The bad news: Barr beats Ruwart for the LP nomination. (No word on a running mate yet.)
The good news: at least it was damn close.
Agorist Demerit Count: 3
57 Responses to Farewell LP
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Here lies LP *1971 +2008 Requiescant in Pacem « Rusz Sumieniem! -
May 26, 2008
[…] poniedzia?ek, 26 maj 2008 at 13:15 (Uncategorized) Hej, mog?o by? gorzej, mog?o by? Root/Barr zamiast Barr/Root. Przynajmniej mo?na si? pocieszy?, ?e Ruwart prawie wygra?a. […]
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Rad Geek People’s Daily 2008-05-26 – Goodbye’s too good a word, babe -
May 26, 2008
[…] In light ofthe late unpleasantness in Denver, the pair of ridiculous small-government conservative tools nominated, and the Partyarchs running the convention, who saw fit to so transparently stage-manage the process of choosing a contemptible conservative drug prohibitionist and a contemptible conservative warhawk as their party’s mouthpieces, I think that congratulations and thanks are due to Aster for pointing out the perfect reply—and all that really needs to be said, at this point. […]
I couldn’t believe this. “Party of principle” my a**.
I can completely believe it. It’s the inevitable outcome of the choruses of “sticking to principles won’t win us any voooootes!” that have been building for years. I’m so glad that I got the hell away from the LP after 2000, and from believing that it could move anything larger than a molehill without falling apart.
Now, onward to Bob Barr’s stunning capture of 2% of the vote on his platform of “we could cut some taxes, maybe???”
I think Brad Spangler got his wish: the LP is through. It’s GOP Lite from now on, baby.
Roderick:
Oh, don’t worry. It gets worse.
I’ll probably write my own post on this, but Root’s “bang” loss speech/endorsement speech was a tragic moment. The conservatives have taken over the party of classical liberalism.
(apologies for use of others’ words)
I’m walkin’ down that long, lonesome road, babe
Where I’m bound, I can’t tell
But goodbye’s too good a word, gal
So I’ll just say fare thee well
I ain’t sayin’ you treated me unkind
You could have done better but I don’t mind
You just kinda wasted my precious time
But don’t think twice, it’s all right
…..
Oh, but you who philosophise disgrace
and criticize all fears,
Bury the rag deep in your face
For now’s the time for your tears.
I know I’ve said more savage words against libertarianism and the Libertarian Party than anyone. But writing this, I am crying.
I take it there is no political party of liberty left in America today.
What is our approach to electoral self-defense now? Vote for the Green Party or the most libertarian of the Democratic candidates?
This is an important issue that friends of liberty should discuss
Natasha:
My approach is not to bother. I don’t begrudge anyone throwing mud at an oncoming tank, but neither do I have any illusion that it’s going to make a difference. To me, Barr/Root just means that the mud has turned to sand. Better to work on running laterally, digging a hole, etc. (if I may stretch my analogy completely out of shape).
What’s worse, Root kept talking about his “16-year plan” to become the nominee in the elections after this one.
You all ought to buck up and quit whining. You made yourselves vulnerable to this disappointment by refusing to listen to those who tried to tell you electoral politics was the wrong approach. So now you want to whine and moan because you lost a game you insisted on playing? Even though you should have known it was expensive entertainment, indeed? You’re a bunch of fools.
No, Spangler didn’t get his wish. In order for me to convince you of the error of your electoral ways, you would have first had to get your way (a Ruwart nomination) and then watched it fail. Now you insufferable idiots are talking about the Boston Tea Party, the Constitution Party and assorted other ballot-related abominations.
Isn’t the gloom-and-doom here a result of focusing on words instead of reality?
If, thirty-seven years ago, the founders of the LP had chosen to name their party the “Progressive Conservative Party” (a more accurate name, for sure!) would any of us be upset that the PC Party had nominated Bob Barr?
Isn’t the problem that the LP calls itself “Libertarian” and we too call ourselves “libertarian” and we feel that they are somehow betraying the “true” meaning of the word?
With all due respect, the word “libertarian” was never going to save us.
