said they would vote for [Libertarian Party presidential candidate] Mr. Barr in a matchup against Mr. McCain and Mr. Obama in November. (Mr. McCain and Mr. Obama received 45 percent and 35 percent in the poll, respectively.)

More here.

For the record, Matt Welch is the editor in chief of reason magazine. I'm the editor of reason.tv and reason online.

Don't Expect Me to Cry for All the Reasons You Have to Die

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Fri, 30 May 2008 10:14:00 EDT

Another thing about Michael Gerson's funny Jesus-wasn't-a-libertarian column that Jacob Sullum dropped some theology on below: In reading it, I was reminded again of something I only fully realized when doing research of the 2000 campaign for my book: The George W. Bush vs. John McCain fight back then, when Compassionate Conservatism did holy battle with the secular religion of National Greatness Conservatism, was widely (and accurately) understood at the time as an explicit rejection of GOP libertarianism, then most associated with Newt Gingrich. (See, for example, the extended McCain quote at the bottom of this post.) The two candidates were championing the federal government as a tool for good works, and promising to restore a certain dignity and honor in the White House. We've had eight years of one flavor (admittedly mixed heavily with the neocon/National Greatness stuff after 9/11); now it's time to try the other.

Is it any wonder then, that the Republican nominee has trouble on his libertarian flank, despite being good on stuff like earmarks and government waste?

In that context, and in the season of an impending Republican rout, it makes perfect sense for those Republicans, like Gerson, who've actually been within sniffing distance of power these past eight years to take aim at those libertarians who most definitely have not. Considering that Bob Barr is this year's third-party candidate of interest, and Ron Paul is still proving to be some kind of irritant, expect the next six months to produce an establishment GOP assault on limited-government Republicans and independents who have little or no more use for that shrinking Big Tent. Should be a hoot.

How Barr Brought It

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Tue, 27 May 2008 07:00:00 EDT

reason Associate Editor David Weigel traveled to Denver over the Memorial Day weekend to cover the Libertarian Party's national convention, which culminated in former Georgia Rep. Bob Barr and Wayne Allyn Root being selected as the presidential and vice-presidential standardbearers for the nation's third-largest party in the 2008 presidential election.

Read all of Weigel's coverage in sequence:

"Who Isn't Trying to Take Over the Libertarian Party?: Scenes from the LP's most newsworthy convention in years" (May 23)

"Anarchists of the World, Unite!: The Libertarian Party's radical candidates aren't conceding anything to the media-appointed frontrunners" (May 24)

"Three Hits and a Miss: The Libertarian Party debate elevates Barr, Kubby, and Root, while Ruwart underperforms" (May 25)

"Citizen Bob: How Bob Barr and Wayne Allyn Root took over the Libertarian Party" (May 26)

And don't miss his blog entries during the convention, which can be read here.

reason.tv interviewed Barr before the convention. Watch the 15-minute video by clicking here.

Citizen Bob

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Mon, 26 May 2008 15:00:00 EDT

The Bob Barr campaign couldn't have plotted it any better. The former GOP congressman-turned Libertarian Party contender announces his candidacy two short weeks before the LP convention, and grabs more free media than 2004 nominee Michael Badnarik received in a year. He arrives in Denver amid bellyaching and heckling and a sea of "Mary!" stickers, and gets reporters talking about the drama of a deadlocked Libertarian convention. C-SPAN stays glued to the proceedings for all of Sunday, through six ballots that turn out closer than the results of an Olympic track meet. And when it's all over, Barr gets both the nomination and a running mate, Wayne Allyn Root, whose views comport comfortably with Barr's own.

The results may have been ideal for Barr, but they weren't plotted out that way. Early in the balloting on Sunday, Barr's strategists—and the candidate himself—thought the Radical Caucus might have beaten them. The boos and catcalls that came when Barr supporters staged a whooping march around the convention floor were louder than they expected. The 25 percent Barr scored on the first ballot was lower than everyone expected. "The Barr campaign needs to be a steamroller to win this," Steve Kubby strategist Tom Knapp said early in the day. "They needed to win 40 percent to keep people from peeling off."

Barr didn't steamroll, instead grinding out a series of ties with radical favorite Mary Ruwart before the Las Vegas businessman Root dropped out and sent his support Barr's way, wrapping up the nomination.

Here's how Barr/Root won the nomination:

A Changed Party. The groundwork for Barr's win started building after the 2004 debacle, when Michael Badnarik ran an underwhelming purist campaign that satisfied no segment of the party. An estimated 2,000 people left the LP then, and activism dropped off substantially. The strongest anti-Barr candidates, Kubby and Ruwart, were old faces who'd run for the vice presidential nomination in 2000 and 1992, respectively. Ruwart had also run for the presidential nomination in 1984.

Mea Maxima Culpa. Barr could not have won if, like fellow major-party defector Mike Gravel, he'd jumped into the party right before the convention. Instead the Georgia congressman once famous for prosecuting the impeachment of Bill Clinton built credibility with the delegates by being able to refer to his two years in the party. When he mentioned this fact in his debate performance and pre-vote speech, some of the less-active delegates who'd been surfeited with anti-Barr rumors of "hijacking the party" were surprised. Barr complemented with a few staged "road to Damascus" moments in front of the delegates; standing up at the debate and apologizing for part (not all) of the Defense of Marriage Act, claiming he wished he'd joined the LP sooner. "I may not have committed as early as y'all," Barr said in his nomination speech, "but don't cast me aside because I'm a latecomer!"

The Media Drip, Drip, Drip. The press helped Barr in two ways. It was obvious even to Barr's enemies that the media had more interest in him than in anyone else; Mary Ruwart's pre-speech montage of clips, which included the iffy likes of a Longevity Magazine cover story and "Libertarian says return tax dollars" clips from previous unsuccessful runs for office, made Barr's exposure look that much more impressive. Then, Ruwart took a pounding from the media that even her throatiest backers couldn't ignore. LP activist Barry Hess could dismiss Barr as a creature of "the old media," but by the time delegates were voting on the fourth ballot, The Washington Times had run a story on the convention that mentioned Ruwart's unforgettable argument about child pornography, and whispers were flying around the convention hall.

The Lackluster "Stop Barr" Movement. Barr's enemies printed a series of fear-mongering leaflets for delegates, one going after his un-Libertarian voting record, another painting an Orwellian future of the party re-branding as "New Republicans" if Barr won. But they didn't do the harder work of digging through Barr's un-Libertarian statements, which in fact multiplied as he did his pre-convention media tour. The impact of, say, a YouTube video splicing together Barr's waffling answer on Hannity and Colmes about drug legalization, his comment that Republicans would split their tickets for him (voting against lower-ballot Libertarians in the process), and other heretical stuff could have been devastating. As it happened, there was no compelling, real-time evidence for delegates to contradict Barr's humble convention persona.

Fair Play. All weekend, the convention swirled with rumors that a crush of Barr delegates would show up at the 11th hour to rig the vote. Over 1,000 delegate slots were open, and less than 650 had registered by the end of Saturday. The word was out for other campaigns' delegates to deny credentials to latecomers. In the end Barr's campaign took advantage of a few empty slots in Southern states, but that was matched by the arrival of a few Ruwart and Kubby supporters who signed up to stop Barr. "It was a legitimate victory in the sense that there was not significant packing," said party co-founder David Nolan, a Kubby supporter, "and what packing there was came from more than one camp." Barr campaign manager Russ Verney said that his team only brought around 50 delegates to Denver, and won the rest of their support in the Sheraton, via one-on-one campaigning and arm-twisting.

