Do you think that the conservatives and libertarians in the United States should (or could) unite into one massive rightist mega-coalition, or are the differences far too irreconcilable and this will just end up being that scene from Monty Python that the thread title refers to?
The GOP probably won’t win too many allies from libertarians on the abortion issue (apart from the pro-life Libertarians) or same-sex marriage. However, the libertarian and Tea Party factions of the GOP, as far as the news is showing, might feel alienated enough by the party establishment (RINO) to the point I can see them joining the Libertarians.
I’ve always thought there was room in the U.S. for a fiscally conservative, socially liberal party. I even came up with a name for it, the Moderate Party. The real question is whether the conservatives can let go of the social issues without losing a large portion of their support, and whether the party can draw enough backing from true fiscal conservatives without doling out big favors to large corporations, which typically end up costing the government even more money.
Prior to 1980 I was a Republican because of my generally fiscally conservative views. After Reagan and the Moral Majority, I became a Democrat because I couldn’t stomach Republican social conservatism. I’m not sure how many like me are out there, but if they could coalesce into a movement, I could see a new party forming.
There is a Libertarian Party, and they are both fiscally conservative and socially liberal. The problem is, that even that party has a pro-life faction, basing its position on the libertarian Non-Aggression Principle (i.e. don’t hurt me, and I won’t hurt you.) To them, “what is more aggressive to a non-aggressor and a greater infringement on the right to life than slaying an unborn child before it does anything?”
The GOP actually did have the “conservative with money, liberal with human beings” approach in the 1950s and “I Like Ike.” (Hey, Eisenhower won two elections.)
My problem is: The GOP establishment are corporatist sellouts and the lobbyist groups’ prison b****es, and the Democrats are borderline communists who don’t understand that “they’ve run out of other people’s money.” That slogan and the principle behind it is what gave Thatcher the general election in the UK in May of '79.
The modern conservative movement covers a lot of different factions. Some factions, like the business conservatives, are practically libertarians already - the only thing they’d lose is government contracts and subsidies. But other groups, like the family values and religious conservatives, aren’t going to work well with libertarians - these are conservative groups that want a strong and active government that enforces their moral views. The national security conservatives and the neocons are going to have problems with the libertarians over foreign policy and defense spending. And even among main street conservatives, you’d probably see some problems - the reality is a lot of government spending has become part of the mainstream and people who say they want a smaller government don’t mean they want to lose social security, medicare, or public schools.
Most libertarians are already Republicans anyway cause muh taxes>everything else. Adding a few hundred thousand more vidya players, potheads, otakus, and the like won’t change the equation all that much.
Are you saying it’s just a effective slogan or do you actually believe the Democratic Party of 2015 are borderline communists? Because that seems out of touch with reality. The modern Democrats are basically the same as what used to be moderate Republicans - like the people who voted for Eisenhower.
The Democrats have apparently made “just throw more money at it” their theme song regarding poverty, and anyone can see that it isn’t working. It’s backfired spectacularly, and half a century, and $1 trillion USD has done nothing to lift anyone out of poverty in America. At all. Welfare fraud is rampant, people are staying on the system for decades, and it’s costing too much money.
Besides, Medicare/Social Security and public schools should be handled by state government and local governments respectively. The unit of government closest to the individual is the best suited to take care of the individual. There shouldn’t be these obscene federal spending bills where there’s 3 trillion USD a year. (I also think the defense budget is way too high. However, the US govt’s biggest expenditure is healthcare programs that would be better handled by each of the 50 states.)
You ask me, the perfect solution is composed of the following points:
Mandatory term limits on ALL members of Congress. Two for Senators, six for Representatives. (Both would be equivalent to twelve years apiece)
If they fail to balance the budget, ALL sitting members of Congress, with no distinction of party, are ineligible for reelection.
A flat tax of 15% on all income above $70K USD per year. (Backed up by an eternity clause)
Mandatory justification of any and all spending by all Cabinet departments during Congressional budget approval. (This includes Defense, Justice, Homeland, all of it.)
