Why I'm Not A Libertarian

Why I'm Not A Libertarian - Michael Medved calls Libertarians "Losertarians".

Medved's wrong.

Oh, not entirely. Medved is rarely completely wrong about mch of anything. But on this
issue, Medved paints with an uncharacteristically broad, clumsy brush.

Not enough people are concerned with civil liberties - or, to be more accurate, our broad range of civil liberties. Oh, on one level, a lot of people are concerned, it's true. But much of that concern is heat without light, as a whole wave of summer civil libertarians, the "Ashcroft Libertarians", have debouched like hounds chasing the beer concessionaire instead of the fox, knotted up about the "civil liberties" of foreign terrorists captured on the battlefield, and baying at the moon over further erosions of liberties first gutted under Bill Clinton - for whom most Ashcroft Libertarians voted. The real role of the Libertarian party - as the nation's nagging Jeffersonian conscience - is more important than ever.

I touched on the basic reasons that I left the GOP and joined the Libertarian party the other day in this space. I left the Republicans in or around 1992, angry at the GOP's caving in on taxes and gun control. I was convinced I'd made the right choice in the early years - as the 1994 Crime Bill and the 1996 Counterterrorism Bill and the eternal War On Drugs wrought real havoc on genuine liberties. I watched Congress knuckle under and ban a range of guns that looked scary, and vote to allow property forfeiture without trial, and a range of wiretaps and surveillance and smash-and-grab searches and police deception that'd make the Ashcroft Libertarians blanche with horror, if they stopped howling at Ashcroft long enough to pay attention.

I was as active a Libertarian as my schedule allowed - which meant then as today "sporadically". But I ended up running for office twice - in 1996 for US House against Bruce Vento (I lost) and in 1998 for State Treasurer. I wasn't a "true believer", but I was certainly a believer.

While I was in the Libertarian Party, I noticed that it seemed to draw three basic types of people:

People who found the groupthink of the left too stifling, or who felt the left had abandoned its one-time focus on liberty. They tended (broadly) to be former hippies, or seem like them.
1. People who were outraged enough about one or two issues to have left one party or another (usually the Republicans).
2. Purists - people with absolutist, rigid beliefs about civil liberties; the kind of people who regretted the Federalists' influence in ditching the Articles of Confederation, who felt the North was the big bad brother in the Civil War (while furiously allowing that slavery was both grossly immoral and, simultaneously, curable by market forces). The kind of people I eventually characterized as "having their feet firmly planted in the clouds".

I was a #2, with a touch of #3. I admired the #3s.

It was good. I learned a lot. And in 1998, I ran for State Treasurer, and won [1].

And while my time in the Libertarians was good, two realizations crept up on me, starting as little germs of doubt and growing into reasons for my return to the GOP in 1999.

First - they were purists. There's nothing wrong with purism - Jefferson, Madison and Hamilton were purists. Purism is the privilege of the unchecked idealist. But not only are most people pragmatists, but most problems do not lend themselves to being solved by absolutist, purist means.

Second - views on defense started my exit from the Democrat party in the early eighties. It was, if anything, more important with the Libertarians. The Libertarian dogma ranges from the suicidal (that we should "Defend our borders" and nothing more) to the vacuously frivolous (the military should be privatized). It was telling that even Jefferson, the patron saint of Libertarianism, abandoned traditional libertarian isolationism when faced with a foreign threat (the Barbary pirate crisis of 1803), when he abandoned his traditionally libetarian beliefs to declare he'd spend "millions for defense but not a penny for tribute".

So I left. I went back to the Republican Party. When I caucus, I sit on the side of the meetings with the other "libertarian Republicans", people who supported Jack Kemp and don't really care what gays do and whose feelings about abortion vary but whose beliefs about civil liberty don't. It can be uncomforable, as King Banaian described in sCSU Scholars yesterday:

My own Siddhartha journey began when I announced at a caucus my support for Jack Kemp and the first question asked was "Where does he stand on abortion?" I said I didn't know, and that whatever it was would not change my mind about supporting him. Nobody spoke to me the rest of the night.

I laughed when I read that. I've faced the same audience, the one that sits on the other side of the room, the ones that are there because they oppose abortion and, in many cases, no other. God bless 'em - the party needs everyone it can get - but the interrogation they give you when you're running for even the pettiest party office always starts with "what are your views on abortion" and ends with "But do you really Really REALLY oppose abortion?"

Back to the original point; Medved's wrong. The Libertarians may never win a significant office outside of Montana or Alaska, but they have had one vital function; they've served as the nagging libertarian conscience of the right. As the Greens drag the Democrats to the left for fear of losing 3% of their number to the ideological purists, so do the Libertarians force the GOP to stay as true as it does on civil liberties. I think it's important that right after the Libertarian Party USA hit its peak in terms of national influence and mindshare - the early nineties - the GOP adopted its most libertarian approach in decades (the 1994 campaigns borrowed heavily from Libertarian themes), to keep the 1-2% of Republicans that might defect to the Libertarian Party in the fold.

I'm still a Republican. I'll always be one. But in the GOP meetings, I wave the figurative Libertarian flag and do my bit to nag the rest of the caucus to focus on the things that matter - freedom being the big one - and leave the little things to the people.

Where they belong, as much as it pains some of us.

[1] Not in the sense that I actually spent four years as state treasurer or anything. My only

platform point was "Abolish the useless office of State Treasurer". There was also a ballot

initiative that year to do exactly that. While I got 37,000 votes , the ballot initiative passed 2-1. The people proved they didn't need any stinkin' politician to abolish their offices; you can't get more libertarian than that. I declared a moral victory.

Posted by Mitch at March 25, 2004 07:40 AM