With Enemies Like This.... Fringe candidate Christine Smith did Barr a favor by using her allotted, post-elimination speaking time to rant and rave before a national TV audience about Barr's "neo-con" conspiracy. Plenty of delegates had become familiar with, and repelled by, Smith's self-aggrandizing rudeness and all-around weirdness. Ruwart until that moment had been gaining strength by appearing a victim of public bullying and LP-trashing by Barr supporters. But for the crucial 15 minutes of Smith's rant, Barr seemed like a victim himself of people who were making the whole party look bad.

The Ghost of Losers Past. Anti-Barr (and, to a lesser extent, anti-Root) campaigners never convincingly argued that some other candidate could get more votes in November. The closest anyone came was Mary Ruwart's theory that disenchanted Hillary Clinton voters would be casting about for a woman to vote for, but that reeked of liberal gender politics and alienated as many people as it won over. The Barr-or-Ruwart choice was not zero sum: It was between a square peg candidate who could get a record number of votes and a round peg candidate who would probably get the 300,000 to 500,000 votes that the party has won since 1984. Ruwart's ill-advised Sunday leaflet, advertising endorsements from 1984 candidate David Bergland (228,111), 1992 candidate Andre Marrou (291,627), and 2004 candidate Badnarik (397,265), only emphasized that point.

What didn't help Barr? The 11th hour endorsement of oddball Daniel Imperato clearly didn't. After Imperato backed Barr, his sole supporter from Arkansas voted for Imperato on the first ballot anyway. On subsequent ballots, he backed Mary Ruwart. The much-discussed support for Barr in the national party probably cut both ways. It helped Barr that national officials considered him the strongest candidate. Former executive director Shane Cory worked for Barr on the convention floor, and at Sunday's victory banquet, party chairman Bill Redpath reminisced about bringing Barr into the party, waxing: "I've been saying all along we're going to have a hell of a presidential ticket this year." But all of that support just strengthened the resolve of the anti-Barr contingent. "If the nomination was stolen," David Nolan said, "it was stolen in the national office."

But even Nolan, the strongest and most-respected voice in the anti-Barr camp, was optimistic about the ticket once the dust settled. He could see Barr/Root drawing a Nader 2000-like 2 million votes; his worry was simply that Barr, like Nader, wouldn't follow through with party building after the election, thus wrecking the LP. Party unity, which was hard to find amid the raucous boos of Sunday, started to evolve a few hours after the ballots were counted. There was talk of Barr endorsing Steve Kubby, who narrowly missed the VP slot, for a 2010 run for governor of California.

And there was startlingly optimistic talk of the party banding together to prevent Republican efforts to kick them off ballots. Why was that optimistic? Because this year the LP finally has a candidate that could swing the election.

David Weigel is an associate editor of reason. Read his first three dispatches from the LP convention here, here and here.

Bonus video: On Tuesday, May 20, reason hosted a debate about "The Future of Libertarian Politics" featuring LP presidential hopefuls Wayne Allyn Root, Mike Gravel, and Bob Barr (Mary Ruwart was invited but unable to attend). Video excerpts of the conversation are below (approximately 10 minutes long). For more information, go to reason.tv.

Three Hits and a Miss

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Sun, 25 May 2008 13:40:00 EDT

The timing was perfect. Presidential candidate Mary Ruwart, a favorite among the Libertarian Party's Radical Caucus, was 15 minutes into a hard-hitting speech and Q&A with delegates at the contested LP convention in Denver, and she'd just finished enumerating what it is she couldn't stomach in a prospective running mate. In short, she couldn't stomach Bob Barr. As if on cue, Barr's twang exploded over a next-door soundsystem.

"All right!" he said, whooping up dozens of his cowboy-hatted delegates. "Are we ready to go?"

Ruwart's face froze into a devious, oh please kind of smile as Barr briefly addressed his throng. Fired up and ready to go, he marched them past the exhibit area and over into the main convention hall to deliver delegate tokens guaranteeing Barr a place in the Saturday night debate and a nominating speech at the Sunday presidential contest. As the procession went past, Neal Stephenson, a supporter of longshot candidate Christine Smith, loudly sang John Williams' "Imperial March," the song playing when Darth Vader enters the room in Star Wars.

Jim Peron, working the Laissez Faire Books table, opted for less subtlety. "Fuckin' traitors!" Peron yelled. "Go back to the GOP!" As Barr's crowd entered the hall, Peron joined in a burst of sarcastic applause and cheers. "Hooray!" yelled a phalanx of delegates. "They're leaving the convention!"

Barr, of course, was not leaving. When the 1 p.m. deadline for the LP debate came, the former Republican congressman delivered 94 tokens to win inclusion. Mary Ruwart and Wayne Allyn Root handed in exactly as many tokens. Barr and Ruwart, though, had both passed a few of their tokens to friends they wanted to see make the debates (in Barr's case it was Mike Gravel; in Ruwart's it was Steve Kubby). Barr's decision, in retrospect, seems like a strategic coup. Ruwart's decision is harder to game out at the moment.

What actually transpired at the "C-SPAN debate" surprised most of the delegates I talked to afterward. With a few exceptions, their reaction was four-fold: Root, brash and funny, looked more than ever like an effective cheerleader for the LP. Kubby, against all odds, stole the show again and again. Ruwart, poised but bland, underperformed the expectations many delegates had for her. And Barr, faced for the first time by his fellow candidates and a puckish moderator, thrived under the pressure.

Every chance Barr got to finesse or apologize for one of his past Republican mistakes−the Defense of Marriage Act, the PATRIOT Act, the drug war−he grabbed with both hands. The only direct hit he sustained came from the audience, after Barr referenced the "tens of thousands" of innocents serving time on drug charges. A voice from the back of the room cried out, "How many did you put in there?" But the debate rolled on.

Barr was able to thrive because of a rule that was little-noticed outside of candidates' headquarters. Personal attacks, which had flown back and forth throughout the week in alternative debates and speeches, were semi-off-limits. If one candidate challenged another by name, the attackee had 30 seconds to respond. So the closest thing to candidate swipes at Barr were the occasional nameless allusions by George Phillies to a political action committee (PAC) that "gives to libertarians," plus Steve Kubby's glancing reference to Barr voting for the PATRIOT Act. If you weren't aware that Barr's PAC spreads cash around to the big two parties, Phillies' attack wilted on arrival.

The by-a-nose frontrunner benefited, too, from the rollicking performance of Kubby. The marijuana activist only made it to the debate with an assist from Mary Ruwart's extra tokens, but had told delegates throughout the day that as long as he could get on stage, he could win the nomination. In fact, he might have done well enough to surge into the top four.

Kubby scored the biggest laughs of the night. After comparing government intervention in the environment to "the fox guarding the chicken coop," he said: "I'm a libertarian! The only way I'd accept that is if the chickens are armed!" And Kubby powerfully reminded delegates why the medical marijuana issue is not some fringe or abstract concern: "I've gone to jail for liberty. I've nearly died for liberty!"

