Let’s get it out of the way, shall we?
The GOP fucked up in several levels. Once again they failed to seek a candidate that appealed to the core base of Conservatives as well as the most moderates. I believe that Mitt Romney is a good person (I met the guys years ago) but he is too “narrow” in his approach. Even though we are pragmatists, we do need to feel our candidate has a deep understanding of the Constitution and that did not come out well. The Republicans were never able to shake the blackout that the media had imposed on Romney’s message. The GOP still believes that the Old Media controls the message and played against their strengths instead of looking for their weaknesses.
The other big mistake was the treatment of the Hispanic population. In essence the GOP thought all Hispanics were of Mexican extraction and played accordingly. The Bush clan was keenly aware of this fact and knew what to say and do. Pundits declare that the immigration issue was a death knoll for the Republicans, but the East Coast Hispanics could not care less about it since the majority (Cubans and Puerto Ricans) are immune from any enforcement of the Immigration Laws and a great majority of other Hispanics Caribbean & South America) came legally or can achieve legal status easily and were leaving countries that turned socialist. Failing to use the images of Chavez, Correa, Morales & Kirchner is inexcusable. The Bush clan was great with Hispanics because: a) They were part of the family and b) knew the difference between what East Coast Hispanics worried about and same for the West Coast Hispanics. But apparently the Romney campaign forgot to borrow the manual from the Bushes.
There are some other stuff, but I’ll just stay with the above for now.
The Libertarians….. All I saw through the election cycle makes me comfortable in saying that the Libertarian Party is a myth as understood by the majority. Many people call themselves Libertarians because they believe in the principles enunciated by Ayn Rand in her works, but Rand herself had little of no patience for the Libertarian party and refused to be associated with them. Apparently Libertarians have managed to “hijack” Ayn Rand and that is what the majority of Americans see and feel attracted to. In reality what i have seen of the hard core Libertarian is the Right wing equivalent of the Anarchist/Occupy Wall Street movement but with a deep belief in personal hygiene. The Hard Core Libertarians are the Hipsters of our side.
Hard Core Libertarians are dogmatic. I tried to engage several of them and ask about some things that I did not agree on at face value to see if I was misunderstanding the message. Generally the answer was a rotund “Fuck you, that is the way it is.” which is not conductive to attracting people to your cause. The inability to accept people who do not toe what passes for the ideological line of the day/person guarantees very low numbers joining your cause. Double down if you yourself are unable to explain your position to the uninitiated and demand absolute obedience because it is a sure indicator that your philosophical base is not as solid as you thought. In lay terms, you don’t know what you are talking about.
And even between its Hard Core membership, the Libertarians do not have one cohesive message. The following pics are extracted from Facebook yesterday.
One Libertarian denies they were responsible and the other is literally basking in the embers of payback. That is a Schizophrenic message in anybody’s book and has been the theme since the election was over. Hard Core Libertarians firmly believed Ron Paul was electable when he wasn’t and same for Gary Johnson and as long as they behave they way they did all through this campaign, nobody is gonna give a rat’s ass about your candidates. That is not a conspiracy but simple market strategy: If you can’t sell it, don’t blame the customers.
To summarize: One group abandoned its ideals and smarts for power and the other has no idea what their ideas are and cannot sell what they don’t know. That is not a way to run a winning election.
I consider myself to be libertarian and agree with some of what your saying but also think you are missing a bigger point here. Yes, some of the older libertarians are very dogmatic and crass and I think the main driver was that they were for a long time a minor portion of the political process that they tried to stand out, often in a negative way.
I think that the GOP is screwed several ways, but the main issue is that the GOP is no longer a small government political party. While we give college kids a lot of crap for being idealistic there is a fairly significant portion that are fiscally conservative but are more socially open. If the GOP doubles down on hating gays and immigrants and pounding on women’s right over their body they are going to continue to lose elections. The message from the GOP should be that we the government has no business involving itself in people’s private affairs whether that is ecomomic issues or who we are sleeping with.
I know a lot of gun owner’s tried to get behind Mitt and overlooked some of his past statements but the guy was a FUDD and would sell us down the river if he thought it was politically benefical. Johnson on the other hand actually stated that he was for less gun laws and while the Governor of NM signed a concealed carry law.
I have my reservations about the LP every being a major player and think the best result with be a libertarian movement within the GOP but I’m not sure that will ever happen.