The overwhelming majority of our neighbors and countrymen happen not to support natural rights and happen not to believe that an individual is fully responsible for his or her actions, even if he hides behind words like “army” or “government” to justify his crimes. This is true even of most who call themselves “libertarians.”
I had a chance to chat with Ed Clark for a few minutes among a small group during his 1980 Presidential run. I tried to find out what his real position on Social Security was. He talked vaguely about the need for transitional programs, of some indefinite duration. He was not willing to simply say that to force anyone to pay for “Social Security” was a violation of that person’s natural rights.
Ed has generally been considered among the relatively hard-core libertarians in the LP.
No, the real issue is not saving the word “libertarian” or pretending that the LP has truly supported views it has never consistently supported. The real issue is how to change people’s hearts and minds so that they come to see a crime as a crime whether it is carried out by a ghetto black, a middle-class white, a US government soldier, or the President of the United States.
When there is a “Memorial Day” in the US when it is considered at least a matter open to serious debate if someone points out that none of our “honored dead” died to “protect our freedom,” then we will know we are actually making progress.
I think there may also be some unconscious nationalism here.
America (and therefore any US political party, including the LP) just does not matter that much. Sure, most of us live here, and anyone would like to see improvements in his or her own neighborhood. And, for the time being, America is both the greatest military power on earth and also the world’s most dangerous rogue state.
But, America has passed its peak of influence. The US is less than five percent of the world’s population, seven percent or so of its land area. The future of the world is being determined elsewhere, most likely in Asia.
Forget the LP. If you want to influence the history of the human race, figure out how to spread the message of natural-rights anarchism among the Indians and the Chinese.
Dave Miller in Sacramento
Mock teh Vote! http://www.nostate.com/71/libertarians-for-statism/
Ed has generally been considered among the relatively hard-core libertarians in the LP.
That’s news to me. Surely among the LP presidential candidates he’s one of the least hardcore.
you would have first had to get your way (a Ruwart nomination) and then watched it fail
Depends what you mean by fail, Brad. The purpose of the Ruwart campaign was not to get Ruwart elected as president.
Rod,
Well… Ed certainly was not a hard-core libertarian in fact!
But was Bergland or Hospers or MacBride or Marrou or…?
Does anyone recall any of those guys saying that, rather than phasing out Social Security, no one should ever be forced to pay for it at all, starting immediately? (I use this as a simple example where “transitionism” seems to be very appealing to those who view natural rights as a “long-term goal” rather than as an ethical principle.)
There’s a story (I think I heard it from Rothbard) that back during the ’60 campaign some libertarian got to have a private talk with Tricky Dick and came away afterwards announcing that Nixon was really, in his heart, one of us libertarians.
And maybe he was, just like, deep, deep in his heart, Greenspan is really one of us.
But of course, it does not matter. In practice, Greenspan was an inflationist statist who helped prop up the state (and Nixon was worse – though he at least performed the service of partially discrediting the imperial Presidency for a few years).
I know that deep in their hearts Harry Browne and Ron Paul were libertarians, and perhaps their Presidential campaigns were more libertarian than Clark’s, Bergland’s, et al.
But I myself was involved in the LP for many years, and I frankly did not see much tolerance there for core libertarian principles as I laid them out above: i.e., consistent support for natural rights and for the idea that violating natural rights was just as wrong if done by the President of the United States as by a two-bit criminal. I knew a few LPers who held those views, but not many.
In my experience, from the late ‘70s to the mid-90s, the LP was basically a bunch of guys who disliked high taxes and wanted to be free to smoke pot.
I still remember back in ’92 one high-ranking Cal state LP official patiently explaining to me that libertarianism had nothing to do with anarchism. He clearly was not simply explaining his personal views, but thought he was expressing the view held by all LP members. Of course, he was mistaken, but it did seem to be the majority view.
From what I saw personally in the LP, the Barr nomination is not much of a step down. View the LP as it really was, and it really has not changed that much.
Those of us who wanted to use the LP to educate its own members and the general public about the idea of consistently respecting natural rights always seemed to be a small and not very happily tolerated minority in the LP, at least in my own experience.