As much as Kubby soared, Ruwart sputtered. All weekend long, she had been the primary beneficiary of a backlash against "Republican converts." But in the debate she mixed rote libertarian answers with over-the-top claims of political power, such as her vital role in "fighting the PATRIOT Act." (Even though Barr voted for the Act in 2001, Ruwart let him pivot to his verifiable claim that he allied himself with civil liberties groups since then to roll the law back.) Again and again, and in a press conference after the debate, she claimed that disappointed Hillary Clinton voters looking for a female candidate would gravitate to her. Leaving aside the fact that Cynthia McKinney might win the Green Party nomination, the Libertarian Party is a terrible place for gender politics. "That's not how we want to appeal to voters," said Virginia delegate Aaron Sime.

Three of the other candidates failed to break out. Phillies appealed to his long-running campaign organization and party credibility, factors that will become irrelevant as soon as the party hands its torch to one of the candidates. Michael Jingozian gave one of his best performances in a year of campaigning, but sounded out of his depth, unfamiliar with the Tragedy of the Commons, musing about electing other third party candidates in addition to Libertarians. Gravel had too many opportunities to share his less libertarian views, compensating a few times by repeating his mantra: "Freedom, freedom, freedom!" ("He's not all the way there yet," went a common post-debate refrain.)

It was Wayne Allyn Root who most complicated Barr's plans. Root's vein-throbbing, high-decibel TV-pitchman's answers divided the crowd, but by far the larger segment thought he stood out in a party that has opted for drab candidates since anyone can remember. Not since Ron Paul shouted down meatheads on the Morton Downey Jr. Show has an LP candidate radiated such energy. After the debate, in a sprawling hospitality suite stuffed with free drinks and troughs of Italian food, Root complained that it was agonizing to sit down for two whole hours. "I'm a prize fighter!" he said. "I need to move around!" Manny Klausner, a longtime Reason Foundation trustee and former reason editor who is giving Root's nominating speech, thought that his candidate won the test of delegates imagining their candidate making the Libertarian case on TV. "You don't want a lecturer doing that job," Klausner said. "You need a cheerleader."

As the campaigns scattered to talk and party with delegates, the conventional wisdom calcified. Barr staff, who have never expected to win on the first ballot, worried about surviving a three-way race between still-beloved Ruwart and stronger-than-ever Root. Kubby supporters started dreaming of a longshot win. Libertarian Party co-founder David Nolan, who has been supporting Kubby, was seen in the hospitality suites saying that Kubby and Root were on the rise. Michael Cloud, the long-time activist who's still controversial for his role in the Harry Browne campaigns, rushed to Barr's suite to give him advice on floor management ... then teleported to Root's suite to check out the other star.

Ruwart's supporters, as they had the night before, waved off the expensive suites and gathered in The Supreme Court, a hotel bar with a live funk band. "Look, she's not a thrilling candidate," said a California delegate. "She's a candidate who won't make us look bad or drive us even further to the right." And that's the paramount concern for Ruwart backers, many of whom wear buttons with Barr's named crossed out. They know what "pragmatic" party leaders want. They've watched the party platform continue to shrink in length and boldness. They saw party Treasurer Aaron Starr and some Ohio delegates turning red as Starchild, the mono-named concubine for California, gave media interviews in a tie-dyed unitard and floppy psychedelic top hat festooned with a feather boa. Late at night, free from the party's schoolmarms, Starchild took boozy snapshots with giggly girls in cocktail dresses, and bumped and grinded with hotel guests.

"Give it up!" said the band's bassist when Starchild temporarily shimmied offstage. "Give it up for Austin Powers!" Hey, these people are used to being misunderstood.

David Weigel is an associate editor of reason. Read his first two dispatches from the LP convention here and here.

Anarchists of the World, Unite!

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Sat, 24 May 2008 15:04:00 EDT

"It's the first presidential campaign button with a marijuana leaf," says Steve Kubby, grinning ear to ear. He whips out a tiny Kubby '08 pin with red letters pasted onto a familiar green leaf. Alabama political operator Steve Gordon, the suddenly controversial (after selling his Third Party Watch website to longtime GOP direct-mail activist Richard Viguerie) former Libertarian Party political director who's working for presumed frontrunner Bob Barr, takes the pin and thanks him. "I know you can't wear it," says Kubby, "but take it as souvenir."

Fluorescent yellow "Kubby 2008: Let Freedom Grow" signs have sprung up in Denver over the past 24 hours, at the beginning of the LP's most high-profile gathering in years. Kubby, a medical marijuana activist who has staged various battles with California and federal authorities, has been hobbled during this ripe year for Libertarians by an adrenal cancer that has taken a serious toll on him. "I raised travel funds, and then he couldn't travel," laments Kubby organizer and blogger Thomas Knapp. "If he'd been able to campaign, he'd be in Mary Ruwart's position right now." That is, Knapp argues, Kubby would be the preferred candidate of the LP's radical bloc.

As the convention fills up−almost 600 delegates have registered now, more than 250 of them on Friday−it's becoming clearer that this is not a Bob Barr coronation. Delegates are tolerant people who can sit through a pointless convention floor vote or a ramble from longshot Daniel Imperato, but they prefer to hear from candidates who say what they really think. Kubby and Ruwart do that.

On Friday morning, Kubby happily recalled the "Libertarians for Truth" forum, where Democrat-turned-Libertarian presidential candidate Mike Gravel asked an audience to consider cases when military force was necessary, and received a sour reception. Kubby and Ruwart, on the other hand, smacked the question out of the park. “There is no ethical argument to support government's use of force,” Kubby said to zealous applause. As Ruwart patiently explained how libertarian philosophy negated Gravel's answer, Kubby grinned. When she finished, he gave her a friendly pat on the back.

Kubby's alliance with Ruwart is the single most direct threat to a Barr nomination−the outcome that most outside media still think is assured. A motion to make it harder to participate in Saturday's "C-SPAN debate" failed, making it easier for the two radical candidates to share support and propel each other into the fray. If Kubby has a surplus of debate tokens (candidates need tokens from 10% of delegates to participate), he'll give them to Ruwart; she'll do the same if the situation's reversed. If one of the campaign is falling short and the other's on the bubble for the nomination, the struggling campaign will endorse the surging one.

Knowing this, you'd think that the radical caucus would be confident. It isn't. The whiff of a Barr conspiracy permeates radical meetings. Late Friday, every campaign except Barr's gathered for an unofficial, un-televised debate. Nearly 200 people, most of them delegates, spilled in and out of the smallish venue and cheered as Mike Gravel took a wholly un-Barrish position on immigration (no border walls for him) and Kubby thwacked the frontrunner for his PATRIOT Act vote back in 2001. Outside, Kubby supporters speculated that Barr was hoarding tokens that he'd never use for the debate. He's skipped every previous debate, the theory went, so why participate in that one? (Barr's people were flabbergasted by this: "We'd go to all this effort and forfeit the debate?")

"Paulie Cannoli," a Kubby supporter and blogger who'd been unceremoniously de-credentialed by Third Party Watch, joked around and proposed that radicals make an end run around Barr. "Give him all the tokens," Cannoli said. "Let him take the stage all by himself. Then get all the candidates back in here and tell C-SPAN!" Cannoli, who brandished the media credentials of former LP Executive Director Shane Cory (a man about as popular in this circle as Donald Rumsfeld), handed out Kubby buttons and asked for support: "A token for the tokin' candidate!"