Most of the ones I talk to were younger ones. Dogma was almost scary.
I think that the Libertarian party is now suffering from a irreparable image problem. Perhaps we do need a Third Party based more closely to Ayn Rand’s ideas or just do a final decapitation of the North East Republicans who are in charge of the GOP and bring new conservative blood to the heart of the party.
And neither solution will be easy, but it has to be tried.
Nothing worth doing is easy. If it was easy, someone else would have already done it.
Just a few quick things…
1.) Libertarian anarchy is not to be conflated with the OWS anarchy. The former is better known as anarcho-capitalism, and is truly anarchy (ie. just self-rule, no rulers), the latter is anarcho-syndicalism where they just invent a new name for government run by direct democracy, or in other words not anarchy at all.
2.) The Johnson didn’t play a spoiler versus Paul primary numbers aren’t as disjoint as you might think. The Paul numbers show there was enough potential to effect the outcome, now what happened to them is a fair question. Which all the Johnson numbers show is that they didn’t go to him. Did a 1/3 go to Romney, 1/3 go to Obama, and a 1/3 stay home? Who knows! But they didn’t as a majority go to Romney nor to Johnson.
3.) I prefer to think that many people consider themselves libertarian (small l) when they realize that neither party represents what they believe which is usually that it’s wrong to initiate the use of force against others. While the issue with the big L party version may be a solid mix of the people running the party as well as our screwed up human tendencies that force us into the false dichotomy of the two major parties and result in us voting against the other guy. Not much we can do about the latter part of that.
4.) Regarding the being told “fuck you,” my experience as a libertarian is the exact opposite of yours. This seems to be the default response from conservatives towards libertarians when they’re busy straw manning libertarians and any attempt to converse is tried. But it also occurs when trying to converse with them about how their exceptions to their general opposition to government intervention in individuals’ lives.
” anarcho-capitalism”
You guys really make up stuff like this and think people are gonna take you seriously?
Or in other words synonymous with a free market, volunteerism, agorism, and probably others too.
Or is this another case of the “fuck you”s going the opposite direction of what you just wrote?
Anarchy: absence or denial of any authority or established order.
But for capitalism to flourish, you need a certain set of rules that everybody will follow. The use of the word anarchy immediately suggest the opposite EVEN IF IT IS NOT WHAT YOU MEANT.
Perfect timing, I just refreshed the page, and I am so very happy you actually engaged the conversation.
I would disagree that capitalism (not to be confused with cronyism or corporatism) requires certain rules. Instead all it requires is property, and property rights can be enforced by the individual without any special need for rules or rulers.
As an aside, if we want to be pedantic, anarchy actually means, without rulers. It does not necessarily mean, without rules. Most people will likely, simply and voluntarily leave other people’s property alone. That’s already the natural state of things in our society as it is.
That said, you still have the anarchy without adjectives crowd, and they certainly would be welcome in an anarcho-capitalist society, it would just pay for them to be aware that some people value their property and watch their step accordingly.
Contrast that with how welcoming an anarcho-syndicalist society would be of the prior two, and you start to get the notion that one of these anarchies isn’t at all like the others.
“As an aside, if we want to be pedantic, anarchy actually means, without rulers. It does not necessarily mean, without rules.”
If people need a decoder ring to understand you platform, you are in a heap of trouble.
Let’s say I come up with an air freshener that smells like lilacs but I label it Vomit & Diarrhea, blaming the poor sales on the “idiotic” consumer that “did not get it” is a poor excuse.
Make the message clear. Words have long established meanings and people will default to that.
Decoder ring? That sounds like sour grapes, which is still just a variant of the “fuck you,” you claim is supposed to be directed at you, not coming from you.
Words do have long established meaning and anarchy comes from greek, an – without, archy – ruler(s). Which is precisely why I wanted to make clear that one should not conflate OWS ‘anarchy’ with libertarian anarchy.
If you want to take it as a Fuck You, go ahead. You can refuse to see the problem all you want, but it is still there.
“But it also occurs when trying to converse with them about how their exceptions to their general opposition to government intervention in individuals’ lives.”
This. If the GOP is truly for individual freedoms, they are going to have to ease back (waaay back) on most of the social issues they are so famous for. Families and churches should be shaping peoples morals and principals. Government, regardless of party, needs to get the heck out of that business completely. Removing some of those hard-right policies would open the party to a much larger % of the population. All the hard-liners will undoubtedly piss and moan about it, but reality trumps idealism, especially on the national stage. Adapt, or slowly fade into obscurity.