End the Federal Reserve. (Do I need to go into the fact that they have less accountability than small children and less transparency than the KGB? Or how about that in the 100 years since Wilson created that economic Eldritch Abomination, our dollar has lost 99 percent of its value?)
Get rid of excess duplication in federal bureaucracy, and limit the number of agencies with the same function to two. (Do we need 100 something-or-other different federal programs for helping the disabled?)
Abolish any government department whose duties are more efficiently handled by the states or by the private sector. (i.e. Dept. of Education.)
End the war on drugs. Enough money has been wasted by Washington on a four-decade-long Prohibition nostalgia trip.
(Feel free to add anything, but don’t be an a-hole.)
Why does anyone still believe that the Republicans are fiscally conservative? I’m 50; during my political lifetime the only party that has realistically tried to reduce the federal deficit is the Democrats. The Republicans make a lot of noise, but when they’re in office they pass Medicare Part D and a war on Iraq with no attempt to pay the bills.
Given that the United States has a FPTP system, only a two party system is really viable in this country which in turn means that one of the big two has to be the “fiscally conservative, socially liberal” party. Unfortunately it seems to me that the Democrats are taking this route with the increasing outmigration of working-class whites from the party and the in-migration of upper-middle class urban/suburban professionals/bobos. The nightmare scenario for me is where the Democrats are reduced to an impotent neoliberal party running on a platform of “we aren’t the other guys” and in the same limp-dick position as the French PS, Dutch PVDA, or Spanish PSOE while the Republicans become a right-wing populist party under the influence of Trump and co. The ideal scenario otoh is where the Democrats manage to revive a New Deal majority and become a populist party (with a wide range of views on cultural issues which abortion and gun rights excepted are generally shifting in a progressive direction) against an elitist Republican Party, with the Democrats able to maintain a quasi permanent majority by mobilizing the entirety of the lower-middle and working classes allowing it to outvote the GOP in the metro areas as well as in more rural reas.
As opposed to the other one, which has to be the “fiscally liberal, socially conservative” party?
As an aside, since you’ve started college, your writing on this message board has become far less clear and lucid. I hope that your use of run-on sentences with multiple interpretations, and your use of catch-phrases and nouns that are unfamiliar to most of us here are at least getting you good grades.
I see a system in this country that makes me feel like we are being held hostage when it comes to things we cannot do without. Healthcare, Education and in some areas even housing. I consider myself a republican but am currently fed up with the entire platform. I feel we should have fair access if not equal access to anything affecting our health or our ability to succeed.
I feel like the democratic party would be more prone to oppressive tactics if they ever felt they had enough leverage and this is what keeps me voting republican.
How, precisely, do you want to provide “equal access to anything affecting our health” without being “held hostage” by Healthcare and Education, and which of the Republicans do you think is proposing achieve this?
That’s a good name for it, from a marketing standpoint.
From an actual standpoint, I’d call it the Internet Party, due to that combination of viewpoints being far more popular among netizens who care a lot about politics than among Americans as a whole…
The problem with the Libertarian Party is that they poll about 0.2% of the electorate. You’re not going to get a “massive” coalition by uniting with them unless you already have a massive group to begin with.
Well I was responding to SpoilerVirgin who wanted a “fiscally conservative, socially liberal” (Gawd, I hate that phrase) party, so I was just pointing that such an “ideology” would have to be incorporated into one of the two great parties in the United States (or at least a faction thereof) were it to be in anyway viable or serious. And presumably, yes, if one party was dominantly “fiscally conservative, socially liberal” the other would have more populist tendencies.
I apologize if some of my posts have been incoherent or difficult to understand-many of my posts come when I’m tired and/or I feel like I have to respond to some normie nonsense in which case my favoured tactic (probably appropriate in light of my old username) is “carpet-bombing”-that is overwhelming the person I’m responding to with a wall o’ text. It is not surprising that clarity and/or eloquence may suffer on occasion as a result.
Actually, I’m thinking more than just the organized Libertarian Party. I’m going more along the lines of the entire libertarian movement in the US, whether they belong to the party or not. Libertarian-identifying Americans are about 11 percent of the total US population.