One of them was chatting with some of us and asked if the LP would be interested in having the Paul supporters back (they raised hell in the Missouri GOP caucuses last month and the state convention is coming up).

I tried to negotiate a deal—“we’ll give you Bob Barr for them!”—but no final arrangement was reached.

I warned lots of LPers and Ron Paul people about Ron Paul’s newsletters and got ignored completely. What I predicted came to pass and they (and the entire libertarian community) got completely screwed by Ron Paul’s nazi-esque writings. Turning backs on the DOMA issue, or pretending it doesn’t exist, will just repeat the same process and result in more wasted campaign millions. Barr supporters should strongly encourage him to make his position on DOMA, as communicated to a number of us late last year, public and unambiguous.

Outright Libertarians would be happy to help him communicate his position to the general media and help navigate the skeptical waters of the queer press, but he’s got to be public and unambiguous about his position in order to make that effective.

Barr has not recanted on his evil, bigoted legislation. Apparently you don’t have a problem with this well then, f… you too. Because I will be in Denver and I will let every delegate I can know how Barr’s legislation forced me apart from my partner of 10 years. It is the height of unlibertarian thinking to push that law, he has refused to acknowledge it was evil. I’m sick and tired of disgusting conservatives infiltrating the LP and rewriting what it means to be libertarian. Barr’s bigoted views will haunt him and anyone who supports him. And if he gets the LP nod then I will actively campaign against the Libertarian Party for the first time in my life.

I didn’t want welfare and neither did he. We both worked our entire life. We weren’t looking for “special privileges” just the same right that any straight American in a relationship with a foreign citizn has—to bring their partner to the US. Barr specifically wrote laws to strip gays of rights that he enjoys. That is the antithesis of libertarianism and he is an dark spot on the party and the movement. Damn him for his role in this. I don’t think I’m the only gay libertarian (and there are many of course) who finds his campaign repugnant to the very ideals of our party.

Fiscal conservativism is not a free market. While the two may overlap they are not the same. Many of the counties, states and cities in the old south were and still remain fiscally consrvative and do not waste tax dollars, but that does not mean that they have reduced, abolished, or repealed the thousands of regulations that keep people from engaing in the market place. occupational licensing laws, housing regulations, transportation regulations all remain on the books and tie people down. Or to put it more bluntly is the government boot on the neck of the poor and meant to stay there and keep them down.

MHW

And your point is? I never said Steve Kubby is always right, any more than I said you’re always wrong.

FYI - Steve Kubby backed Tom McClintock for Governor in the 2003 recall election, as did many other Libertarians.

April 9th, 2008 at 11:35 am
Thomas, well under the “left liveral” Ed Crane the LP has achieved its highest
score so far, but still not enough to make a dent. Ed Crane, who has stated he would not vote, mentioned a few weeks ago that Ron Paul is the only one that really is an attractive candidate to him, ”

That should be Ed Clark friend not Crane.

SG might be requesting donations because it was his idea to place that fundraiser tube up, which isn’t looking too bright at the moment. Let’s all hope it wasn’t his idea! It ranks up there with whoever let the “fair” TAX plank in the vanilla general election platform on his new site. I have no problems with a LP candidate with a vanilla general election platform on their official website. Running for office you want people to be FOR you, don’t supply something they can be against you by just reading your website. Print what they can agree with you about. These two mistakes on Barr’s staff doesn’t equal nor comes even close to the ineptness of the Paul “brain”trust, but major blunders still.

He could of kept quite on the fairTAX until after the convention and sailed to the LP nomination on the 3rd or 4th ballot. Some of you say that’s dishonest, well NOT really in politics. It’s up to the delegate to find out info on all the candidates or they need to allow someone else to occupy their important position. Now it will be a FIGHT for the nomination. He still will be your nominee if he wants it, unless that “tube” doesn’t fill up enough over the next six weeks. If that’s the case he may see it as a waste of energy and possible reputation. Leaving the nomination to another underfunded candidate.

Anyone else here curious how much Ruwart, Gravel and Root have raised the past few days ? I am ! Will just have to wait and see a FEC report I guess. They weren’t “smart” enough to have their fundraising efforts on the front page of their website…

You write:

“If not NOTA, when?”

Good question. I’d suggest asking it the next time you’re tempted to shill for a “libertarian” Tom McClintock campaign.

