Ya think? In 1912, the American Socialist Party had pretty much peaked as a political party. It did have some influence later, during the New Deal, when FDR co-opted some of the Socialists’ platform – but the Libertarians have already gotten as much co-optation as they’re likely to get.
Well, there is, kindasorta, see the “Libertarians” category in the Pew Political Typology. They make up 9% of the general public and 10% of registered voters. Compare that with Gary Johnson’s <1% showing in November.
Thing is, this mass base of “Libertarians,” while it definitely exists and now is clearly distinguishable from other groups on the right, is mostly moderate libertarians, which is something fundamentally different from radical libertarianism. These are the sort of voters who want public spending cut, and want this privatized and that legalized; but who, OTOH, think Rand is as nutty as Marx, don’t mind that their money can’t be changed for gold, and would never think of joining the Libertarian Party in its current form. They don’t fit into any of the 24 Types, and any LP member or Ronulan you ever met probably does fit one or another (or more than one).
I’m thinking the libertarians are going to need twenty or thirty different competing libertarian candidates just to represent all the different views among self-professed libertarians before they can even start thinking about cross-over appeal.
No libertarian will ever be elected president. Libertarianism is and always will be a minor fringe movement. The best they can hope to do is focus on one issue at a time- say the war on drugs or maybe the Patriot Act. Work within the system and concentrate on issues, they will never constitute a significant voting bloc in Congress so they have to be issue-oriented rather than try to win elections.
At which point their unrealistic idealism will cause them to start twenty or thirty different Libertarian Parties.
There are Libertarians and then there are libertarians. I think the GOP would do well to learn a few things from the latter, namely to drop the social conservatism and focus on personal liberty and economics. Americans aren’t going to go for unfettered free trade, but rather focus on a more free-market approach to issues like health care. Decouple health care from employment, allow medical savings accounts, allow insurance companies to operate across state lines, etc and make sure there is a reasonable safety net for those who really need it.
At best this approach would do nothing. At worst it would make things 1000x worse. Most people only have insurance because their employer offers it or they qualify for Medicare. Medical savings accounts wouldn’t do shit. The only people who could afford to make an MSA big enough to handle a major medical issue are those who are wealthy enough to self-insure in the first place. The insuarance across state lines strategy wouldn’t do shit. All that would do is make all the insurance companies set up shop in the state with the loosest regulations, just like the credit card companies do (how’s that workin’ out for ya?). Those who really need a safey net includes most of the 98%. We’re all one major disease away from being completely wiped out were it not for insuarnce. It needs to be universally available and affordable, not scaled back.
The GOP would lose both the Libertarian vote and the Teaper vote. Do you know what happens when you try to strike a compromise between two groups that dispise compromises?
The Libertarian vote (capital “L”) is about .2% of the electorate, on a good day (or bad day, depending on how you see things). Don’t underestimate the number of TPers who are less interested in social issues than economic ones.
It then seems to me that it would be more profitable to ignore any and all demands the Libertarians make in favor of the whole Teaper package.
This is standard post-election stuff and I wouldn’t take it seriously. Whenever a party loses, different factions in the party come forward to claim that if only everybody had listened to them, the party would have won - so it’s inevitable that the rest of the party will heed their wisdom and they will lead them to victory in the next election. It goes without saying that if everybody says this, they can’t all be right. To expand on John Mace’s point, Republicans might be able to make gains with some libertarian ideas but America isn’t a Libertarian country. It’s not even close, although it’s an article of faith that if someone runs for a president with a platform that proposes ending Social Security, Medicare, and federal involvement in law enforcement and education and a host of other issues and a generally isolationist attitude, Americans will flock to that candidate even though they’ve been supporting Social Security and Medicare and federal involvement in a bunch of other issues and an engaged foreign police for generations.
I’m not so sure about that – despite the fact that the Tea Partiers only ever seem to mention economic or fiscal issues on their rally-signs and in their published platforms, etc. The impression I get is that their mouths/signs say “taxes/deficits/regulation” but their eyes/hearts/whatever say “abortion/immigration/secularism/negroes”.
Shh! Shh! Of course they can all be right! Listen to them all, Pubs!
Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light.
I imagine it would be pretty much like what would happen if Pauly Shore was cast as The Doctor, with Abe Vigoda as his companion.
The trick is to roll the tape, take not of which faction the party was listening to when it rolled over the cliff, and cut that faction out next time. In this case, that would be the Talibornagain faction (which, via the Akin and Mourdoch fiascoes and their spillover effect on the party brand image, enabled the Dems to make gains in the Senate despite a lineup where they were defending 23* seats to the Republicans’ 10).
*counting the two Dem-caucusers.
That is kind of difficult inasmuch as a person in Washington has to do things to make the constituency happy in order to be re-elected and realistically has to collaborate with other pols if they want to have any hope of advancing their agenda. Purist libertarianism will be diluted by the system, as well it ought to. One could argue that Ayn Rand Paul is kind of close, probably as close as you can get.
I did like the proximity of “pol” and “pot” in your post, though. Sounds like something an ophthalmologist might prescribe for glaucoma, “Paul Pot”.
The word “pot,” while arguably always relevant to any discussion of Libertarian politics, is absent from my post.
I have a kind of wide field of vision, in the way the text is laid out on this here display, it appears almost directly above “pol” in the quote box. Sorry.
After the BBC sold the series to Disney.