Dave
I still remember back in ’92 one high-ranking Cal state LP official patiently explaining to me that libertarianism had nothing to do with anarchism.
When I was in North Carolina in the 90s the local LP was pretty thoroughgoingly radical-libertarian and much of the leadership was anarchist; so this does seem to be something that varies from locality to locality.
Rod wrote:
>When I was in North Carolina in the 90s the local LP was pretty thoroughgoingly radical-libertarian and much of the leadership was anarchist; so this does seem to be something that varies from locality to locality.
Yeah, when I was a grad student at Stanford, our student group (not officially affiliated with the LP) was basically pretty hard-core Rothbardian anarchist. In fact, one of the leading LPers in the area considered me the “moderate” among the Stanford students because, while I did generally agree with Rothbard, I did not just blindly follow him (I’m not sure the others did either, but she thought they did).
On the other hand, I knew a number of the top figures in the California LP, which was obviously the largest state party in the nation by far. I think it is fair to say that they were generally not “libertarians” in the sense I defined the word above (I’m not trying to argue over the “true” definition, but merely give a sense of where those folks stood).
My main point is just that the LP has always been very, very much a mixed bag, and it has very little impact or influence anyway. It has always consisted, to a substantial degree, of a bunch of would-be politicians. Just think of it as the “Progressive Conservative Party” as I suggested above, and, well, Barr probably is not as bad as McCain or Barack. I may even vote for Barr myself: I rather enjoy playing the electoral game, even though I expect little out of it: it does give one an excuse to talk to other people about politics and express some genuinely libertarian views.
Of course, if I vote for Barr, my Republican friends will claim I am “really” voting for Obama and my Democratic friends will claim I am “really” voting for McCain: I’ve already gotten this over the last few months when I have vaguely mentioned that I might vote third-party.
Electoral politics does bring out the zany side of people!
Dave
“It’s the inevitable outcome of the choruses of “sticking to principles won’t win us any voooootes!” that have been building for years.”
If you stick to principles, you’re not seeking votes : >
The reason this is a disaster is not because the Libertarian Party was ever the perfect embodiment of libertarian ideas, but because the treason of the ‘party of Principle’ is symbolic of everything wrong with libertarianism, which itself has a great deal to do with everything which has become wrong with America.
I.
Look from Bob Barr to Ron Paul to Lew Rockwell- the spokescreatures for the libertarian movement are everywhere conservative monstrosities. This is not a question of a Party/non-party split, extreme/moderate split, or minarchist/anarchist split. Some of the libertarians most alienated from the LP are among the worst (and some of the individualists remaining within the movement are Party members, minarchists, and political moderates),
The problem is with libertarianism, the idea and the concept- with an idea of liberty with has come to coalesce not around individualism and the completion of the Enlightenment project but around an anti-contextual hatred of the modern nation-state which simply begs for cooptation by reaction and obscurantism. Those calling themselves libertarians today do not foremost cry out for the human spirit to be able to think for itself and create its own life; they have united instead on a negative, *against* one recent and narrow form of tyranny and allied themselves with those who seek a return of earlier and more awful forms. Libertarianism as an ideology no longer works on balance as a force for liberation of the individual mind and spirit in today’s world- partially, it never did. This should have been expected given that ‘libertarianism’ as *anti-statism* rather that a positive affirmation of the cultural institutions of individualism is not much more of a coherent philosophy than ‘anti-Communism’ or anti-fascism, and similarly utterly vulnerable to use by vicious people for horrific purposes.
Ditching the Party is not enough. What has happened to the Party is the symptom. The Party did not betray libertarianism; the Party and libertarianism have both betrayed the Enlightenment, and both were set up without any structural safeguards which could prevent such a betrayal. The word ‘libertarianism’ does not mean freedom for living, breathing individuals if the mind and spirit of individual liberty becomes absent, and there was never anything in libertarianism to ensure that it was present.
II.
