Posted on 05/29/2010 9:04:14 AM PDT by dr_who
To my left-liberal Democrat friends:
As you engage in intellectual dishonesty using Rand Paul’s silly comments on the 1964 Civil Rights Act to misrepresent libertarianism, perhaps you might want to consider a little history of the political philosophy of the founder of our party, Thomas Jefferson, the original libertarian. Let me help you escape your ignorance about libertarianism without a capital L, a political philosophy far from conservatism.
As a child of the 1960s, I was one of you. I wore a “Madly for Adlai” button, delivered Kennedy brochures on my newspaper route, and defended Medicare in speech class. Growing up in the Bible Belt, I was the only kid in town to subscribe to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, a near-communist rag according to neighbors who read the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, for which a young Pat Buchanan was writing editorials.
After three years of reporting, I became a press secretary, arriving in Washington in 1975 with Rep. Paul Simon who embodied the Progressive Era. He believed programs, regulations, and social “science” expertise could lift the poor and end corruption.
By the mid-1980s, I was press spokesman for the Democratic National Committee, when “centrist” Democrats began to repair the damage that led “Reagan Democrats” to desert the party. I joined other “New Democrats,” rejecting tax-and-spend excess and the group-outcomes mentality that advocated preferences based on race rather than focusing on individual opportunity.
Then, by the middle of the 1990s, I made the logical progression to libertarian.
My own evolution might help inform those of you who think libertarians are a bunch of self-centered, conservative, anti-poor ogres—unless, like some liberals in the cable babble and op-ed page commentariat, you wish to willfully mischaracterize the word libertarian and use the philosophy as a whipping boy. I’m talking to you, Joe Klein of Time magazine, who wrote that “Tea Party libertarians” would “expose the utopian foolishness of their ideology.” And you, Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post, who informed readers that “Paul lives in Libertarian La-La Land, where a purist philosophy leads people to believe in the purest nonsense.” Surely, Mr. Robinson, you know the difference between capital L Libertarian Party members, and those of us who are members of the two major parties, or of no party at all. The Tea Party is not a libertarian movement. It’s a hodgepodge of populist beliefs, like those always accompanying economic downturns.
Classical liberalism, on the other hand, has lasted centuries. It was a natural fit for an Agrarian Era, with self-sustaining farmers, frontiersmen, and shop keepers. When the Industrial Era arrived, these individualists railed against “wage labor.” They wanted no part of centralized industry and its abuses. Corporate excesses fed Progressive Era reformers, who promoted one-size-fits-all government to address the sins of the Robber Barons.
With adoption of the income tax and world wars, a depression, and a big tax-paying middle class after World War II, Big Government was in full bloom by the 1960s, complete with a tax-hungry Cold War military industrial complex, entitlement programs that devoured revenue, and government dependency by both an impoverished underclass and a corporate welfare class.
Then came the push-back that brought Ronald Reagan to power. With about twice as many Americans calling themselves conservative as liberal, Democrats abandoned liberal and used the wimpy mush-word progressive.
But a "defense" of libertarianism appearing in "Reason" is a bit of stretch, unless the Contradictions Editor is on holiday.
Reason magazine is by and for libertarians, so you’re last statement doesn’t make much sense.
ahh. Clearly they have no “Contradictions Editor”.
You need one or two editors yourself.
I don’t understand the snotty jibe at Tea Partiers. The TEA Party movement has nothing to do with an economic downturn & everything to do with over-reaching government. Something a libertarian (small L or not) should be able to get behind!
Huh? Stevenson was the Democratic nominee in 1952 and 1956. He lost the nomination to JFK in 1960.
Me either-apparently he has never bothered to attend a Tea party rally or meeting...
Those who attempt to portray Tea Partiers in derisive, derogatory, or simply misinformed ways, are either deliberately misrepresenting them for the sake of their own agenda (Obama, Clinton, and the rest of the so-called "progressives"), or they are misinformed and ignorant.
Tea Partiers have read enough of their nation's real history (not the revisionist one perpetrated upon them by the "progressives") that they understand their role versus those who would set up a political class to rule over them. They understand the difference between freedom and slavery, between tyranny by government and liberty by the Constitution's limits on those in government.
In other words, Tea Partiers are of that same mind as America's Founders, who fled Europe to escape what today's regressive "progressives" are trying to inflict upon them in 2010.
Tea Partiers are more learned and more intellectual than the current crop of so-called leaders who look down their collective noses and sneer--including that ex-President who fears that their rhetoric is somehow likely to incite violence. Shame on you, Mr. Clinton, for, of all of them, you probably know better.
Bill Clinton knows better like any other professional grifter knows better. Shame is the one thing he doesn’t know. Anyone who hasn’t figured that out yet is likely to fall prey to Bill or people like him.
I sense that if you’re a libertarian or NR conservative and you live anywhere in and around NE, NY, and DC, you’re supposed to be mildly elitist in order to maintain civility with your friends and coworkers, especially if your choice of friends and coworkers often limited to old counterculture hippies, ivory tower ivy leaguers, social climbers, activists/lefties and the other scum that think they run the country (and often do).
True statement. A research team wouldn't hurt, either.
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