The direction of our nation and its laws can be changed. But the only way that works is to take over one of the two major parties. The Republican party of Teddy Roosevelt was pretty liberal and the Democratic party of that time was pretty conservative. The Deomcrats were dominated by the South where states rights, low taxes, and very limited federal goverment was quite popular. It was the Roosevelt type liberals of the north that dominated the Republican party in the first two decades of this century. But by the mid 1920's conservatives had taken over the Republican party too. As someone said their was not a dimes worth of difference between the two parties.
But the left under the mantle of FDR took over the Democratic party. Using party loyalty they got FDR elected president. Twenty years of FDR made the conservative Democratic party into the liberal Democratic party.
In the South the consrvative Democrats started to move to the Republican party and in new England the liberal Republicans started to move to the Democratic party.
For the first 30 years of the last century the Progressive party tried to make an impact. It Failed. It tried to move the nation to the left and it failed. FDR figured out how to do it and made the Democrats a Leftist party.
But third party people for the most part are afraid to try to move into control a major party. They don't think they could succeed. But the fact is no movement goes from a party with one or two percent support to a party with over 50 percent support in an instant. What they do is take votes from the major party most like them, thus electing the major party least like them. The third party never gets enough votes to win. If the party least like them fails, that results in the dominance of the party most like them and it takes their voters back. That takes them out of the game completely.
But the splinter parties never learn. They keep thinking that they can go from next to nothing to over 50 percent in one election cycle. It has never happened. It never will.
What does a major party do when a splinter party takes a few million votes from them? They look at the few million the splinter party got and say we need all those plus some of the other party to win. Geting the splinter party votes will make some of our voters move to the other party. So that is not a solution. They conclude that the thing to do is to move closer to the other major parties positions. What would happens in real life if the libertarians ever get enough votes to take down a Republican, the Republicans will just move to the left as a result. They will figure getting 6 percent of the Democrat votes would be enought for a Republican victory while getting 100 percent of the libertarian votes would not.
The solution to change is what it has been for 140 years. Get in one of the existing party and change it to your liking.
Barry Goldwater tried it in the Republican party and failed. Reagan did it in the Republican party and succeeded. Back when the Demcocratic party was still dominated by Conservatives, Reagan was a Democrat. But he saw the liberals were well on theway to total control of the Democrats, so he became a Republican and took that party away from the Jerry Fords and other left leaning Republicans.
Will libertarians be astute enough to try a wining approach? Not likely. Third parties just never seem to learn.
Tator, your statements are right-on. You pick on the same kinds of observations I've made (and been flamed for) many times in the past. Keep up the great philosophising!
:) ttt
This is a good post. Thanks. And, yes, I'm a libertarian.
You will never get the FR Libertarians to believe / agree with any of it though. LOL
Libertarians of the Libertarian party as with all 3rd parties have to be totally ignorant about how our sytem of govenrment works. We have a two party system. The two parties have been in control since 1860. They have made every rule in such a way that third parties are always counter productive.
We should not be resigned to the smug, self-affirming dominance of the two major parties. The American people deserve a better range of choices and should certainly be able to vote for who they truly think is best without having to worry it will help the one they consider the worst.
The solution to change is what it has been for 140 years. Get in one of the existing party and change it to your liking.
No, the solution is to adopt preferential voting, or "instant runoffs", whereby voters can indicate their first choice, second choice, third choice, etc. on the ballot. For example, you could put Buchanan down as your #1 choice with Bush as #2, so that if Buchanan is eliminated from the race, your vote transfers automatically to Bush. Hence, no more "spoilers," no more wasted-vote anxiety, and no more victories by default for candidates who are (among the top three, anyway) the least favorite of the majority.
Has nobody here heard of this candidate-ranking system? (Alaska Republicans are trying to enact it for state elections, and I'm told that the Utah GOP uses it to determine its nominees.)
http://www.liberty-tree.org/ltn/crisis-and-leviathan.html (available at www.bookfinder.com)
I read the book over the holidays, and from my reading of the book, as well as other historical sources, I think you have a misimpression of the actual growth of government over the 20th century.
If you read Crisis and Leviathan, you'll see that the People's Party (aka, the Populist Party), the Progressive Party (Teddy Roosevelt's offshoot of the Republican Party), and the Socialist Party (under Eugene Debs) were actually spectacularly effective. And you'll also see that the Democratic Party turned Big Government long before FDR. In fact, many of the economic controls FDR used in the New Deal were simply carryovers and extensions of the economic controls of WWI (under progressive Democrat, Woodrow Wilson). The reason the Populist, Progressive, and Socialist parties were spectacularly effective is that they did, in fact, pull the entire country substantially to the left. FDR merely completed a job that was already well underway. A big shift to the left had already occurred between the late 1890's and 1919 (the end of WWI).
In fact, if you read "The Roosevelt Myth" by Joe Flynn, you'll see that FDR's actions as president essentially completely repudiated the ideas on which he ran. When running for president, for example, he criticized Hoover for deficit spending. (And I don't mean, "for not enough deficit spending.")
In conclusion, based on my readings, your opinions are based on an incomplete view of history. The various third parties (Populist, Progressive, and Socialist) did in fact carry public opinion substantially to the left. Just as we Libertarians plan on pulling public opinion substantially to the "Top."
By the way, we Libertarians don't agree that politics is based on Left/Right, and instead think that politics is actually a diamond...with Left (liberal), Right (conservative), Top (libertarian), and Bottom (authoritarian). See the "smallest political quiz" on the Libertarian Party website...http://www.lp.org/quiz/ )
Mark (member of the Libertarian Party...accept no substitutes!)
P.S. On behalf of the tens of thousands of members of the Libertarian Party, let me tell Ms. Postrel that we aren't going anywhere. She can go away. We're staying. And if she doesn't like it, she can come get us. But she should remember that most of us have guns. ;-) Because, unlike Republicans, we actually think that the 2nd and 10th Amendments MEAN something!