The trouble is that libertarianism was always the Archamerican Philosophy, and the corruption of libertarianism has a great deal to do with the changes which have come to America in the last thirty years. From 1776 to the counterculture, America once really did, despite its faults, at least to some relative degree embody the ideals of Enlightenment and individualism of which libertarianism was supposed to be an expression. But America is being thoroughly taken over by the other heritage which distinquished in from the Old Country- its violence, miltarism, bigotry, provincial ignorance, anti-intellectualism. and religious fanaticism. In an almost perfect morality play, America’s original sin of slavery has indeed at last destroyed it, for as Kevin Phillips’s _American Theocracy_ well observes, it is the Southern cultural patterns orginally produced by a slave society (and the worst and oldest of Cavalier British classism, before that) which have now spread to a working plurality if not simple majority of America. When the ideals of modernity started unvoidably hitting everyday culture in the 60s and 70s, a good part of America decided the deal wasn’t worth it, and what Leanprd Peikoff called the ‘nation of the Enlightenment’ is the headquarters of the most dangerous court of church and altar and (badly) storied pomp in the West. In 1929, *any* party which considered itself the embodiment of the German spirit would be in deep trouble, even if the German spirit it originally held in mind was that of Lessing, Schiller, and Beethoven.
Libertarianism has always been both explicitly and implicitly tied to a specifically American social system, culture, and mentality. If America fails, libertarianism will either have to recreate itself according to the grammar and rhythms of different traditions or perish ignomiously, tied in what remains of educated world opinion to a derided and discredited system which by all evidence is going to crash brutally with immense harm to all sorts of innocent (and less-than-innocent) bystanders. In New Zealand, the Libertarianz and ACT parties are far less devoted to liberty than to Americanism and are for all practical purposes aligned with more mainstream forces which, if successful, will see what is happening to America (and the UK and elsewhere) also come here. As for those mainstream forces, the same Kiwis who have expressed to be they would like New Zealand to imitate America simulatenously believe in ‘modernising’ in the manner of Singapore and China- for that is what America means to the world; wealth and efficiency by any means necessary (torture, for instance. Meanwhile those who practise liberty (along with many who don’t) rightly see America as the most *relevant* symbol of threatening authoritarism.
Libertarianism would have to de-Americanise itself to survive. but I doubt it can; libertarian theory is so caught up in unconscious American parochialism that it has little appeal outside the United States for both fairly good and pretty lousy reasons (just as ‘anti-Americanism’ has always been both a rational if preoccupied judgement *and* a resentful bigotry of ignorant and cynical premodernists). Even if libertarianism did fully de-Americanise, the perception that libertarianism=capitalism=America is going to make life difficult for libertarians in much the way as the existence of the Soviet Union once made life very difficult for anti-authoritarians who still held to pre-Soviet notions of communism.
Personally, I think it is more likely that many wonderful things- things like individualism, the market economy. high standards of living, the counterculture, modernity itself- will, as with 1929, be unjustly blamed for a failure which resulted precisely from their betrayal. I think the eclipse of America will do immense and very possibly fatal damage to libertarianism and to far, far more than libertarianism. The real battle today is not to save the Enlightenment in America. It is not even to save Enlightenment *from* America. It is to make sure that the destruction of the nation created by the Declaration of Independence does not bring down that declaration along with it. Every illiberal force in the entire world will work to make that happen- to convince the world that Imperial America rose and fell *because* of the Statue of Liberty- and sociobiology and 10,000 years of patriarchal tyranny will make it very easy for a world full of ignorant and brutalised people to believe them.
* * *
I put my money with the European Union, statist and badly flawed as it is. If the individualist way of life has any future it is there. India, I don’t know much of. But China? A world whose future lies with the most brutal and extensive dictatorship on the planet? Get me a drink. Get me six drinks and a glass of blue acid to wash it down with. I’ll be considerate, but probably not kind, and wash the glass.
Wonderful job we’ve done with this world of ours. If there are gods, they probably long ago disowned the human race in disgust.
But Aster, tell us how you really feel!
Aster:
Well, thanks for your comments about libertarianism. Althought they were not meant to me, they ask a question I asked you in Charles Blog. I think you say things that are very true, specially the need of libertarianism to beyond being an “american philosophy”. I only disagree with your views on the european union. Here xenophobia, racism and re-barbarization are in their zenit. The left is divided between old time comunists that are becoming more and more irrelevant, social democrat parties that are becoming essentialy center right parties. Anarchism is not what it used to be. Meanwhile, is no casuality that goverments with a proto fascistic stripe (see Berlusconi in Italy) or even with neocon look (Sarkozy in France, Merkel in Germany) are on the rise.
