Posted on 11/10/2013 3:06:57 AM PST by Kaslin
When you bait a hook, you hope to catch a fish. Thursday I baited a hook, and I caught a lot of fish.
I had intended to write today’s column with the title “The Problem With Conservatives,” because there are some too. But I enjoyed the feedback I got from poking the bear so much I thought I’d grab another stick.
By daring to criticize “Libertarians” (yeah, I’m capitalizing it since it bothers certain people so much) for their ineffectiveness, laziness and general apathy while what they claim to so prize is slipping away, the flying monkey brigade of indifference was unleashed. Good.
The majority of tweets, emails and feedback I received were positive, and some were just this side of hyperventilating. But few of them were on point. They were mostly flipping the bird as they turned the corner while taking their ball and going home.
In other words, they illustrated my point while “destroying” it.
An overwhelming amount of hyperbolic, self-congratulatory back-patting tweets came from people, a large percentage of whom work/write/edit for Reason magazine (or at least claim to in their Twitter bios), which is odd but also oddly illustrative of my point. I said nice things about Reason in my original piece. Not only nice things, but it was majority nice. The rest was constructive criticism.
They do great work at Reason. They cover important stories the majority of the media ignores, and they throw fun parties (met my fiancé at one). But apparently they take breaks from that great work to spend a lot of time attacking and arguing about what some “irrelevant” person wrote that was just “stupid.”
What none of them, those at Reason and elsewhere, did was refute what I wrote. They simply became it.
Andrew Kirell, who is an editor at the site Mediaite, wrote the most tweeted “takedown” of me, but it was also one of the weakest. He seemed to take my piece personally in spite of the fact that I’d never heard of him until someone tweeted his article to me. That’s fine. It’s sad, but it’s his life.
His points, as they were, consist of truly childish pettiness.
First, my capitalization of “Libertarian” rather than using a lower-case “L.” Two answers to that: 1) take it up with an editor, and 2) get a hobby.
Second, he doesn’t like my asking, “Honestly, what does being a Libertarian mean beyond legalizing drugs, banging hookers and sitting by while the rest of the world blows itself up?” He responded to that with, “It should be quite clear by now that Hunter is just mad that libertarians aren’t conservatives. By picking the issues on which libertarians and conservatives most vehemently disagree, he conveniently broadsides the whole movement as being solely about the “hookers” and drugs. In other words: Why can’t you libertarians just invade more countries and lock up more people for victimless crimes?”
Since I’d never heard of Kirell before Friday, how he professes to know what I think and my motives on anything will be a mystery for the ages. I think prostitution should be legal, support most drug decriminalization and oppose most military action. But I also know hookers, getting high and bringing our troops home from abroad aren’t exactly the keys to saving the Republic.
Libertarians hate social conservatives, and I’m hardly social conservatives’ best defender since I’m not and never have been one. But I don’t run in fear of them because I believe the top priority should be defeating the progressive agenda, wherever it is. Libertarians are happy to see a fiscal conservative defeated at the polls because they happen to be a social conservative too. That’s not only short-sighted, it’s stupid.
George W. Bush was a socially conservative President, yet last I checked abortion was legal between 2001 and 2009 and Las Vegas had not been Dresden-ed into oblivion. Gay people were not rounded up nationwide, nor in Texas when he was governor there. In short, what difference does it make if any politician is a social conservative? How did it affect the life of Andrew Kirell? It doesn’t. This is not to defend Bush, who was a disgrace on fiscal issues, as were Republicans under him.
Not done digging, Andrew writes, “What’s more is that Reason constantly offers up policy solutions and waxes poetic about libertarian “philosophy” (since that’s what libertarianism is, a philosophy). They just get ignored by partisan conservatives like Mr. Hunter, who wave away any policy that involves cuts to the military, scaling back the surveillance state or legalizing certain victimless crimes.”
On the first part, I thought I’d covered that by praising them. Apparently not. But on the ignored part, he’s dead wrong. They are disregarded by design.
Like it or not, for any of that “philosophy” to move beyond chatter over microbrews and be enacted, “partisan conservatives” in government are going to have to be engaged. Wanting something to be won’t make it so. Having a great idea won’t change anything if you refuse to work with and friends attack opponents in the position of power to enact it.
On the rest, it’s just lazy. I’ve written and spoken extensively in support of military cuts – no budget item that large isn’t full of waste, fraud and unnecessary garbage. I’ve attacked the NSA – but the NSA already knows that – and I’ve already covered victimless crimes.
All that and more could have been uncovered through some simple Googling. But Andrew and his friends were mad, and mad trumps thinking and logic. That trumping of logic, that knee-jerk emotional response, is the point.
