Update Normally, I add my updates at the bottom, but this one warrants a top of the page correction. I have been advised that the editorial I criticized was actually a guest editorial from the Washington Post. This was apparently clear in the print edition of the paper but not in the online version. I probably wouldn’t have bothered pounding out a criticism of the Washington Post – I think I hold the Courier Press to a higher standard. (Oh, the irony.) End Update
The Evansville Courier Press Washington Post takes a pretty dim view of Rep. Ron Paul and his candidacy. That doesn’t bother me in and of itself since I don’t really think he’s the best bet myself. His past writings are fair game, and the racial absurdities that appeared in his newsletter are deal breakers so long as Paul continues to fail to provide adequate explanations for their appearances in his news letter. But, still, the Courier Press’s Washington Post’s editorial seems a little lazy to me.
The Courier Press Washington Post casually dismisses Paul’s “golden rule diplomacy” (do unto other countries as we would have them do unto us) because it doesn’t provide all of the answers. It seems like a standard habit of editorial writers to hold “fringe” candidates to higher standards than “serious” candidates. When a mainstream candidate offers platitudes, they generally don’t get such dismissive treatment.
And the Courier Press Washington Post positively sneers at the idea that our foreign policy contributed in the slightest to the attacks of 9/11. It isn’t “blame America first” to go looking for all of the reasons. Reason #1 – bin Laden is a murderous religious fanatic. Reason #x – U.S. foreign policy caused us to maintain military bases in Saudi Arabia that didn’t sit well with certain religious types.
Strict isolation isn’t a winning foreign policy, in my opinion. But neither is it worthy of the casual dismissal it seemed to get from the Courier Press. Washington Post.
“It seems like a standard habit of editorial writers to hold “fringe†candidates to higher standards than “serious†candidates.”
Good call.
“It seems like a standard habit of editorial writers to hold “fringe†candidates to higher standards than “serious†candidates.”
Been there, done that. Big fun.
One suggestion, though, if I may. Paul may be a “fringe” candidate in terms of polling or obvious affinity for his view, but that makes him (or I, when I ran) no less serious. He means it, and I meant it.
To me, Thompson is a good example of a candidate who isn’t “serious”. He’s an opportunist who saw a field without a clear front-runner, so he jumped in. Thompson is running largely on his celebrity. That’s serious? Paul was running no matter what, on exactly what his ideas are. He declared early, and has been campaigning in earnest throughout.
I detested not being treated as a serious candidate by many in the media. I made more public appearances than my D & R opponents combined and campaigned in earnest. To me, they weren’t all that serious. They did have the decided advantage of knowing that in a statewide race here in Indiana, they didn’t have to do much of anything and the automatic R & D votes would show up. They were sadly correct.
This “fringe” and “serious” labeling goes a long way towards making it so. The readers of editorials believe a lot of what they read. Call ’em fringe, readers believe accordingly. Call a candidate who campaigns for a whole week “serious” and the readers believe that.
Right-libertarians should beware of embracing “Golden Rule diplomacy”, as they will rapidly find themselves bedfellows with “ultra-leftist” Noam Chomsky.
Oh, the horror!
It’s all right, LP–Dick Cheney and the neocons will take you back. The Republican Party is like a fundamentalist church; there’s no son too prodigal as long as he shuts the fuck up and toes the doctrinal line.
What? I mean, what?
Libertarians share views with the left on several issues, and share views with the right on others. One thing libertarians are not are neo-cons.
For crying out loud, Branden. You know this. What the heck are you on about here?
I can’t speak for Branden, but from my perspective, it seemed like there was a trend for nominal libertarians to emphasize fiscal liberties but shy away from social liberties. There would be a strong emphasis on individual property rights, but other kinds of liberties (sex, drugs, rock & roll, atheism, etc.) were largely ignored.
Libertarians were looking like “crypto-Republicans.” I haven’t noticed it nearly as much in the past few years (to the extent my anecdotal observations were accurate in any case.)
Ah. I can affirm for you that as a matter of strategy, LP candidates often did emphasize the fiscal items once Daniels won election in 2004. The reason was that the Republicans then owned the governor’s office and both the Indiana House and Senate, plus the national dynamic was the same. The idea was to show that even with majorities, Republicans were doing little to cut budgets or taxes here in Indiana, as well as at the federal level.
Once the Dems won the Indiana House in 2006, and the Dems won both the US House and Senate, LP candidates began to change their issue focus.
Doug’s observations of the LP jibe with my own, and I’ve been watching LP politics since I was a child in the 1980s thanks to my Dad’s involvement with the national and Oklahoma state parties.