You write:

“Concerning the terms ‘right’ and ‘left,’ perhaps one should specify in which sense and differentiate, for instance most if not all libertarians would be fiscally conservative, some or many of them socially liberal again.”

Sure!

The foundation of the “left”—and those on the “right” are going to have an instant violent reaction to this phraseology, but please hang on for further explanation—has traditionally been found in the notion that “differences in social class determine the nature of a society.”

In the first historical division of “left” versus “right,” the classes were simply divided. The Second Estate (which sat on the right in the 1789 session of the Estates General) was the nobility. The Third Estate (which sat on the left) was the peasants, the working class and the bourgeoisie (e.g. traders and small businessmen not favored with privilege and monopoly by the monarchy). The First Estate, the clergy, was divided in its allegiance between these two classes.

The important thing to notice here is that from its beginning, the left was opposed to centralized power, while the right favored the status quo.

Through the 19th and 20th centuries, the class division on which “left” versus “right” is built tended to center on economics—the socialists tried to split the working class and Marx’s critique of capitalism held that the interests of the bourgeoisie were inherently aligned with the status quo.

Libertarianism in leftist to the extent that it operates on class theory as well: The productive class (the working class and bourgeoisie—e.g. the honest traders) versus the political class (the state and those business interests which make their profits from political advantage rather than honest competition).

“Fiscal conservatism” may be facially libertarian insofar as it seems, at first blush, to run counter to the interests of the political class, but unless it is aligned with a general opposition to the political class, then it’s at best a matter of a stopped clock being right twice a day.

When “fiscal conservatives” become willing to give up the political power that they complain about financing, then they may have libertarian potential. I’ll certainly give the “fiscal conservatives” a second look when I hear them propose a modest—say, 50%—cut in the “defense” budget.

Bob Barr should run for Congress again as a Libertarian, and lay out a Libertarian platform. If he deviates from sound libertarianism, it will be limited to a single district.

As for the other candidates, none of them have credentials that will taken seriously in a campaign for President. The “free media” they will get will be minimal, and focused on the fact that they don’t have a chance to effect the election. We need to build up our local groups through local campaigns before we can be taken seriously at the national level.

If not NOTA, when?

Barr is not my first choice but, since Kentucky would toss out my write-in for Paul, he’s a good chance to get my vote in November.

O.W.

Sure, everyone can agree that 10% is much more significant than 2%, but the fact is that we do not control how people vote. The voters themselves do (setting aside counting shenanigans, which certainly happen).

I think there’s a misunderstanding of third-party (or ideological party) politics going on behind the sentence I quoted. The Nolan Chart, as useful a tool as it is, has in some ways fostered this misunderstanding. People draw out this chart, and they say something like “Look, if only the LP chooses positions that fall within an area where 20% of people ‘test’, then the LP should be able to get those 20% of people to vote Libertarian.”

This sort of analysis – favored by Carl Milsted, example here:
http://www.lpva.com/Archives/Editorial/Milsted/20060415.shtml

completely misses a vital fact of American politics – the monopoly two-party system. The D/R Party will make promises to those people and they will continue in large part to vote for whichever branch of it they feel most comfortable with because even if it doesn’t promise (or deliver) what they want, it will deliver something of what they want, and it will do that by actually winning. The ones who choose Libertarian consistently (not for a ‘protest vote’) will be those people who have accepted that their vote is a statement more than an attempt to seize and hold power.

Our focus at this point, I beleive, can’t be people who are willing to make a lot of compromises ideologically – or who have no strong ideological leanings – because those people, by and large have a party (the D/R) that gives them what they want – the satisfaction of being on a ‘winning team’. Will they vote Libertarian occasionally? Sure, especially when they want to ‘punish’ a politician on their ‘team’. But those aren’t the steady sort of committed activists the LP needs so much. Most of them will return to their ‘home party’ for the next election.

We can – and should! – attract and hold strong ideologues – from the right and the left – and forge them into neither ‘right’ nor ‘left’, and certainly not ‘center’, but into Libertarians. These are folks who understand libertarianism and will be committed to a project with a timetable much longer than the next election cycle.

Tedious? Hard? Uphill battle? Sure. But immensely rewarding, and, I think, the only proven way to have a long-term influence on not just the next election but on American political thought. Let’s not settle for a change in regimes, let’s aim to change America’s view of politics altogether.

This is how I see it, and I may certainly be wrong, but I think that history supports me on this.