Libertarian hatred, anger, disappointment, whatever you want to call it, toward conservatives causes them to function irrationally and against their self-interest. Libertarians agree with conservatives on probably 80 percent of the issues. Yet they can’t or won’t get past the remaining 20 percent. So they cheer a conservative loss as some sort of philosophical victory, and we get Obamacare. How’s that working out for the cause of liberty?
Had Kirell contacted me about what I’d written we could’ve had what I suspect would’ve been an interesting conversation. But he didn’t. He didn’t even have the courage to tweet me his post when it went live. Others did or else I wouldn’t have known it existed. To have the courage of your convictions you should at least have the courage to engage in a discussion of them.
We eventually chatted a bit on Twitter and he seems like an all right guy. But he still didn’t seem to get it. I asked him for victories his philosophy has racked up over the last 20 years and he did have a list. It included the Internet, Rand Paul, Justin Amash, school choice and Supreme Court decisions on guns. Great, except…
The Internet is on the verge of being usurped by “net neutrality” regulations, especially if more progressives Democrats are elected. Even without that, the FCC is always ready to do it through regulatory fiat since President Obama appoints the majority and there’s big money pushing for it.
Rand Paul and Justin Amash, I hate to say it, are Republicans. They’re doing it right – working within the system to change it. Hate the system all you want – and who doesn’t? But it’s not going anywhere.
On school choice, the Heller gun rights case, and more, court victories came because conservatives won elections and appointed judges. They’re great victories, don’t get me wrong –and too many squishy Second Amendment groups sat on their hands for the majority of Heller out of fear of losing. But they’re one death or retirement away from being gone forever.
Conservative justices tend to respect precedent; progressive justices do not. Cheer the defeats of McCain and Romney all you want, but if you’re interested in liberty you’d better find a way to keep five Supreme Court Justices healthy, alive and able to work for the next three years or you can kiss your past and future victories goodbye.
That’s the crux of it – the short-sighted nature of critics of my original piece exemplifies the problem. By refusing to even vocally and sternly lay out some general principles of what it means to be a Libertarian, the movement leaves the term open to bastardization. And it’s been bastardized.
Kirell does give me credit for this, then complains I didn’t include Glenn Beck in my criticism. I don’t follow or listen to Glenn Beck, so I have no idea what claims to make about him, nor do I care. For that matter, I didn’t single out Bill Maher to attack Bill Maher. I did it to make a point. Kirell knows this, cedes as much, but needs to ignore it to attack me as a “partisan.” Whatever.
I enjoy pissing off people, and I enjoy engaging people who disagree with me in discussion. You can’t be a radio host and not. But I don’t like illogic and I don’t like hypocrites. One of the things liberal callers to my show do is, when confronted with an inconvenient fact, play the “Yeah, but Republicans did X, Y, or Z too!” Or first. Or 50 years ago, or something of that sort. It’s a lazy argument and a way to dodge a point you can’t refute. Build a time machine, and I’ll happily go back and refight things I had no voice in or wasn’t alive during while you congratulate yourself.
But until you build that time machine, how about we deal with the world in which we live now and the future? We can legalize drugs and prostitution, bring all our troops home and slash the military. But we’ll still have Obamacare, a debt higher than our GDP and more in unfunded liabilities than there is wealth on the planet. And government will continue to grow.
I’m sure there were people on the Titanic who warned of setting the engines full-steam ahead because there was a possibility of an iceberg, but I doubt they died with the warm smugness of having been right. They just died … in icy water in the middle of a dark ocean. Libertarians revel in attacking conservatives for their faults, and many of the attacks are deserved. But refusing to engage, get involved and fight to change minds – as opposed to preaching to the choir – means nothing when they’re going to drown if we hit the iceberg progressives have set us up to hit.
I hope it changes, but I highly doubt it will.
Final note. I won’t link to those who engaged me on Twitter, even the nasty ones, because they had the courage and courtesy to do so directly. But I did find it amusing that I got a lot of “Libertarians don’t have a purity test!” tweets accompanied by “you’re not” or “you never were” tweets. If there is no purity test, not even nebulous guidelines, how can they say?
Libertarians have a lot of passion. I just wish it were focused and mobilized for, rather than against, achieving goals for liberty. If you want to get to, say, 10, and Republicans will fight with you to get to 7, but Democrats want to take you to 0, why wouldn’t you fight alongside Republicans to at least get 7? Fight over the remaining 3 later. I’d love to have the conservative/libertarian war after progressivism is vanquished, or at least retreated some. But you won’t get it. You’ll continue to slip toward 0 if you sit on the sidelines focusing your energy on the fact that 7 isn’t 10.
I know I’m not going to win any friends with this, but I don’t care. I have enough friends. What I don’t have, what we don’t have, is enough victories. I’m sick of people celebrating losing like it’s an accomplishment. You want to attack me, knock yourself out. You want to have a discussion, you know where to find me.