While his opponents debated, Barr held court one floor above in a sprawling hospitality suite crammed with booze (if you had cash or a ticket) and snacks (if you had neither). If he didn't get a chance to impress delegates in the debate, he made up for it here: A self-proclaimed "bisexual pagan" named John Karr proclaimed himself a likely Barr voter because the former Georgia congressman could run the strongest campaign. When the candidate stood up on chair to address the crowd, he argued for his "background and credibility" while strategically trashing his former party. "In just two days here," Barr said, "I have had more and deeper discussions of the substance of American politics, and of the Constitution, than in 30 years of Republican politics!"

Barr didn't sway everyone in the room. Michael Kielsky, a "hardcore" Arizona delegate who sported one of the radicals' "Libertarian Wing of the Libertarian Party" buttons, gave Barr some credit for moving in the right direction. But Kielsky was still backing Mary Ruwart. A few more floors above the party, the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered members of Outright Libertarians were partying and chewing on a big rumor: Two hundred-odd unexpected delegates would arrive from Ohio and South Carolina on Saturday or Sunday. Supporters of the Outright candidate, George Phillies, were spreading the word so that enough radicals would be in the hall to vote down credentials for the meddlers. "If they get in," said California delegate Chris Madsen, "we're looking at a first ballot Barr victory."

"If Barr gets this nomination, he'd better know that he can't count on an electoral vote majority," said Massachusetts delegate and Phillies supporter Arthur Torrey. "I'm on the slate to go to the Electoral College, and I will be a faithless elector." That's not an empty threat: The only electoral college vote the LP has ever received was from a faithless Richard Nixon elector (and future LP presidential candidate) who went for 1972 candidate John Hospers. Torrey's a pagan with a gay sister, so his support isn't really gettable for Barr. "You can't tell me my religion is evil and my sister can't get married and expect to ever get my vote."

David Weigel is an associate editor of reason. Read his first dispatch from the LP convention here.

Tucker Pulls a Sherman!

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Fri, 23 May 2008 14:29:00 EDT

Contrary to yesterday's rumors, MSNBC's Tucker Carlson will not run for the Libertarian Party presidential nod. Not only that, he was never thinking about it. And if elected, he wouldn't serve (well, that's an extrapolation). Reports ABC's Jake Tapper:

Carlson tells me he was never running.
He's right now with his family in Maine rather than in Denver with the Marijuana Policy Project and the like.
"I probably should have done it," Tucker emails me." Imagine the bus trip."
Shoot.
Oh, well.

More here.

Carlson wrote the second-best on-the-trail-with-Ron-Paul story of the GOP primary season. Read it here. And then read the best one, by reason's Brian Doherty, here.

All about Shermanesque political statements here.

Who Isn't Trying to Take Over the Libertarian Party?

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Fri, 23 May 2008 12:00:00 EDT

You see right there, in between the cameras? Under the boom mike, in front of the fetching female interviewer in the cowboy hat? There's Bob Barr, holding court and basking in the glow of the national political press. When Barr walked onto the exhibit floor of the 2008 Libertarian Convention, a trail of six campaign staffers followed behind him—the kind of showy political operation that gives outsiders the impression that the former Georgia congressman is the obvious frontrunner in the race to head up the biggest third-party challenge in this year's presidential campaign.

A few feet away in the Denver Sheraton, Barr's opponents are shaking their heads, sharing "can-you-believe-this" looks. "Talk to some delegates, already!" says Jim Casarjian-Perry. A Massachusetts delegate for candidate George Phillies, Casarjian-Perry had, moments earlier, pinned Barr over whether he sticks by all the propositions of the Defense of Marriage Act, which Barr authored. Casarjian-Perry lives in Massachusetts, is married to his partner, but is unable to change his new, hyphenated name on his passport or driver's license. He wasn't at all satisfied by the purported frontrunner's answer.

"Barr doesn't understand basic libertarian principles," Casarjian-Perry says. In Phillies, this delegate (an elected city government official) sees a candidate who's laying the groundwork to elect libertarians who do understand those principles. "If [Barr] makes it to the final ballot," he says, "I'm ready to vote for none of the above."

It would be a bit much, right now, to call the 2008 Libertarian nomination fight "heated" or "bitter." The delegates trickling in to Denver, ever-aware that this city hosted the embryonic stirrings of the party 36 years ago, are happy to see each other. They're gorging on free food, face-to-face conversations with people they've known only online, and brainy discussions that aren't so easy to come by back home.

Still, there's a battle gearing up, and not just over the headline fight over who will win the nomination. Two years ago, the self-described "reform caucus" of the party took over a convention in Portland and shaved the platform from 61 planks to a pocket-sized 15. The non-aggression principle in the party's declaration survived, but only narrowly. Even before Bob Barr entered this race, radicals, who estimate they have one-third of conventioneers firmly on their side, were planning to use Denver to "Restore '04" and resurrect the older, more far-reaching platform.

The specter of a recent Republican transplant leading the LP has cranked up this platform fight to 11. A flyer labeled "CALL TO ACTION: The Libertarian Party—Not For Sale!" is being distributed around the Sheraton, spelling out a six-point theory of the right-wing takeover strategy. "The Barr campaign's principals are veteran ‘partyjackers,'" says the flyer. Smoking gun? The appearance at the convention of conservative direct mail pioneer Richard Viguerie, who is filling a speaking slot that was once going to go to radio host Neal Boortz. "If [Barr and Viguerie are] successful, the Libertarian Party will become just one more mouthpiece for malcontent Republicans."

The rumors are unstoppable. A supporter of candidate Steve Kubby hears that close to 150 new party members crawled out of the woodwork to register Thursday. "They're Barr delegates," he speculates. "When they hold the vote to expand the number of delegates, vote 'no.' You see them trying to give the vote to someone you don't know, vote 'no.'" The story that someone is push-polling for Tucker Carlson to enter the race at the 11th hour is getting more laughs than anything else, but it jibes with the spirit of the moment. Hey, who isn't trying to take over this party?

The beneficiary of all of this, for now, is the soft-spoken and generally beloved candidate Mary Ruwart. As Barr fielded a mix of harsh and softball questions from delegates, Ruwart walked around the Sheraton finding fans. "No one is happy about the tone," Ruwart says. "I was at the 1983 convention [where the party split over the nomination of David Bergland], and it was so spiteful and destructive that I was almost done with the party." It took decades of running unity campaigns to make her optimistic again. The pre-convention attack on Ruwart's anarchist position on child pornography, and the tone of the campaign since then, has worn on her. "This might be more heated than 1983," Ruwart says. "I hope it won't be." (Copies of Short Answers to Tough Questions, the book with the passages that started the controversy, are still on sale at Ruwart's convention booth.)

The Barr campaign doesn't want a bloodbath either, which is why it's trying to out-organize and out-argue the skeptics. Barr's floor campaign is certainly the most sophisticated, which doesn't surprise many people here. From an upstairs suite, headquarters cranks out flyers, keeps track of delegates, prints drink tickets, and collates the tokens needed to get into the official Saturday night debate. The value proposition of a Barr candidacy is taking hold.

"I want us to broaden the base," says one Texas delegate and reform caucus stalwart. "I've been a Ruwart fan for a long time but she can't do that. But Barr can get 3 to 5 percent of the vote and make McCain rue the day he stopped being a conservative." Wyoming party chair Dave Herbert simply wants to "get some votes," and Barr or Wayne Allyn Root offer the best prospects for his dream of an election thrown into the House of Representatives.

This segment of the party—the ones who care first and foremost about electoral punch—worry that a debate over ideological purity will wreck their momentum. Talking to Whitney Gravel, whose recently Democratic husband Mike's bid is beset by some of these same gripes, Americans for Prosperity's Richard Burke developed a theory. "The purists don't want a political party as much as they want a church," he said. "They need a place to worship."