Sergio-
Actually, you beat me to writing to you! Much of what I wrote was everything I previously couldn’t put into articulate order in order to answer your questions. So *thank you* for encouraging me to get my mind working.
Your words on the European Union may be more informed than mine. My impressions on the matter largely derive from interrogating every European traveler who I’ve come across for the last 9 months (to be honest, I don’t trust much media these days, maintream *or* independent), and are certainly flavoured by my particular cultural concerns as a post-transgender girl, (ex-?)sex-worker, (ex-?)Pagan, etc. But I admit that my impression of the European country of which I’m most aware (France; not counting the UK) are not very good at all. I agree with you about that rat-bastard Sarkozy; I have a French-American sex worker friend who doesn’t wish to return to France because she doesn’t see all that much difference between them. On the other hand, I’ve met lots of Germans and Scandinavians who are as free-spirited as any people I’ve met except San Franciscans and urban Kiwis.
History and political philosophy says to me Europe is likely to go the way of America, because the basic problems are ultimately the same. If that is the case, then may God help us all.
Can you suggest any good (i.e., readable and philosophically informed) books about current political trends in Europe? This request is earnest, and I will read what I can acquire on this issue.
There has never been a hardcore LP presidential campaign in the history of the party: Ruwart’s would have been the first, and after 6 ballots 45% of the delegates still wanted an openly anarchist candidate who’d been branded a supporter of child pornography and sex between 5- and 50-year olds, and had not performed well in the critical debate the night before (the one that won obscure Michael Badnarik the nomination in 2004), which had the entire Ruwart staff depressed afterwards (including Mary herself).
Brad is right: what happened this weekend won’t cause us anarcho-partyarchs to concede the lack of usefulness of the LP as an educational tool (and, frankly, there are so many long-time non-party libertarians whose first knowledge of the philosophy was the result of the LP that I do wish some of them would concede that it has been a useful feeder organization for the movement for all its faults).
If Barr-Root is a bust, that 45% who were ready to nominate a market anarchist (and who put Ruwart on the Libertarian National Committee the very next day, even though she refused to endorse the winning ticket) will have the majority next time. Then we’ll have the Spangler test.
I have deep respect for those following the agorist strategy, but we need both agorism and education, and so long as there is a party with the name libertarian in it, what it does impacts the education side. Frankly, it wouldn’t have taken many non-party anarchists showing up in Denver to have a Ruwart-Kubby ticket right now.
For my part, I’ll be starting a web site shortly called Libertarian Persuasion that will be a depository for sound bites, brochure words, and position papers to defend each of the libertarian positions in public policy. Although the starting point will be the LP platform (which still acknowledges the right of secession by anyone from the government), I’m expecting to add pseudo-planks supporting libertarian positions not addressed in that platform, and I hope some of you will be willing to occasionally use your writing skills to provide your best ideas on how to briefly explain hardcore libertarian positions. All contributions will be public domain with an invitation to steal and the site will have no affiliation with the LP (I’m paying the bills and plan to moderate it to exclude spam and rudeness).
The only way the anarchists leave before 2012 is if Barr-Root draws enough conservatives into the party to in 2010 to marginalize both the anarchists and our radical minarchist allies (who in large part are just anarchists unable to admit that a government that doesn’t aggress, doesn’t tax,and allows secession isn’t a government as most market anarchists define it). Given the high probability that they will fail to meet expectations (the idea that socially tolerant Ron Paul youth are going to become activists for this ticket is daffy, and he has raised a pathetically small amount of money for a supposedly breakthrough campaign for the LP), the radicals will be back in charge for the next presidential election cycle. Frankly, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the 2012 LP nominee turns out to be Ruwart, who clearly has no intention of leaving the LP right now and will still be writing and speaking actively over the next 4 years (including an update of her infamous Short Answers to the Tough Questions).