The first piece in this series by Hunter (you posted couple days ago) was on the money, and yet…when I forwarded it to one of the more practical libertarians I know…he too “took it personally” and went ballisitic….and later sent me the piece from Mediaiate. And like I said, this is the most practical libertarian I know.
He even agrees Sarvis was a joke ,and yet, for some unfathomable reason, he took this so personally. Libertarians: conservatives who failed to launch…..
This started out with promise but ended up long and boring, irrelevant and borderline incoherent.
One of the few libertarians I like is John Stossel. the other ones are just kooks imo
BEFORE THE ELECTION:
"Ha! You libertarians are a bunch of pot-smoking, child porn hippies with machine guns in your home who won't get .0001% of the vote! Get out of here and leave the elections to the grownups!"
AFTER THE ELECTION:
"WAAA! WAAA! Why did you guys have to run and cause our RINO to lose?"
Stop demonizing libertarians. The vast majority of them are pro-liberty and even pro-life. For this, I blame the Libertarian Party itself. It has done a horrible job of nurturing real libertarian candidates in hopelessly blue states in which Republicans haven't got a prayer, and won't endorse real conservative Republicans and encourage the libertarian candidate to get out of the race.
I blame the Libertarian Party itself. I
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
The Libertarian Party would be much more effective if it were a club or organization like the National Rife Association.
I was a member of the Libertarian Party and active in its affairs for several years. I quit about 10 years ago because I finally decided that their methods were counterproductive.
most liberaltarians are pro life!!!, Sorry but every one I have met or talked to and I mean ALL of them are not pro life as they want Govt out of it and a woman can do anything she wants , just like they’re for homosexuality, incest,etc and all the time they harp on about no Govt.
I actually fell for the libertatarian line some time ago until I heard more about their liberal social issues , liberal military, liberal open borders.
This is one of the attitudes that gets me frustrated with pro-life conservatives. It’s an all or nothing issue for them.
They don’t get that we got to where we are because the Progressives understand that it’s a long haul to turn the Titanic and it happens in increments. They chipped away at one issue for forty years until our country has one of the most ‘progressive’ abortion policies in the world. Then they paint us as radicals and extremists and silence our voice.
I got into an argument on a blog that had a lot of foreigners a few weeks ago on the abortion issue. Once they found out I was pro-life, things turned so ugly. But once I (and a few others) finally got through to them that we didn’t have the 12 week cut-off period, that a woman could get an abortion until she was in labor in some places, the reaction was stunning.d
At first, they accused me and the others of lying. Saying that there’s no way that could be legal in a Western nation. After they were shown proof, there was an uncomfortable dialogue. It was uncomfortable for them because they just realized what pro-life and pro-choice actually meant in the US and they didn’t like that they found themselves in the pro-life camp.
Progressives are smart. They kept their ‘endgame’ to themselves and played their cards close to their chest. They took the first ‘reasonable’ steps and painted anyone who disagreed as an extremist. Once they got the tide going in their direction (and drowned out the voices of their enemies) they just kept pushing slowly in the the direction they want to go.
Conservatives will *not* shut up and learn how to play the game. More than 70% of the US is for a cut-off at the 12 week mark. Most people believe that clinics should be clean and regulated. (Most don’t know that they aren’t) We can win the easy fight, then keep ‘nudging’.
But ‘principled’ conservatives would rather stand on their righteous soapbox and feed our gleeful enemies soundbites than learn how to play to win.
The pro-life camp has left the majority in the middle (abortion until the 12th week, OK with IVF, abortion for rape, life of the mother, and severe deformities) with no place to go *except* the pro-choice camp. So we lose the bulk and have no hope of getting them back.
I like the Libertarian party, I am not one but they gave me a pro life candidate to vote for in the last U.S. Senate election here in Illinois.
I don’t even remember his name any more but voting for him beat the heck out of voting for Senator Mark Kirk or the other democrat.
Well, yeah.
(1) Candidate gets asked the "Akin question" - "Do you believe that a twelve year old who is raped by her stepfather should be required to carry the child to term??"
(2) Candidate answers, "Yes, absolutely".
(3) Pro-death Democrat wins by a large margin, ensuring years more of unlimited abortions up to the moment of birth.
(4) Pro-life hardliners sleep soundly, comforted in the knowledge that they have remained unsullied by the taint of compromise.
Especially the most vulnerable.
I will never vote for a pro-abortion candidate. You'll need to get used to being frustrated.
/johnny
I’m on my phone, so I can’t link to his article from the other day, but I would encourage everyone to find out and read it. keyword libertarian and you’ll find it. There were about 200 replies. Caused quite a brou haha.
That bears repeating. The article is yet another hit piece on a group of liberty loving people who should be the natural allies of conservatives. Every argument made about how libertarians stick to their principles and don't vote for the Republican who shares 70% of their values applies just as much to conservative voters.
