Posted on 11/07/2013 4:59:55 AM PST by Kaslin
There was a time I called myself a Libertarian. And there was a time I was a Libertarian. I just wanted to get government to leave me alone, to leave people alone and to go all crazy and limit itself to doing only that which is spelled out clearly in the Constitution. That was what a Libertarian was. But it’s not anymore.
The word no longer has any meaning, no definition or parameters, certainly no coherent philosophy to speak of. And there’s no one to blame for that except Libertarians themselves.
So what happened?
By not even loosely defining the parameters of a set of beliefs, Libertarians allowed their brand – as it was – to be hijacked by anyone willing to wear the label. They went from the movement for individual responsibility, small government and free markets to a gaggle of misfits who want pot and prostitution legalized and a total non-interventionist foreign policy.
That pretty much sums it up.
Honestly, what does being a Libertarian mean beyond legalizing drugs, banging hookers and sitting by while the rest of the world blows itself up?
The great Reason magazine is a wonderful publication filled with great articles, solid journalism you won’t find elsewhere…and a voice that does little more than complain.
Reason is great at highlighting abuses by every level of government, stories ignored by other media outlets. But you won’t find much in the way of philosophy or solutions. (There’s some, it just doesn’t seem to be a focus.) They preach to the choir, and it ends there.
I love the Cato Institute and have a lot of good friends who work there, and they do offer some good solutions. They just refuse to do anything about them. Cato has a deserved reputation for refusing to play nice with anyone else. When was the last legislative “victory” spearheaded or introduced by Cato?
What Libertarians do exceedingly well is sit on the sidelines, arms folded, and complain. No idea was ever put into action by complaining that it wasn’t so, yet that seems to be the Libertarian modus operandi.
On election night 2008, I was at a Reason/America’s Future Foundation (another Libertarian group) election night party in a Chinatown bar in DC. The results of the election were a forgone conclusion, so what better way to mark the night than with a few drinks and friends. Hell, the band played as the Titanic sank, so why not imbibe a bit as the nation hit the iceberg?
It’s not like anyone was thrilled to vote for John McCain that day. But as bad as McCain was (and still is), he was better than Barack Obama. At least that’s a conclusion you’d expect anyone who supported liberty to draw.
Yet that night, as each state was declared for Obama, cheers rose from the crowd. When Obama won Ohio, you would’ve thought you were in a bar in Green Bay and the Packers had just won the Super Bowl. High-fives and laughter filled the room.
It wasn’t as though these self-described Libertarians wanted Obama to win. Well, actually, many of them did. But the majority of them wanted McCain to lose. They wanted Republicans to lose. Their victory was to let the country lose, to get that smug sense of self-satisfaction they were feeling.
In the years since, that attitude has only grown. And what it means to be a Libertarian has blurred even more than before. So much so that a “Libertarian” candidate for governor in Virginia – many of whose views would disgust “real” Libertarians – pulled 7 percent in a race decided by much less pretty much solely on the strength of his party ID.
Libertarians have devolved from the pro-liberty wing of the right side of the ledger to the annoying kid who, when he doesn’t get 100 percent of what he wants, takes his ball and goes home. The team he agrees with more than half the time loses to the team he barely agrees with at all, and he cheers while marinating in his smugness.
Perhaps the best-known of the bastardized self-definition of Libertarian is Bill Maher. Maher is a Libertarian like David Ortiz is a world-class sprinter. But with a definition as firm as a bowl of Jell-O, there’s no one to say he isn’t.
In his largely ignored HBO show, Maher labels himself a Libertarian. On the Internet, a lazy, compliant media perpetuates that label, and soon it becomes accepted fact. In reality, Maher doesn’t have the first clue about the virtues of individual liberty, nor does he possess any love of a Libertarian philosophy beyond wanting to smoke weed and bang hookers.
But who’s saying he’s not a Libertarian? Who challenges his claim in any public and sustained way? No one.
So the progressive pap that slips past his bleached teeth and onto the Internet is associated with, and is becoming, Libertarian orthodoxy with a new generation of confused people.
Grover Norquist, President of Americans for Tax Reform, famously tells the story of how Maher came to his Wednesday Meeting once and made his Libertarian claim, then proceeded to rant of how government needs to do this, that and the other thing. And they need to raise taxes to pay for it all. Grover, in a room of 150 people, ask Maher, “So you’re from the pro-high tax wing of the Libertarian movement?” Everyone in the room laughed hysterically, except Maher. He didn’t get it. At least it didn’t seem like he’d gotten it, but maybe he did. Maybe it was everyone else in the room who didn’t get it.
Thanks to Maher and his ilk, the term Libertarian does now come closer to what he thinks it is than it used to. If prominent Libertarians and Libertarian organizations continue to accept through silence this bastardization, it will continue to intensify. If they continue with their “my way or the highway” approach to electoral politics, their 100 percent-or-nothing purity tests, I’m not sure there will be anyone except them left to give a damn.
There’s a lesson in all this for the GOP establishment too. The disintegration of Libertarians is similar to what we’re seeing happen in the counterproductive battle between conservatives/Tea Party and the Republican establishment. If the GOP establishment can’t win with their candidate, they’d rather lose. It’s not cutting off your nose to spite your face; it’s more like cutting off your head to spite yourself.
The Virginia gubernatorial race wasn’t lost by Ken Cuccinelli. It was lost by the GOP establishment. The national party took their ball and went home early, leaving the Republican candidate astronomically outspent. Even with that disadvantage, he barely lost. Say what you will of Michael Steele’s tenure as GOP Chairman, at least he won. That’s more than can be said for the elections under Reince Priebus.
