Please. Libertarians are neither Republicans nor Democrats until they get to the ballot box. Then - oh dear - they forget how much in favor they are of gay marriage and put a big check mark next to the GOP candidate.
Perhaps libertarians are being marginalized because many of the ‘big’ libertarian issues were actually solved. In the 1970’s and 1980’s, libertarians were more vocal and more powerful, because there were major issues that they were fighting for and had a chance to actually win. Libertarians were against government tariffs, socialized medicine, wide scale welfare, government meddling in markets to ‘improve them’, and high taxes. Back then, individual marginal tax rates were up around 70% in the highest brackets, tariffs were all over the place, government/industry ‘initiatives’ were the order of the day, welfare was widespread and permanent, etc. By the middle of the 1990’s, welfare had been reformed, tax rates were dramatically reduced, free trade was the order of the day, there was recognition that huge government/industry collaborations like MITI and Sematech were boondoggles, socialized medicine was a dead issue, and even Bill Clinton was admitting that ‘the era of big government is over’.
There are lots of issues left for libertarians to fight for, but they are increasingly esoteric and difficult to deal with. Some of the major ‘low hanging fruit’ has been picked.
Then George W. Bush was elected, and promptly re-started the era of big government, all while claiming that he was a small government Republican. But Libertarians have a hard time attacking Republicans, because they tend to live in the Republican camp.
My prediction - if a left-wing Democrat is elected in 2008, you will see a revival of libertarianism. For one thing, the Republicans will be free to ‘talk the talk’ again, once they are no longer in power. And tramplings of libertarian principles that Republicans can seemingly get away with will not be tolerated if Democrats do it.
Oh, and libertarianism is alive and well - in Eastern Europe.
But to what degree where libertarians actually involved in any of these battles? All of these issues were also opposed by conservatives. And on issues where conservatives and libertarians differed - drug legalization, gay marriage, first amendment issues, etc - it was the conservatives that prevailed. Mainly because it was the conservatives that actually got organized and elected.
So the libertarians were no more a factor in American politics in the 70s or 80s that they were before or since. They just happened to be sitting on the sideline while somebody else was playing the game.
[shrug] We socialists usually hold our noses and vote Dem. The Democratic Party is corporate property almost as much as the Republican Party, but what can you do?
[shrug] We socialists usually hold our noses and vote Dem. The Democratic Party is corporate property almost as much as the Republican Party, but what can you do? There’s rarely a Socialist Party or Green Party or left-leaning independent candidate on the ballot, and when there is you know it’s a wasted vote, owing to the winner-take all structure of our electoral system.
Really, WRT to the general size and scope of functions of government, how is W any different from his three immediate predecessors?
I think you will find that is not true.
Yes, in the sense the former Warsaw Pact countries have spent the past decade phasing out Communism. But is there any kind of organized, ideological movement there analogous to the American LP and its sympathizers? I rather think the Eastern Europeans are going to divest and privatize up to the point where they have social-democratic welfare states equivalent to Western Europe’s, and then stop, if they haven’t already.