For example, conservatives should get behind a Christie campaign right, he's a Republican, and he's much better than a Democrat, and he's in favor of a lot of conservative positions. But he does want to ban semi-automatic firearms. Oh well, why should we oppose him, he's mostly on our side.
Or how about those RINOs. Amnesty is just one issue. Why not support McCain, or Romney or some other RINO. After all, if they win the Republicans will get to appoint some judges.
Conservatives reject those arguments, so why are they surprised or angry that other voters do the same thing? If there was a conservative 3rd party candidate then the Republicans would be blaming them for their defeat.
When a political part is losing elections they need to get a larger number of people to support their candidates. Its as simple as that. You can do that by educating and persuading the voters, or by finding candidates who can appeal to the majority of voters as they are. Blaming the people who you couldn't convince to vote for your candidate is pointless.
A far more useful exercise is to understand why, and figure out how to get them to support your next candidate.
Of course every argument the author makes is symmetric. If the libertarians failing to join the Republicans to work together is the cause of Republican failures, then the reverse is just as true. Had the Republicans chosen candidates and policies that appealed to the Libertarians then the Republicans would have been victorious. So why didn’t they?
To be honest, the reason I decided I had to leave the libertarians was because they are too close for comfort to leftists in MANY issues. Rather than take the side of good in a policy that NEEDS fixing, they take the side with the left for non-intrusion, so that problem gets worse rather than better. Once the courts and a president makes decision that cause harm, it MUST be fought against, not all this mealy-mouthed stuff about the government shouldn’t be dictating these things. QUITE RIGHT! HOWEVER, once the government HAS stepped in, and EVERYONE else is forced by law to go along with it, is there no purpose to righting that wrong? The government had no business forcing abortion on the country, abolishing prayer in schools or at public meetings, and the list goes on. The libertarians profess to be against the loss of rights, but not all rights, apparently. Too bad I did not keep all the things I once compiled that eventually made me realize I could not longer support them. They are willing to leave the greater wrongs as they are. That is my point. IN one sense I’m not so concerned with the legalization of pot, but this is a major issue with them. They care not about the number of abortions being done yearly, the homosexual agenda that is being FORCED upon school children and the sex education programs that basically are “how-to” programs. Yes, I’d agree that had the state not already been involved in this and it was currently up for a vote, let the states themselves decide. But the federal government got involved way back and they don’t let go. They take more, force more upon us, but the libertarians think that we should NOT BE FIGHTING those issues. So we let the left continue the destruction of the family without a fight? Yes...THAT WAS THE ANSWER I GOT from one writer. That was enough for me. These decisions belong to the state, which I agree, but we cannot fight to overturn these so that the states can THEN make their own choices? (No answer from that one.) So, we are at an impasse as our once-great country continues to self-destruct. I’m certain that a lot of states would love to be free of Washington’s strong arm, but they’ll get no real help from libertarians to throw the monkey off their backs. Basically, the attitude is “what’s done is done.” So slavery was better left as it was? (The answer to that was to let each state determine.) What about states who wanted slavery, but a slave ran off to a free state? Would the free state be forced to return the slave or do as it wanted? Their answer showed me that they don’t think through the consequences of the big issues. We could go on here for a long time. Libertarians take issue on the small things, mostly. They vote way too often with the left on social issues. I have a lot of good friends who are libertarian. They minimize the effect that abortion, forced homosexual teaching in schools, etc. have on the nation.
No, they aren't pro-life, you just made that up.
Social liberalism is their agenda and why they are not merely conservatives.
*** Had the Republicans chosen candidates and policies that appealed to the Libertarians then the Republicans would have been victorious. So why didn’t they?***
Is that some kind of sick joke? You want the GOP to accept the left’s agenda?
We conservatives are against this libertarian agenda.
Libertarian agenda:
Throw open the borders completely; only a rare individual (terrorist, disease carrier etc.) can be kept from freedom of movement through “political boundaries”.
Homosexuals; total freedom in the military, gay marriage, adoption, child custody and everything else.
Abortion; zero restrictions or impediments.
Pornography; no restraint, no restrictions.
Drugs; Meth, Heroin, Crack, and anything new that science can come up with, zero restrictions.
Advertising those drugs, prostitution, and pornography; zero restrictions.
Military Strength; minimal capabilities.
Blaming Libertarians for not voting Republican is no different than blaming Democrats for not voting Republican.
And the premise of the author's article is that Libertarians should vote for Republicans, since they agree on most topics. By the author's logic, conservatives should vote for liberal Republicans, because after all we agree on most topics with them.
I'm not advocating that Republicans do anything, just pointing out the folly of dumping on some group of voters and then being annoyed that they didn't vote for your candidate anyway.
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