Much like Libertarians, the GOP establishment took their ball and went home in Virginia. How’d that work out for them? They “succeeded” – the guy they didn’t want to win didn’t win. But Terry McAuliffe, perhaps the sleaziest person in all of the Clinton universe, is now governor of Virginia. Pretty perverted way to make a point.
Ron Paul
Maybe we should start a classification of “noseless” for these Republicans and Libertarians. Although, if a Bush or Christy gets the 2016 Republican nomination, I’ll be “noseless” too, I guess.
Savris was a Maher-style “libertarian” funded by the democrats. Soros’ plan codenamed “Perot”.
There may have been other problems but they would have been irrelevant if not for Savris taking votes. He is the primary cause of this defeat, he all and the useless idiot paulbots who voted for him against their heroes’ advice.
Thanks for posting. Excellent piece (and heck, I didn’t even write it) and nice little analogy between libtards and GOP e near end of article.
Let’s not forget the idiot who founded CATO runs a super pac that poured 300 K of mostly anti Cooch advertising in on behalf of Sarvis…..when Sarvis has nothing in common with CATO other than libtard label.
I once attended two separate Libertarian rallies. I talked with a few people about the platform and the party’s aims.
At BOTH rallies, different people confided the exact same thing:
“It’s all about the free dope. Not ‘free to smoke dope’, but to ‘smoke FREE dope’.”
Not national security, not tax laws, not intrusive government nor civil liberties. But to smoke taxpayer-funded dope.
Libertarians are like drooling dogs.
And so what? There are plenty of posters here on FR who don't exactly cry themselves to sleep when GOP-e candidates lose.
f@$k1*g losertarians sucked about 6% of the vote from the GOP in the Virginia gubernatorial election.
yes, short sightedness and infantile ignorance is widespread…….
Well, it's pretty slick for the author to get inside the heads of celebrants, but McCain? McCain? Hello?
What the "anybody but a libertarian" crowd here does not apparently understand is that the main reason for moral decay in America is the size and scope of the federal governemnt. Getting a stupid fool like McCain to head it up changes nothing since there would be a token improvement or two more than offset by federal expansion into new areas. What difference does it make whether we quickly go down the California route under Hillary, or slowly under Christie?
I will vote Libertarian or better third party in 2016 given those choices.
Cuccinelli should have been elected governor here and I voted for him along with many other conservatives in my conservative part of Virginia. But don't confuse local politics with national.
The hate-mongering in this thread shows that the GOP is truly dead, killed by its own hand, and in rigor mortis. Just because someone calls himself liberatarian, doesn’t make it so, just as someone who does not call himself libertarian, doesn’t mean he isn’t. The impulse behind the Tea Party is essentially libertarian, which is part of the reason the GOP establishment is trying to destroy it, and some of you hate-mongers are helping. If you don’t believe in Consitutional government, you have no business calling yourselves conservatives.
Interesting, but somehow, the DNC manages not only to pander to their base, but to get things they want done.
Maybe RNC would win more if they started doing this instead of blaming their base for not being in the middle.
In the spirit of “it’s a government of the people, by the people and for the people” how is it the people’s fault that they don’t “serve” a political party. It’s supposed to be the other way around. The RNC may want to take more of a “customer is always right” approach.
Can you imagine a store owner complaining that customers don’t see the wisdom of purchasing a product over another, and stridently keeps it on the shelf though folks aren’t buying it enough to make a profit?
Also, the 6% vote for the libertarian candidate would not necessarily translate to a +6% for Cuccilnelli if the other candidate was off the list. In that case, it could be that those 6% would stay home.
Not me. I'll bust my butt for the arch-conservative gun-flag-and-Bible-waver with a chainsaw marked "Budget Tool" through the primaries right up through the convention, but after that, "the enemy's gate is down" and to the left.
And I just made that my new tagline.
Blaming Libertarians for the failures of the GOPe is like taking aspirin to treat a broken leg.
I think you make a fascinating and very important point…and I’d like to echo and add: The genesis of the tea party movement was absolutely limited government reaction to obama care and mortgage fraud and so on… I won’t go thru the Feb 2009 santelli-rush-drudge-NBC-Robert Gibbs-obama time table here, but that’s clearly the spark that lit a huge town hall anti obama care anti government kindling pile that had been buidling for a while.
EVen if you joined without knowing that’s how it came about, that’s still how it came about.
Now, most of these people were also soc conservatives, but that was NEVER the reason for the TP in the beginning…but some TP groups have sort of been hijacked by a social focus. Some have been hijacked by a sort of anti religion hard core libtard focus (libtard NOT quite the same as legit liberty type). Some are more true to the original intent and idea. Not passing judgment here, just stating what has happened.
And of course, the GOPe hates all of it…the limited gov types, the soc cons type, and the liberty types. This civil war, or set of wars, is raging now…..
The problem with libertarians is that there is not enough of them.
That’s what I always get from Libertarians too. Chatting with them always starts off as nice calm, low-key discussions about federlism and the 10th Amendment and such (on which we’re usually on the same wavelength). But then, they veer the topic over to DOPE, and their eyes widen and they get entirely animated. It’s their driving factor.
I just can’t have any respect for, or interest in what people say, when their all-consuming passion involves zonking their brains into orbit. The whole hippie-style self-absorption mindset. It repells me. It’s so stunted and just damned un-manly. Someone tells me they are a Libertarian, and I walk away.
Ed Crane, Purple PAC’s president, said the group would spend at least $300,000 on the campaign to boost Sarvis. Crane is also the founder of the Libertarian Cato Institute.
“Virginia: We have a rational choice for governor,” the ad’s narrator says. “Why choose between a hard right socially intolerant conservative and an ethically challenged big government liberal? Robert Sarvis — entrepreneur, Libertarian. Social tolerance and lower taxes. Virginia’s future. Send a message. Nov. 5th, vote Sarvis for governor.”
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