Dear conservatives: A rejoinder to Lehrer
One of the goals we set in launching the Word on the Street blog is that it would promote dialogue on a broad range of issues – from pirates to poets to politics – not only between R Street and the reading public, but also among those of us inside the R Street family. We are a diverse bunch, and while there are common goals that bring us together, we definitely don’t all reflect a single party line, either figuratively or (in this case) literally.
And it is with that in mind that I feel the need to take issue with several of the points in my colleague Eli’s recent Huffington Post piece on the “kookiness” he sees in the Libertarian Party and among libertarians more generally. I think Eli misses the mark in prescribing what Libertarians (or libertarians) “should” do, in large measure, because he has the wrong impression about what they are trying to do. I’m also skeptical that some of the suggestions he offers would, in fact, bring them any closer to the mainstream.
That the LP and the libertarian movement more generally have their share of eccentric characters, I would certainly not deny, although the perennial example of San Francisco LP mainstay Starchild (whom I knew a bit back in my Bay Area days) is both a tired and, I’d say, unfair one. People who don’t know Starchild are immediately struck by his name, his unique fashion sense and his unorthodox choice of career. But the fact remains that he’s an incredibly hard worker (something at a terrible shortage in the LP) with relatively mainstream libertarian views. In any case, he generally outpolls Republicans when he runs for office, so he’s clearly doing something right.
I also question whether, for instance, the “birther” and “truther” movements have any notably greater traction within the LP than the do in the general public. Polls suggest more than half of Republican voters believe President Obama was born outside the United States, and that includes Mitt Romney “advisor” Donald Trump.
The truther movement, meanwhile, has mostly faded out of site since the end of the Bush administration, but at its height, about one-third of Americans expressed the belief that 9-11 was an inside job. Since the LP has only once received more than 0.5% of the vote in a presidential race – and that was 32 years ago – I think it’s fair to say that the overwhelming majority of truthers are not Libertarians (and I would add, based on my own anecdotal experience, that the overwhelming majority of Libertarians are not truthers.)
But let’s leave aside the question of relative loonyness to ask the bigger one, which is, why does anyone join an organization like the Libertarian Party in the first place?
I might be able to contribute something to this question. While I am not, today, a member of either the Libertarian Party or the Republican Party, I have been a member of both. In fact, I’ve been an office holder in both, serving for a time as an elected Republican district leader and, later, on the steering committee of the New Jersey Libertarian Party. I was even a delegate to the LP’s 2004 National Convention in Atlanta.
I still care quite a bit about policy (hence, I have the job I do) and I still consider myself more or less a libertarian (albeit more of an Economist magazine-style libertarian than an “End the Fed” type.) But over the years, I lost my taste for partisan politics, which I now regard as a sport whose outcomes simply don’t interest me – or, in the grand scheme of things, matter — all that much.
Actually, there’s one particular sport that comes to mind: pro wrestling. Just as in pro wrestling, politics is a performance art, full of costumes and lighting and invented dramas and tons of noisy, completely fabricated personas. If I were more of a wrestling fan, I’d offer a riff on whether conservatives were the faces (because they love law and order) and liberals were the heels (because they’re more tolerant of individualism) or whether the liberals were the faces (because they’re so earnest and self-righteous) and the conservatives were the heels (because they unapologetically reject empathy for human weakness.) But truthfully, I haven’t watched a wrestling match since Junkyard Dog was in his prime, so extending this metaphor any further is beyond my ken.
The point being that politics is like sports. And just as in sports, there are any number of reasons a partisan is drawn to their particular rooting allegiances. Some like the turbo-charged hyper-masculinity of The Rock. Some like the arrogance and smarmy humor of Roddy Piper. Some just like Koko B. Ware’s parrot. But even though I’m no longer a member, I can pretty much guarantee that approximately zero people who have ever joined the Libertarian Party share Eli’s outlook on this point:
Libertarians can offer practical solutions. They don’t need to get in bed with the political Left. But, if they want the fusionist alliance to keep going and the political right to remain in power, libertarians are going to have to stop being nuts.
No one who joins the Libertarian Party wants “the political right to remain in power.” Joining the Libertarian Party is, explicitly, an act of rejecting Buckley/Meyer-style fusionism. The LP dubs itself the “party of principle,” and while one could debate whether it has always lived up to that lofty appellation, there is no question that the party has always prioritized ideological purity over electoral success. If anything, electoral success has always had something of a stigma attached among those in the party who insist that the overriding goal should be to win minds, not votes.
One can (and I do) question whether there’s any particular point to having a political party that isn’t, first and foremost, trying to win. I’ve written before about how I thought the LP has outlived its usefulness as both a source of information about libertarianism and as an infrastructure for local libertarian activism. I see it now as just another lumbering dinosaur in the age of information. But it is an explicitly libertarian dinosaur, not a fusionist dinosaur, and a Republican yelling at it to “stop being so darned libertarian!” is not, perhaps, the most useful advice that could be offered.
Not the least of which, because I don’t think it’s clear that moving in the directions Eli suggests would actually represent mainstreaming the party. For instance, he writes:
Likewise, few Americans want to abandon Israel, cut and run in Afghanistan, or stop being a global force for freedom and democracy.
Public polling doesn’t actually bear out those claims. Only 41% of Americans would even call Israel an “ally.” And while more Americans (38%) say we give the right amount of support to Israel than those (33%) who say we give too much, both groups far outnumber the 17% who say we do not give enough. Moreover, two-thirds of Americans say the United States should take neither side in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, compared to 25% who say the U.S. should favor Israel.
Moving on to Afghanistan, 53% say the United States should not be involved, while just 36% say the country is doing the right thing in fighting there. Separate polling shows that 69% want to end the war.
As to “being a global force for freedom and democracy,” seven in ten Americans say the United States should not try to change dictatorships into democracies, compared to just 15% who say that we should. Roughly half of Americans opposed last year’s military actions in Libya (even though no American lives were lost) and two in three Americans (including half of Republicans) say the Iraq War was not worth the cost and loss of life.
Which is not to say, necessarily, that Americans are right about all of these things. As we saw with the birthers and the truthers, Americans can have lots of bad ideas. But it is simply not true that “very few” Americans agree with libertarians on these points. It appears, in fact, that most do.
To wrap this up, in a nutshell, conservatives and libertarians believe different things (hell, even libertarians and libertarians believe different things.) There are some areas of common ground, but even those are often motivated by very different passions. Libertarian support of free enterprise, for instance, tends to have something to do with markets being an expression, surprise surprise, of liberty, not with their being an “institution” that needs to be preserved.
Where libertarians and conservatives can work together, they should. But let’s be honest about what that means. Ron Paul aside (since I don’t think most of his followers can be called “libertarian” in any real sense of the word) there is no discernible libertarian voting block and there never has been. What conservatives really mean when they refer to “working with” libertarians is that conservative think tanks and action groups need the intellectual output of free market economists, most of whom are libertarian. It’s hard to see how the goings-on at a tiny, irrelevant third party convention has any bearing on that relationship.
And where libertarians and liberals can work together, they should. Indeed, we here at R Street already do! Our allies on insurance issues have included the National Wildlife Federation, Friends of the Earth, American Rivers and any number of other groups with whom we certainly have broad disagreements on a great many issues.
But it is also useful to bear in mind that the combined area of both (libertarian/conservative and libertarian/liberal) of those Venn diagrams will always be much smaller than the enormous number of ways in which conservatives and liberals always have, and always will, work together to suppress liberty.
And good night, Koko B. Ware, wherever you are.