I, too, have noticed a very belated process of realization on the part of the LP that–how about that–a lesser-of-evils analysis vis a vis the Republican Party may not have been such a good idea. That the LP adopted this position in the late 1970s, in the immediate aftermath of Watergate, the illegal bombing of Cambodia, the wage and price controls concurrent with Bretton Woods II, and other sins of the Nixon administration, calls a certain epithet hurled by Lenin to mind, but I’ll come to that bridge without quite crossing it.
Yes, the LP is slowly, slowly, slowly appearing to shift direction, but I don’t have any confidence that they’ll truly learn. When the fiscal conservatism of Ronald Reagan led to the largest budget deficits in U.S. history, LP libertarians largely swallowed the Republican Party line that it was all Congress’s fault. Okay, so you guys tuned the rhetoric to assist mode for the 1994 Congressional elections and joined the calls for Clinton’s impeachment. Then when the Republicans got control of all three branches of government, how’d that fiscal conservatism turn out?
No, while guys like Lew Rockwell are turning up the LP flamethrower on the modern GOP, one can still barely warm one’s hands over it.
Right-libertarians in America have been complacent at best, and complicit at worst, in the orgy of Know-Nothingism that has proliferated in this country over the past 30-40 years.
As far as I can tell, the Libertarian Party has been ineffectual on any points of policy where they differ with the Republicans, and enthusiastically cooperative with the GOP in the latter’s efforts to destroy the Democratic Party and make the country safe for one-party rule. It doesn’t take much foresight to guess how minor third parties would fare in such arrangement, but the LP has lacked even that.
Consequently, as the Republican Party has effortlessly shifted its doctrinal focus from conservatism to authoritarianism, the LP has given away for free what it could have bargained for. Was one Texas congressional seat really the high-water mark of the Libertarian Party’s ambition? It sure looks that way from here.
This doesn’t mean I think the LP should commit the same mistake now with the Democrats–this wouldn’t happen anyway since, like conservatives, most right-libertarians have carefully conditioned themselves like Pavlovian dogs to vomit at the first utterance of the words “liberal”, “democrat”, and “equality”, what the LP could usefully do, to their own benefit and that of the electorate at large, is understand how they’re always going to be under a boot until the understand the consequences of Arrow’s Theorem, and start backing electoral reform: namely, preferential voting methods. Condorcet would be ideal, but even IRV–which has many flaws–is an improvement over what we’ve got.
Federal and state election machinery are a big challenge, but party primary elections seem to me ripe for the picking, especially since reform of the presidential primary process in general is ripe.
I’m willing to believe the LP can do something to gain my respect. Put your fingers on a pressure point. Strike a blow for representative democracy. Shut up bitching about 5% here or there on a capital gains or federal income tax and make a difference for the better.
I realize that by asking LP libertarians to prioritize anything, anything more highly than tax policy, I am making a plea to deaf ears. I suggest that this phenomenon is an exemplar of the mighty influence the LP has had on American politics.
Mike Kole,
Regarding Indiana state LP strategy:
Am I reading you correctly?
So when the General Assembly and the Governor’s office were under Republican control, you attacked them from the Right on fiscal matters.
…but gave that up when the Democrats recaptured the lower house? To what end? Help the GOP restore the 2004 status quo?
If you are #3, you get nowhere by attacking the failure to deliver by #2. You go after #1 and their failures. It’s the only hope for getting in the game. We believed we could outflank the Republicans on the grounds of greater fiscal conservatism, where we could possibly exclude the Dems from the conversation entirely on the basis of their disinterest in fiscal conservatism. This generally failed because we generally weren’t covered. Details… sigh.
Now that there is divided power, and no clear #1 party in Indiana, that sort of strategy is pretty useless. But if we have a situation on 2008 where the Dems control the White House and the House and Senate, look for the LP to waste little time taking the same approach with them on civil liberties. We all know the Ds talk a fair game, but rarely deliver. Think they’ll close down Guantanamo? Or repeal the Patriot Act? Dream on.
As for myself, my distrust of Republicans is FAR greater than of Democrats. Ds at least tell me they want to expand government and then deliver on it. Republicans bullshit me that they want to shrink government, and then deliver the greatest expansions (war not even included in this thought) I’ve ever seen in my lifetime.
If you think, however, that we are going to capture the imagination of the American public by talking about Arrow’s Theorem and election reform, you may as well put on the tinfoil hat and build the air castles with the Objectivists. It isn’t nearly as relevant to the average person’s life as the tax policies you find so dreary.
Mike Kole,
Oh, no, I don’t for a moment think that Arrow’s Theorem is an issue that will appeal to the masses. But I do expect the “elites” of third-party leaderships to grasp it. They fail to at their own peril.
Mike Kole,
Okay, with that out of the way I’ll tackle the partisan aspect of your strategic thinking.