At the end of a first-night mixer, two delegates who'd heard all the negativity tried to stay positive. "One thing you can say is that the top five, six candidates this time are all better than the three we had last time," said one. The second delegate swirled his drink and agreed. "I don't think Gravel's really a libertarian, but it says something that he joined the party. We nominate one of these guys, build on that, and get an even better field next time." The two then started chewing over perennial dream canddiates, Gary Johnson and Ed Thompson.

If that's the attitude that catches on among LP delegates, it will get harder and harder for the party not to nominate the Georgian heretic surrounded by all the cameras.

David Weigel is an associate editor of reason.

The State of Libertarianism, 2058

pinkerto@ix.netcom.com (James P. Pinkerton) — Wed, 21 May 2008 15:00:00 EDT

As we consider the current condition of libertarianism, here in the middle of the 21st century, we might pause to reflect upon the bleak fate that befell the last flowering of personal freedom. That period of liberalism and liberation blossomed in the late 20th century, before coming to a disastrous end in the first decade of this new millennium. We can call that happy period the Rand Era, in honor of Ayn Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged, a book still intensely and tragically relevant 101 years after its publication.

But let's look back before we look to the present—and to the future. The Randian libertarianism that emerged in the 1950s was a fierce critique of planning and centralization, manifested in its minor (New Deal), major (Swedish), and malignant (Soviet) forms. The school of anti-statist criticism, reinforced by émigré economists, was further strengthened by the obvious failures of American "Big Government" in the 1960s, from the war in Vietnam to the "War on Poverty." Interestingly, during that same decade of the '60s, libertarianism received a major boost from the so-called New Left. These leftists were ostensibly socialist, or even communist, but, in fact, they were more typically, in practice, anarchists and libertarians. Indeed, by the decade of the 1970s, it became clear that radicals and counter-culturalists were mostly interested in "doing their own thing," an attitude leading them toward an insistence on personal freedom-or, as they put it, not being hassled in their "personal space." Thus the New Left helped spawn the New Age, producing a generation of intensely capitalist music producers, natural food entrepreneurs, and then, most portentously, computer geeks and software developers. But of course, in their private moments, these folks retained their youthful predilections for drugs, sex, and rock and roll.

By the 1980s, these libertarian Boomers were in alliance, conscious and unconscious, with President Ronald Reagan. That is, even if yuppies looked down their nose at Reagan over matters of partisan style, they remained in tune with the pro-business substance of the Gipper's "supply side" ideology. The result was a robust consensus for lower taxes and freer trade, in both political parties. And of course, at the end of the '80s came the end of Communism, inspiring some to proclaim that a full-scale "end of history" was dawning—the permanent and decisive victory of liberal capitalist democracy.

Moreover, in the 1990s, the Internet seemed to bring with it the promise of libertarian nirvana, connecting everyone all across the cyber-flattened "borderless world" in a win-win capitalist nexus. Finally, in that same decade, the failed effort by right-wingers to impeach President Bill Clinton—a libertarian Boomer if there ever was one—was seen by many as the high-water mark of censorious "social" conservatism.

Click above to watch Jim Pinkerton discuss the state of libertarianism in the year 2058.

But then came the Big Shift, from the Rand Era to the Surveillance Era. We can point to five events in particular that heralded this repressive shift:

First, the 9/11 attacks brought a new sense of terrible danger to the world. After that Tuesday morning, normal travel and normal life took on a new menace, to be alleviated, seemingly, only by monitors, security guards, and checkpoints. "The twilight of sovereignty" didn't seem like such a slam-dunk good idea anymore, as nations instead redoubled their surveillance of borders, airports, and infrastructure. Meanwhile, the Iraq and Afghan wars had a paradoxical effect on American politics. On the one hand, those disappointing conflicts demonstrated the incompetence of civilian planners and would-be nation-builders and democratizers. But on the other hand, the two wars rekindled patriotic ardor in many, engendering a sense of social solidarity and government generosity. An old phrase from the end of the First World War, "a nation fit for heroes," was heard again. As defined by politicians with the power of the purse, such a nation proved, of course, massively expensive.

Second, the long stock market slump at the turn of the century shook people's faith in "shareholder capitalism." The bursting of the dot-com bubble in 2000 and some notorious corporate bankruptcies led to the enactment of the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation in 2002—a bill producing unforeseen legal consequences that echo down to this day. But even before the passage of "Sarbox" white-collar prosecutions spiked; ambitious DAs knew that juries had little sympathy for millionaire and billionaire defendants. So when the subprime mortgage market started melting down in 2007, the legal and political climate was ripe for a long siege of regulation and enforcement. A string of spectacular trials and spectacularly long prison sentences for well-heeled defendants permanently changed the business climate on Wall Street. And there was no escape; from the City of London to the Caribbean to Cyprus to Moscow, prosecution (some called it persecution) ratcheted upward. Yet at the same time, the federal government took on new responsibility on behalf of the property-owning middle class; Uncle Sam would, in effect, guarantee both high stock prices and high home prices. A falling dollar, and rising inflation, be damned.

Third, the disgrace of Democratic New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer in 2008 underscored the expansion of state power into areas thought to be mostly private and thus off-limits to government snoops. Spitzer's fall was ironic, because, as the Empire State's attorney general, he had been a zealous proponent of white-collar prosecutions. And so the business class had no sympathy for Spitzer when he was snared on a prostitution rap. But what was little discussed at the time was the ease with which the federal government had nailed this particular defendant. Spitzer was caught on the basis of cash transactions totaling just $80,000—that is, an $80,000 minnow inside the ocean of the then-$14 trillion economy. That the government could be so effective at threshing out Spitzer's activity should have been a red flag to libertarians, but in the scandalous heat of the moment, few bothered to reflect coolly upon what state power had been able to enforce. (And even fewer paused to think about what it meant for the future of personal freedom if all Americans—indeed, all humans—were on the same easily-searchable Google grid. Only too late did "organizing all the world's information" come to seem like more of a threat than a promise.)

Fourth, the 2008 Beijing Olympics taught a bitter lesson: Capitalism and personal freedom do not march forward together. To be sure, China in 2008 was infinitely freer than China of the Maoist era, but the government's tough tactics against Tibetan protestors was proof that the PRC was not moving in a democratic direction, but rather reverting back to Confucianism, albeit with capitalist-mercantilist characteristics. And speaking of mercantilism, the emergence of a whole new work force in tariff heavy and immigrant-proofed Japan—a huge class of mostly subservient robot-helots—did nothing to advance the idea of personal freedom.

Fifth, and finally in our sad saga, that same year, 2008, saw the election of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) as the 44th President, spelling the final end of the Rand Era. In retrospect, we can see that the political triumph of a military leader, carrying his stern message of national service and sacrifice, was made inevitable by the continuation of the Iraq and Afghan wars; in times of severe crisis, democratic electorates naturally turn to the Strong Man. A few lonely figures, notably Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), argued that McCain-style policies were not the solution to America's problems, but rather the cause of the problems. But despite big fundraising totals, Paul's argument was little regarded during the 2008 Republican primary. And in the general election, McCain swept to victory against the Democrats, who, interestingly enough, seemed actually to be more libertarian than McCain. And as president, as we all know, McCain was supremely eager to stride manfully in the Progressive footsteps of his activist-interventionist idol, Theodore Roosevelt.

