Sullivan’s been praising Ron Paul and his awesome youth movement for months now. But now he’s sad to learn that Paul’s youth movement was once a “good ol’ boy” movement that used to make fun of “welfare queens,” yankees, and “homos.”
Ron Paul only appeals to Sullivan because he’s a gadfly who shares Sullivan’s (au courant) view that the Iraq War is a mistake. As with Bush, whose “compassionate conservatism” once appealed to Sullivan’s gobbeldy-gook moderate views, Sullivan’s romantic sentiments will soon be dashed by some expression of a genuinely conservative viewpoint by Paul, such as his opposition to civil rights laws. At that point, expect Sullivan to return to his tried-and-true modus operandi: hysterical denunciation of yet another heart-breaking politician who has the temerity not to agree with him on everything.
I predict libertarianism will always be a fringe movement. Because people that care about the liberties it embraces today–drugs, abortion, gay rights–also believe strongly in social equality. And people that believe in social equality are by definition people that think discrimination is a great evil; it’s hard to sustain the deontological embrace of complete freedom (outside violence) when one’s view of liberty would permit a great evil. Thus Sullivan’s liberalism trumps his libertarianism, and we’ll see something similar from most other left-libertarians. This was the basic historical trajectory, incidentally, of Classical Liberalism.
Conservative-leaning libertarians may well stay libertarian, but they have a more abiding substantive reason to do so and will continue to form the base of practical libertarian voters: They’re in society’s productive class and don’t like the government taking their money to subsidize disorderly parasites. Of course, as men of a conservative bent, they won’t lose any sleep over gay marriage or other social innovations supposedly required by doctrinaire libertarianism.
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Dear Mr. Roach these left-libertarians are not libertarian at all. They are simply liberals who are so antiestablishment that they refuse to admit that they belong in the Democratic party.
We right libertarians of course will not lose any sleep over gay marriage, because we do not believe that the government should be in the business of marriage in the first place, marriage after all being a covenant among God, a man, and a woman.
As for “libertarians” who support the “right” to an abortion, again, they can call themselves whatever they want, but that does not make them libertarian. Without the right to life, all others seem pointless to me.
Yes, indeed, the Libertarian party will remain fringe so long as it continues to be dominated by what you refer to as left-libertarians, and what I have always called liberals or libertines (they want drugs legalized because they want to use them, not for any other reason).
However, even if we can shed these liberals, Senator McCain has ensured that the party cannot rise to prominence. Campaign Finance laws are meant to, and in fact, accomplish only one thing, to ensure that additionaly parties cannot obtain the funding (or at least make it far more difficult) necessary to rise to prominence.
[...] and especially me, my life at home would be miserable indeed. Want a good snark without a gay man (Hello Mr. Sullivan) around? You pretty much need a lady, or at least a woman. If I didn’t know far too much [...]
[...] Andrew Sullivan is nothing if not prone to revisiting his earlier enthusiasms. I suppose there is a kind of authenticity in that . . . “often wrong, but never uncertain!” He loved Bush for a while, but grew disenchanted on account of Iraq and the gay marriage issue. Then he liked Ron Paul for a spell until Paul’s old school conservative views from back in the day were reve… [...]