When was the last time you feel the LP was successful at pulling the Republicans to more frugal fiscal policy?
When was the last time you feel the LP was successful at pulling the Democrats to a more enlightened civil rights policy?
I have vague recollections of Libertarians being on the right side of the Clipper chip issue during the Clinton administration, but that barely registers in public memory. Given that the Clipper chip proposal actually failed (thankfully), though, it doesn’t exactly balance the scales with the 30-year drumbeat of tax repeal rhetoric.
I don’t see where the LP has it in ’em to hold the Democratic party to those planks in its platform the LP actually agrees with, and I hope you’ll agree with me that the LP combined with a whole bunch of deficit hawks weren’t nearly enough to keep the GOP honest.
Persuade me that the LP can be effectual in delivering on the social components of the freedom prescription. In Ron Paul you have a Presidential candidate who promises a hands-off approach if the states want to criminalize abortion. Not an auspicious start. Defense of individual rights is a responsibility of every level of government. “Federalism” is a poor defense of one’s abandonment of the central function of the state.
So when do we discuss Trianglation? Is that the reason for the continuing demise of both parties? .Each party can in no way attract enough voters without enticing non-believers to pick them as the lesser of two evils,so they throw out scaps,but being careful not to abandon their base,and also not to give away enough to fulfill what they pretend to be addressing. In my mind that’s why so much money is so generosly wasted on half-a..d badly defined programs.’Allocate the money and we’ll think how to explain it later’ Neither party can survive by not catering to special interest groups who don’t necessarily support them,but could defeat them in a concerted effort,if aroused against them.This means continued farm subsidies,also a Federal-Private drug program in name at least,so Repubs(in this case) can shut up the critics that they don’t care about seniors or poor.I could come up with more bi-partisan examples , but this is the process of trianglation first defined during Clinton’s years but perfected to nth degree under Bush republicans.
As far as the LP is concerned I don’t have a clue even though I think I understood the above exchanges of analysis.LP is still in the textbook stage maybe?
Branden- Arrow’s Theorem, if I recall it correctly, was pretty much an indictment of any electoral system, stating that all elections are flawed, save one: that of the dictatorship.
What part of that is so key? Seriously. The LP’s biggest concern is getting the attention of the voters who are so locked in to the so-called two-party system.
Branden- Waitaholdit. Ron Paul is a Republican candidate for President, not an LP candidate.
Now we’ll get to the real deal, though. I think it’s a terrible mistake for the LP to concentrate a great deal of effort at the top of ticket. There just isn’t any way that we can compete with the $300+ million presidential campaign, or the $20+ million gubernatorial campaign. Indeed, where we win is at the local level, and there, the issues are specific to local area.
People love to talk about federal or state politics, because it’s easy. It’s on the Sunday morning TV, it’s generalized (albeit badly). We’ve won on specifics of budgetary issues and local property rights issues. Federalism and Arrow’s Theorem are no part of those campaigns, nor is specific attack on any one opposition political party. We win where issues are discussed. The higher up the ticket you go, the less the issues matter or are even discussed. It gets to be horse race and personality at that level, and we can’t compete there yet.
Mike Kole–
Waitaholdit yerself! :)
Apart from party affiliation, tell me how Ron Paul is in any respect outside the Libertarian Party mainstream.
Not everyone may recall as we do that Ron Paul was the LP’s candidate for President in 1988.
Is there any doubt that Paul isn’t going to pull a substantial amount of partisan Libertarian support?
(Wikipedia)
I agree that systematic political reform nearly always has to start at the grass-roots level, and affects local offices first. (On a specific issue, though, it is possible to motivate a national movement quickly and effectively–we’ve seen it many times.)
I also agree that “we” win when issues are discussed. The thing is, I interpret “we” more broadly than I think you are. I think everybody wins when the issues are discussed (well, okay, the fluff politics industry doesn’t win). But that’s not limited to the Libertarians. I think it is perfectly possible for people to have reasoned, principled, and firm disagreements with the Libertarian Party.
To assume that people will agree with you if only they are exposed to enough information is ideological hubris of the first order. Not sure that’s what you were trying to say, but your wording seemed to be getting pretty close to it.
There are numerous issues on which I agree with the LP, but as I elaborated previously, I think its tactics largely undermine its goals. (This is an oversimplification, as the LP is no doubt as fractious as any other political organization–nevertheless, I don’t see any LP libertarians playing the game as I would play it.)
Mike Kole–
Since we’re having two conversations here, I reckon I’ll continue to keep them separate.
I’m using Arrow’s Theorem here as a crude shorthand for the theorem itself and a lot of corollary results in election theory.
For a more comprehensive overview of my understanding of election theory, have a quick look over my presentation slides from a talk I gave a couple of years ago.
If you see any howlers, please let me know.