But America's strenuous efforts in the Middle East proved unsustainable. Even substantial tax increases, as well as the enactment of a "voluntary draft," were not sufficient to maintain the tempo of operations as the fighting dragged across decades. And so most Americans breathed a sigh of relief when Saudi Arabia, engorged with profits from Euro-denominated oil, engineered what was effectively a buyout of U.S. Central Command.

And by then, of course, America faced many other national security challenges closer to home. After Venezuela, and then Mexico, exploded their atomic bombs in the 2020s, Americans concluded, once and for all, that border security needed to be a top priority.

But the biggest shock came in East Asia. The Chinese takeover of Taiwan was a masterpiece of patient and subtle Go-like positioning, followed by a sudden cyber-strike that left Taiwanese and American defense planners blinded and befuddled—until, of course, it was too late to thwart the People's Liberation Army. Only then did it become clear that America's policy toward China had to change.

For a painful and perilous decade, America feverishly worked to rebuild its military computer systems, all of which had to be completely replaced and redesigned, since the turn-of-the-century equipment had been so honeycombed by Chinese viruses and spyware. During that period of American rebuilding, only America's nuclear arsenal kept the homeland safe; in the meantime, China was able to consolidate its hegemony in Asia, regaining its historic position as The Central Kingdom.

But of course, the rising threat from China provoked a strong response here in the U.S., as policymakers massively rethought their assumptions about economic policy and national strategy. The old consensus, in which both parties had agreed that propping up the stock market and real estate values was the top priority, became no longer viable. As we all remember, the second crash of '29 was worse than the first. In the difficult decade that followed, the federal government spearheaded the "New New Deal," which, a century after the original New Deal, once again witnessed the fitfully effective economic and military restructuring of the United States.

Meanwhile, around the world, capitalist prosperity waxed and waned, in response to booms and busts of secular liberalization, followed inevitably by sacred radicalization. From Dubai to Mumbai to Shanghai, unparalleled frenzies of conspicuous consumption were followed by equally conspicuous bonfires of the vanities. The reluctant conclusion: Over time, culture trumps economics, and piety stomps freedom. But fortunately for freedom, new libertarian thinkers have blossomed in recent decades, seeking to liberate humanity from the not-at-all-dead hand of state power. These new thinkers, re-reading Rand, Hayek, Friedman, and others, are determined to learn the sad lessons of history and apply the new hope of technology. And they have reached a few conclusions that we must study closely:

First, true freedom—camouflaged from all-seeing eyes in the sky, hidden even from the all-penetrating Google Grid—can flourish only in a few small and isolated places around the globe, where self-selected populations can gather together as ex-pats and exiles, to live free or die. These places have been mostly small islands, protected by nuclear booby traps, although a few have existed on the poles, or under the sea, or deep underground. Poignantly, one such place was called "Galt's Gulch," named after the place where the capitalist strikers hid out in Rand's Atlas Shrugged. But this time, the strikers were real enough—until, of course, they met their tragic end at the hands of bounty-hunting looters.

So the second lesson: No permanent victories for freedom can be found in this finite physical earth. Hobbes was right: The nation-state—sometimes, the imperial state—is the most effective monopolizer of force, thus the inevitable master of territory.

The third lesson: The true frontier of freedom will have to be elsewhere, not in this physical world as we commonly think of it. Many freedom-seekers have experimented with virtual reality as an escape hatch, or various kinds of nanotechnology. We wish those dematerialized libertarian voyagers well—but, frankly, we don't know what has happened to them.

The fourth lesson is the keeper: A free world is a new world, the farther away, the better. The next significant victory for freedom—a return to Randianism—will be best realized via transportation to somewhere else, off this earth. Flight beats fight, especially when the freedom-fighter is guaranteed to lose to the statists in the end. The Europeans who came to America found liberty in the empty spaces of the New World; the same was true in Australia. It's no accident that North America and Australia have traditionally been among the freest countries in the world. And if they are now less free, in the middle of this grim 21st century, that's because they are increasingly filled up. They have regressed to the regimented condition of the rest of the planet.

As free-market economists said in the last libertarian era, the only true freedom that one has is the power of an alternative—that is, the power to go somewhere else, to go where a man or a woman can breathe free air, even if that air is artificial. And that means outer space—to the moon, Mars, and beyond.

Of course the moon has long been settled by various countries. And Mars and other asteroids have been touched by humans, too, mostly those wearing uniforms and working for various governments and mining collectives. Does that mean that the state has permanently extended its grip there, too? Is freedom finished off-earth, as well as on-earth?

Maybe. But it's easier to stage a freedom revolution in the far pavilions. Just as the mountains of West Virginia were free when the lowlands of Virginia were enslaved, so the periphery is always freer than the core.

Just as the American colonies rebelled from the mother country in 1776, so, too, could the space colonies rebel from this earth. Will it work? Could a space-revolt succeed? There is only one way to find out.

In the meantime, as we hatch our plan for the big breakaway, we might turn to another great libertarian writer from the Rand Era, Robert A. Heinlein. His 1966 novel, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, remains the best handbook for an off-world revolution, leading, in this instance, to a libertarian Luna.

Yes, the moon is a harsh mistress, but the earth is even harsher.

James P. Pinkerton served in the presidential administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. He is a Fox News contributor and a fellow at the New America Foundation.

The Great Libertarian Debate

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Wed, 21 May 2008 07:50:00 EDT

Did you miss our discussion on Libertarian and libertarian politics last night? Fear not; the American Spectator's Philip Klein has a good write-up (including follow-ups with Bob Barr on war and Mike Gravel on health care). The Washington Post's Reliable Source provides a sartorial scorecard, plus follow-up quotes from Gravel and our own David Weigel. Robert Stacy McCain makes a good point about the upcoming LP convention, and Extreme Mortman exhumes some relevant YouTubing. We will have video up a bit later.

(More Noel St. John photos from the event here.)

You Won't Fool the Children of the rEVOLution

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Wed, 14 May 2008 12:30:00 EDT

Before there was Ron Paul the New York Times best-selling author—go on, keep rolling that around on your tongue—there was Ron Paul, the Texas congressman who made floor statements in the House of Representatives when no one was listening. Before that there was Ron Paul, the roving libertarian politico and the publisher of countless monthly newsletters written in a voice curiously wittier than his own. And before that there was Ron Paul, founder of the Foundation for Rational Economics and Education, table-pounding advocate for the gold standard, a lecturer to anyone who would listen.

Paul is 72 years old. He has been reading libertarian philosophy for close to 50 years and writing it for more than 30. That his labors should finally bear fruit now, at the end of a presidential bid where he succeeded beyond a fool's dream by simply reiterating all those decades' worth of opinions, carries a kind of irony. All of the quirks of his presidential bid make more sense. Why did he give the same dense, 40-minute speech at every stop? Why didn't he get into the muck with the rest of the GOP candidates, even when he started to out-fundraise them? Hey, he was trying to tell you people: He wasn't running for president; he was spreading a message.

It is impossible to imagine his new book, The Revolution: A Manifesto, selling in droves, or even being published at all, if Paul had not run his quixotic presidential race. We have proof. Sharing the shelves with Paul's book is another political tome that, if you based your judgments on the elite-media love machine, you'd assume would be racing up the charts. Republican Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hagel's policy sheaf-cum-memoir, America: Our Next Chapter, (with the additional and aggrandizing subtitle Tough Questions, Straight Answers) comes after three fat years of Sunday show bookings, warm profiles in magazines such as GQ, and unkillable rumors that he was about to announce a presidential bid. Released two months ago, the book is already forgotten.