Besides, I’d rather cave on social issues before I cave on constitutional rights and fiscal government responsibility. Lesser of two evils, yes, but I’d rather make that choice before someone else makes it for me.
If you are going to put on your big boy pants and call people out, Miguel, at least grow a pair and actually call them out rather than show yourself to be a passive-aggressive coward.
For those curious, I wrote the words contained in the first screenshot here, and I stand by them to today. The facts are the facts; not even in Florida, which finally seems to have finalized their vote count (?), (or, unfortunately, New Mexico, Johnson’s home state) did any one third party receive sufficient votes to change the outcome of state elections. Speculation, guesswork, and assumptions on what could/would/might have happened if people did not vote third-party is so much bullshit – there is no guarantee Johnson voters would have voted without his name on the ticket, nor is there any indication that they all would have voted for Romney (in fact, most pollings I saw regarding his support indicated it was fairly evenly purple). Again, not that those people all voting Republican would have changed the outcome.
And, really, conflating libertarian with Libertarian (I am not the latter, and you and I both know that) is only superseded in stupidity by conflating primary votes with election votes. The author of that graphic was an idiot, which just makes you a water-carrier for an idiot, since you seem to have bought into the idiocy… the same caliber of idiocy the “gun control” extremists employ when they abuse and rape statistics.
*shrug* But, hey, keep pointing fingers and trying to blame the customer for the Republican Party’s failure to “sell it”. When the supposed party of personal responsibility abandons that core, essential precept in order to speciously attempt to shift blame onto those who literally cannot be responsible (helpful hint: more Republicans simply did not vote than Gary Johnson had total votes), I have no further use for that party… or the useful who endorse that message, for that matter.
I will repeat what I told you before: You guys sure protested too much and keep doing so for allegedly not caring about the outcome.
But I’ll let you have the fun on this one.
I tend to agree with Dennis Miller. We can Monday morning quarterback the thing to death, but the bottom line is that in 2012 America chose socialism. Obama and his “progressive” (aka communist) cronies have 4 years to push the limits of moving American society down that path.
Plan accordingly.
Amen
“If people need a decoder ring to understand you platform, you are in a heap of trouble”
From the Merriam-Webster dictionary:
anarchy
: absence of government
I don’t believe that we can ever get to that level of freedom, though I wish for it some times, because I do see value in military and a justice system that operates within consistent guidelines. I’ll agree that that the American people choose European Socialism but I think that would have happened even if Mitt was elected. The Republicans need to do some soul searching and realize that on their current path their are doomed for the dustbin. They need to quit talking about being for small government and actually doing it. There is nothing wrong about while my values don’t agree with ** individuals in this country are free to make their own choices (and suffer the consequences) and we support their right to do so. You don’t have to agree with legalizing whatever War on Private Decisions is currently being fought to say that individuals are free to make those decisions.
On another level we need to better explain our economic positions to the average person rather than given canned answers. We can response to liberals constant rants and lies but we tiptoe around laying out the economic reality that we face.
Both the Republicans and the Libertarians need to sit down and take a really, really good look at themselves. A brutally honest look.
The Republicans can either be the party of small government, or of “traditional values”… not both.
Libertarians likewise need to stop fooling themselves. They’re the armchair coaches of American politics, with a lot of good ideas but no actual experience in running a professional team. But they sit by the phone waiting for that call that will never come.
But, I have every confidence both parties will keep on doing the same exact thing, with the same exact results.
Once upon a time I was a card carrying Libertarian. That all ended on September 11, 2001 when the Libertarian Party could not come up with a single cohesive answer to whether or not a military response was justified.
Please note, I was not looking for an answer I agreed with. I was looking for an answer, period. The Carole Moore faction was of the opinion that war was NEVER justified, and the Neal Boortz faction wanted the bombing to start effective immediately. The party as a whole did not come up with an answer, and as far as I know they never have.
That was the day I finally accepted the fact that the LP was nothing more than the party of drugged up pacifists, no matter how they argue about it. They have one defining cause, the drug war, and everything else is negotiable.
Party of principle my ass.
Note to big L Libertarians, I am not interested in, nor am I inviting, dialog. I saw it first-hand, the conversation is over.