Posted on 11/09/2006 1:18:32 PM PST by Keltik
Then you're not the person to whom my statement was directed.
It's much better company than Russell Kirk
"Most men move to the center. Great Men move the center."
Paraphrased from somewhere. If anyone has the real quote, zap me a FReepmail please.
"I don't know what's more frightening about this thread -- that a very vocal minority (majority?!) of so-called "conservatives" seems to be rejecting the need for moral order, or that virtually none of the responders know who Russell Kirk was."
Amen and thank you!
That is an emotional response.
The logical response for Republicans is to ignore you with indifference. There is no gain to be had for Republicans to have a relationship with Libertarians if it means personal defeat or electoral defeat.
The logical place for Libertarians to be is with the democrat party since you have the same goal. Consider it to be similar to throwing a bad girlfriend out of my house. It's a bad relationship when one person slithers around like a snake or sneaks around like a rat. That's finished forever exactly right here and right now.
Russel Kirk 1988:The Neoconservatives: An Endangered Species
Be that as it may, I predict that within-a very few years we will hear no more of the Neoconservatives...........
Neoconservatives lack those long views and that apprehension of the human condition which forms a basis for successful statecraft. Often clever, these Neoconservatives; seldom wise............
I have tended to side with those moderate Libertarians who set their faces against foreign entanglements. And not seldom it has seemed as if some eminent Neoconservatives mistook Tel Aviv for the capital of the United States .....
To expect that all the world should, and must, adopt the peculiar political institutions of the United States - which often do not work very well even at home - is to indulge the most unrealistic of visions; yet just that seems to be the hope and expectation of many Neoconservatives. Such naive doctrine led us into the wars in Indo-China - the notion that we could establish or prop up in Vietnam a "democracy" that never had existed anywhere in southeastern Asia. Such foreign policies are such stuff as dreams are made of; yet they lead to the heaps of corpses of men who died in vain. We need to ask ourselves whether the Neoconservative architects of international policy are very different from the foreign policy advisors who surrounded Lyndon Johnson.....
I had thought that the Neoconservatives might become the champions of diversity in the world; instead, they aspire to bring about a world of uniformity and dull standardization,Americanized, industrialized, democratized, logicalized, boring. They are cultural and economic imperialists.............
I think most libertarians take more issue with the means than the end. I can understand the concerns about drugs, but not the insistence that we have to cling to an open-ended communitarian/socialist doctrine because of them.
Libertarians, by definition, are absolute strict Constitutionalists.
Yes, we are far more conservative than pubbies.
Very we put Sister!
8^)
When the AG's staff lawyers of a supposedly conservative "strict constructionist" president goes before the USSC to argue in to uphold and reinforce Wickard v Filburn, that alliance with socialists has already been forged. The constitutionalists end up aligned with the libertarians because they are the only ones who seem to see clearly enough to recognize it.
Well, that works for me, too, because I don't plan on wasting my votes on the gutless GOP any longer.
He's dead Jim....
8^)
Love your tag line!!
8^)
I guess most people here are too young to recognize that Russell Kirk was one of the greats of 20th-century intellectual American conservatism. He was more toward what some would consider the traditionalist end of the conservative spectrum.
Some Libertarians oppose drug legalization or don't mention it altogether. I agree that the issue has splintered the movement, and I myself prefer that marijuana (and industrial hemp) should be legalized but the other drugs remain banned. But any objections to legalizing drugs falls flat when you consider the current kick-down-the-doors failure of a drug policy.
That's fine - but don't squeal like stuck pigs when you lose close elections.
There is no gain to be had for Republicans to have a relationship with Libertarians if it means personal defeat or electoral defeat.
Well, then Republicans will either resort to running as Christians or they'll be RINOs. Good luck winning future elections if you don't have Libertarian elements in your platform, like the 1994 Contract With America did.
I once joined the libertarian party and contributed fairly heavily. I soon found that unless I fully supported the legalization of drugs I was "persona non-grata". The literature was so full of a pro-drug message that I became convinced that the party was a group of drug users who would soon become socialists once they had sufficiently fried their brains and needed a government hand-out to survive.
As long as libertarians insist on drug legalization and are anti-religion they will never be able to participate in a coalition with religious and social conservatives. Nor will they have much of a chance in national elections.
thnx for posting that. great quote.
"Well, then Republicans will either resort to running as Christians or they'll be RINOs. Good luck winning future elections if you don't have Libertarian elements in your platform, like the 1994 Contract With America did."
Newt Gingrich and the other guys behind the Contract With America chose to work within the Republican Party, as have most conservatives starting at least as far back as the post-WW II years. Libertarians can't stand making alliances with anyone who isn't ideologically pure, so they set up their own splinter party. That's one thing Russell Kirk was referring to. As you yourself posted, the [Libertarian] movement is split again, over the drug issue.
You call the Contract With America a Libertarian document. That's another problem I have with Libertarians: They think they invented the limited-government movement, and claim credit for ideas which conservatives have stressed long before there was a Libertarian party, or even a recognized libertarian movement. The Founding Fathers were conservatives, not libertarians. They had a strong grasp of history and human nature, and knew that people's appetites must be restrained by something; if not by external force (like government), then by internal discipline (like religion). They were realists, not abstract theoreticians like so many libertarians.
You have to keep in mind that this was written in the early part of the Cold War, when the ancestors of today's Lew Rockwellians were arguing that Communism was an imaginary threat, and that defending ourselves against it was not worth a dime of public funds.
Actually, Kirk was a follower of Edmund Burke, whose core belief was that traditional values were good not because they were handed to us by God, but because they had been tested by generations of human trial and error. The libertarian belief is that moral codes that have been derived this way are vastly superior to those imposed on us by governments.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.