Hagel was supposed to be the Republicans' anti-war presidential candidate. Failing that, he was supposed to be the natural vice-presidential candidate of a third party "unity" candidacy. The praise and hopes cascaded because Hagel, who voted for the 2002 Iraq resolution, was nonetheless the highest-profile and most-credible (by dint of his service in Vietnam) Republican critic of the war in Iraq.

High-profile does not necessarily mean high-minded. In an early, critical profile of Hagel, National Review's John J. Miller bitingly labeled the senator's attacks on Bush policy as "Hagelian dialect" and "declamations that may sound weighty when spoken but become insubstantial on the printed page." God only knows why Hagel decided to prove this by putting words on a page. There are two recurring motifs in America: Our Next Chapter, and both are devastating to Hagel's image as a deep political thinker.

The first is simple banality. There is enough corn in these pages to solve the world food crisis and forge ethanol with the leftovers. "I remember the first time that I had a real sense of the stakes in global power politics," Hagel writes. "I was in Mr. Sheridan's history class at St. Bonaventure High School, in Columbus, Nebraska." How does he view the Senate? "The floor...is a more majestic setting than a crab bucket, but the behavior of the inhabitants is quite similar."

The second Hagelian device is what I'd call the "outsight"—the opposite of an insight, already quite obvious to readers but thuddingly profound for him. Yes, Hagel was right about Iraq, but the way he writes about foreign policy starts you wondering if he just lucked out this time. "Like its rival India," he writes, "Pakistan is an enormous, sprawling, chaotic land." Albeit one-quarter the size of India and the victim of four successful military coups to India's none. When Hagel isn't thumbing a world almanac, he's recounting the meetings he's held with world leaders, diplomats—people who, in their wisdom, agree with him about most things.

Hagel writes like this because his ideas are not powerful enough to inspire much more. He is not a non-interventionist; his big insight about America's proper place in the world is that the world is changing. "Of course I want our country to ‘win,'" Hagel writes, "but we must ask precisely what does ‘winning' mean and we need to ask that question before the first shot is fired." But this is the only problem Hagel sees with intervention. He has nothing to say about the interventions of the 1990s, even though he voted against them after entering the Senate in 1997. Hagel is a big believer in soft power. But if pushed, he says, "We would mount preemptive strikes against our enemy." The problem with the Iraqi preemptive strike was that the enemy we should have been preempting was stateless. This isn't much of an ideology. It's John Kerry's 2004 platform.

By contrast, Ron Paul's The Revolution could have been written if the congressman had passed on 2008. Paul's arguments about the money supply, foreign policy, and the Constitution have been honed for decades. The only new thing between these covers is confidence. "I have never seen such a diverse coalition rallying to a single banner," Paul writes of his campaign. "Republicans, Democrats, independents, Greens, constitutionalists, whites, blacks, Hispanics, Asian-Americans, antiwar activists, homeschoolers, religious conservatives, freethinkers...these folks typically found, to their surprise, that they rather liked each other."

The Revolution is filled with long quotes from Paul's favored philosophers and economists. It is one giant annotation to his campaign speeches. It's also a correction to some parts of his campaign. The people who thought Paul's aggressive Tom Tancredo-esque push against illegal immigration was a mistake are proven right: There is almost nothing about immigration here. There is nothing you could call right-wing populism, and while this will probably become the most popular work of Murray Rothbard-inspired libertarianism, it rejects Rothbard's late-life strategizing about the benefits of resentment politics. The Revolution is as colorblind and class-blind as any Sesame Street script. The only people readers are told to resent are the politicians and the media bosses—whom Paul compares to Pravda editors—who tell Americans there is no alternative to fiat currency and American empire.

Hagel and Paul both confront readers who, like the rest of the country, have absolutely no confidence in their leaders and no trust in what they say. Hagel tells them to buck up: "The urgency of our unsettled times demands that America acts wisely, with resolve and a common purpose." Paul tells them that they're being lied to, and he's here to tell the truth. "Few Americans realize just how costly our foreign policy is," Paul writes, referring to human lives as well as trillions of dollars. "The terrorists have played us like a fiddle." Americans are also misinformed about how our current health care system evolved, or why their dollar is worth less. They're being lied to about trade: "True free trade occurs in the absence of government intervention in the free flow of goods across borders." Paul attacks the World Trade Organization because it "makes trade relations worse by providing our foreign competitors with a collective means to attack U.S. trade interests." In each case, a foreign or elite power is hoodwinking Americans into trading the system of the Founders for a system making them less free.

Paul never sounds as certain as when he gets to link this all to monetary policy. He's rarely less convincing. Paul sees a direct link between central banking, fiat currency, and the economic crises that he argues wreck the average American's prosperity and empower thugs. A financial collapse, he prophesies, "becomes more likely every day." He proposes legalizing precious metals as currency and killing sales and capital gains taxes on metals to stave off the crisis. It's all packaged as a monetary twist on Pascal's wager: "If we're wrong, then all we've done is eliminate some taxes on gold and silver. No harm done." This is awfully optimistic. The 19th century's booms and busts were far more damaging to livelihoods and to economic systems than anything in the fiat money era. They provided much steadier footing for radical movements. Paul's overheated worry about a Weimar Republic-style collapse kicks the legs out from underneath the argument.

That's what doesn't work. Paul's narrow-eyed certainty about the elites' concealment of the truth can be irritating, especially when he marshalls so many libertarian thinkers—Nozick, Hayek, Mises—to undergird an occasionally specious ideology. But it is an ideology. Paul has a grand unified theory to offer readers, knowing full well that he's opening minds, not programming them. Hagel offers his readers safe ideas and easy paeans to "leadership." Paul offers readers, first and foremost, the lesson that "leaders" and universally accepted concepts shouldn't be trusted. It is worried and informed neostructuralists who can change things, not historical "great men." If Ron Paul doesn't provide perfect solutions, he certainly provides a blueprint.

David Weigel is an associate editor of reason.

On the Media's Take on Ayn Rand (featuring Reason's Nick Gillespie)

Mon, 12 May 2008 17:02:00 EDT

NPR's On the Media did a long segment over the weekend about Ayn Rand's continuing popularity and influence. Among the folks they interviewed was reason's Nick Gillespie. Snippets here:

BROOKE GLADSTONE: That's Gary Cooper playing Howard Roark, the tall, angular architect of tall, angular buildings in The Fountainhead. That book has sold something like six million copies since it was published in 1943. Ron Paul should be so lucky.
Rand died in 1982 - but Rand lives!
NICK GILLESPIE: Let's put it this way: Ayn Rand's work, I think, is popular for the same reason Prometheus has always been popular with humans. It's about somebody who dares to struggle against great odds and, you know, steals fire.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Nick Gillespie is the editor of Reason.com and Reason TV and former editor of Reason Magazine, a Libertarian journal whose name is a nod to Rand's favorite wordreason, above all - reason above conventional pieties, reason above religion, above especially collectivist societies and command economies, the horrors of which she witnessed as a child in St. Petersburg during the Russian Revolution - reason that finds its purest expression in capitalism.
NICK GILLESPIE: Virtually every CEO of every major company will list Ayn Rand as a major influence. A bevy of Hollywood stars, ranging from Brad Pitt to Angelina Jolie to Vince Vaughn - a director like Oliver Stone, who is fond of Castro, says that Ayn Rand is one of the most important figures in his intellectual life. Martina Navratilova, Billie Jean King, Hugh Hefner - I mean, the reach of this author is pretty astonishing....
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I don't think that influence derives from her persuasive argument against command economies.
NICK GILLESPIE: She gives egoists a positive case for why the world should revolve around them and around their efforts. If you are the person who is creating value, if you are the star, the sun really does revolve around you. And not only should it be that way, but that's the moral order of the universe....
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Nick Gillespie, of Reason, says he was never wowed by Rand's novels but that the attacks on them are often swipes by people who would rather not seriously engage her ideas.
NICK GILLESPIE: How many characters from Saul Bellow novels, how many characters from Don DeLillo novels, inarguably great writers, how many of them have penetrated the American cultural consciousness in the way that a Howard Roark or a John Gault [sic] has, to a degree where these are shorthands for an entire system of ideas?
I think that that speaks pretty highly of her power as a writer. She is a great author because she has a phenomenal audience, including a lot of people who go through a worshipful phase with her. And, you know, here we could be talking about Alan Greenspan, the former head of the Federal Reserve, as well as any number of pimply-faced adolescents who decide to grow beyond her.

Whole transcript here.

The piece, which runs about 15 minutes, is rich with bits of audio. Listen to it:

reason on Rand here.

Instapundit on Ron Paul's New Blockbuster Book

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Mon, 12 May 2008 15:26:00 EDT

Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) has a new book out titled The Revolution: A Manifesto (it's currently No. 8 on Amazon's bestsellers list).

Here's Glenn Reynolds, a.k.a the Instapundit, on it:

[The Revolution is] important because Ron Paul's candidacy has interested a lot of people in libertarian ideas who probably haven't read those other books, and because their exposure has come not in the context of academic dissatisfaction with the status quo, but in the context of political action. The book benefits from many of the Paul campaign's virtues, in the form of accessibility, clarity, and straightforwardness. On the other hand, it also suffers from some of the Paul campaign's vices, about which more later.
My biggest disagreement, and that of many libertarians with Paul, involves national security. Paul and I are both libertarians, but of different varieties. Paul is an old-fashioned Rothbardian. I'm more of a Heinleinian libertarian and we, like the Randian libertarians, tend to view national defense as more important than the Rothbardians do. Paul's view, essentially, is that if we quit sending troops abroad, other people and countries would quit wanting to kill us. I'm not particularly persuaded by this. First, even during the minimal-government era of Thomas Jefferson we wound up at war with the Barbary Pirates (in many ways, the spiritual antecedents of today's Islamic terrorists). And second, Paul is not an isolationist—he favors much more commercial and cultural engagement with foreign countries, something which, if experience is any guide, is as likely to anger Islamic fundamentalists and other varieties of terrorists and tyrants as is the establishment of foreign bases....
The main shortcoming in Paul's book, as with his candidacy, is in the follow through, the transition from critique to action. Although he does include a chapter entitled "The Revolution," about reducing the size of government, it's a pretty skimpy plan. Were we to see a Ron Paul Administration, with a House and Senate made up of, well, Ron Pauls, it might have a chance of succeeding, though even so he's a bit timid in places - proposing a freeze on the budgets of cabinet departments instead of their outright abolition, for example, despite noting that only State, Defense, and Justice have clear constitutional mandates. But given the unlikelihood of a Paul Administration, and the even greater unlikelihood of a Paul Congress, his policy prescriptions aren't likely to bear fruit. But those who want to see liberty progress right here and right now will look in vain for suggestions on what they might do, right here and right now, to make progress.
Rome didn't fall in a day, and today's monster government didn't spring up overnight. It was the result of incremental expansion. Given that we're not likely to see an opportunity to downsize the federal government overnight, or even in a single Presidential term, those of libertarian inclinations might well look to incremental approaches to reining in Big Government. They will be well advised, however, to look elsewhere than Revolution: A Manifesto. Still, if Fabian Libertarianism is to have a future, it will owe much to the consciousness-raising of the Paul campaign. Socialist candidate Eugene Debs, after all, never got elected President either, but within a few decades much of his platform was adopted by the Democratic Party. May Paul enjoy similar influence on the future of national politics.

Whole thing here.

reason on Ron Paul here.

Now Playing at Reason.tv: How the WSJ editorial page gets made—Q&A with Robert Pollock

Mon, 12 May 2008 15:00:00 EDT

Former reason intern Robert Pollock has been the editorial features page editor at The Wall Street Journal for more than a year. The Buffalo native sat down recently with reason.tv to talk about how he came to his libertarian beliefs; how the mainstream media is toeing the Journal's line on capital gains taxes; why The Washington Post is the Journal's toughest competition and why The New York Times' editorial pages have a "hectoring" tone; how the GOP turned its back on its small-government philosophy; why America needs more immigrants; and much more.

This 10-minute interview was conducted by reason.tv Editor Nick Gillespie and filmed by reason.tv's Dan Hayes.

Click below to view.

Philly Mayors Says Cops Were Wrong in Beating

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Thu, 08 May 2008 09:22:00 EDT

The actions of a throng of [Philadelphia] police officers shown on a videotape kicking and punching three shooting suspects during a traffic stop were inappropriate, Mayor Michael Nutter said Thursday.
A sergeant and five officers have been removed from street duty as authorities investigated the footage. More than a dozen officers were involved, and Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey said investigators were having the videotape enhanced to try to identify how many were actually striking the suspects. Information will be sent to prosecutors, who will determine whether to press charges.
"It absolutely shows inappropriate behavior," Nutter said in an interview on ABC's "Good Morning America." "There is a way to take people into custody ... and there (are) not acceptable ways of taking people into custody."

More here. The police commissioner has said something similar, and it's refreshing to see authorities not working overtime to defend beserker cops.

Watch the video of the beating and decide for yourself.

And then check out Paulville.org, whose goal is to establish "gated communities containing 100% Ron Paul supporters and or people that live by the ideals of freedom and liberty." (To be honest, I don't know if that means that such police beatings would be totally illegal or an everyday occurence, especially if neighborhood associations embraced the early '90s ideas of Paul advisers/ghostwriters Murray Rothbard and Lew Rockwell [whose takeaway from the police beating of Rodney King was fear of videocameras].)

Here Come Da McCain Judges!

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Wed, 07 May 2008 08:32:00 EDT

GOP Prez Candidate Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) vows to appoint good conservative judges if elected:

John McCain made a play to the GOP's right wing yesterday, vowing to appoint conservative judges like Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. and Justice Samuel Alito and blasting Democratic rivals Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton for voting against them.

In a speech his campaign billed as a major address on the judiciary, McCain delivered a harsh critique of "judicial activists" who over step their Constitutional bounds. He also lambasted Democrats for blocking GOP nominees to the bench by turning the confirmation process into a "gauntlet of abuse."

More here.

Never forget: John Roberts played Peppermint Patty in his high school production of You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown, which should have disqualified him from something.

reason's Damon Root on why some libertarian activism on the high court can be a good thing:

A principled form of libertarian judicial activism—that is, one that consistently upholds individual rights while strictly limiting state power—is essential to the fight for a free society....The real legal challenge facing libertarians isn't judicial activism; it is defending individual rights from the liberals and conservatives who seek to take our liberties away.