What's Wrong With the Libertarian Party?
I caught a youtube video on "Gary Johnson Crazy" and laughed as I watched it. But, then I started wondering. What is wrong with that party? Either Johnson is nowhere near Libertarian or my own definition of Libertarian is way off. He just came off like a liberal who smokes a pound of weed each day. He said some of the craziest stuff, and some very liberal, almost statist things. Can some of us here illuminate this for me?...What went wrong with that party? I've always thought that Libertarian ideas could REALLY take hold in America. But, it seems like they purposely derail themselves with these wingnuts. I know some would say the same about Trump...but from what I understand the RNC didn't spend a dime on him. He stepped in as a rogue. While the Libertarians' last candidate was the legit poster child(?) I'm stumped by it.
I think that the Libertarian party has got to get its act together and remember that there is something more than marijuana to rail about. Also, it must take better care of reaching out to people who may be 90% Libertarian but are now forced to vote outside of that organization. For what its worth!
But, as to your question, What's Wrong With the Libertarian Party?, well, I have one question and one solution:
Are YOU a member of the LP?
One solution is YOU, and everyone else reading this page, join, be active, and help the LP find its way, that way possibly being back to more honest and sane pro-liberty positions.
I was there early. Not quite at the founding, although I was trying to start a Libertarian party at about the same time, completely unknowing of the "real" Libertarian Party.
I also was one of the first to quit, storming out of our local group's meeting.
I have since re-joined. And re-quit. And re-joined.
I was terribly disappointed in Gary Johnson's not being consistently libertarian, but he was 'WAY ahead of whoever might have been in second place ... although I don't think any single candidate was. All the rest were so much worse, it was all a tie for second place.
Anyway, EVERYONE HERE: JOIN, and help us in the LP find the rational course. Thank you.
In the meantime, we are working WITH them.
In my almost squishy and certainly moderate approach, we have to reduce the government to its constitutional size before we can repeal it completely.
There are obligations that morally have to be met and, maybe more to the point, there are educational considerations: HOW do we convince people to get completely rid of government since that is such a new -- actually very old and radical (see Ayn Rand's definition of "radical") -- idea.
Minarchy as a goal is fine with me.
So come join. We'll love to have you.
..."to reduce the government to its constitutional size before we can repeal it completely."
The latter part sounds to me as if you were dreaming of another utopia. Just as communists and many others did and do. Don't you see that these kinds of dreamed up schemes are incompatible with the human nature?
As our favorite philosopher and a few before her, less clearly and less emphatically said: all living things act only according to their nature and cannot act in any different way.
Just my reaction.
All "schemes" are dreamed up, even a Galt's Gulch. And cynics and/or pessimists would say of such a "scheme" it is "incompatible with the human nature."
To which I politely say pish and tosh.
The important point, well, one of them, was that we autarchists and voluntaryists and agorists are often, and in my case always, willing to work with minarchists to lessen and end tyranny.
Which, by the way, is a whole lot better way to end it than by whining and sneering at those of us who are making the effort.
Ivory-tower intellectuals, even if they claim to be Objectivists, don't really accomplish much in the real world, which we all claim to believe in. We must actually go into that real world and make some specific efforts.
Thank you, Maritimus, for your reaction.
Philosophical understanding is not a "scheme", Those who reject utopian floating abstractions like anarchy and the crackpot fad arguments confined within the miniscule Libertarian Party activists are not "cynics and pessimists". The subjectivism and arbitrary force of anarchy are not an ideal to be sought.
The Libertarian Party is not (yet) an anarchism-oriented party. Some of its members are.
As several others have noted on this same page it is in fact loaded with kooks that even some LP activists want to get rid of, not the least of which were its most recent presidential and vice presidential "candidates" Johnson and Weld. Their antics were discussed and denounced several times in this forum.
Telling people who take Ayn Rand's ideas seriously to join in with that zoo is very bad advice, just as bad as when Ayn Rand denounced it starting 50 years ago at the beginning of its inevitable long run of failure. Please don't presume that we "know very little" about the Libertarian Party.
You deserve a -1 here. I did not do it to avoid misinterpretation of that action on anybody's part.
EDIT: added address
But in fact I deserve a plus-four (which is a fashion pun you won't get) for being so polite.
Also, you said "Please don't presume that we 'know very little' ...
I was referring very specifically to YOU for your rude, hate-filled, and, yes, ignorant "kooks"!
As someone nicer than I and much smarter than you has pointed out, both the old parties have "kooks" and, frankly, there are "kooks" and, worse, cultists claiming to be Objectivists.
Do we denounce the philosophy? Do we denounce Galt's Gulch? Do ... well, no need to go on. Others, if not you, will get my point.
But I'm not worried about Johnson's kooky ideas because I doubt he'd get anywhere with most of them. An elected libertarian politician would probably be doing most of the same things as Trump or Rand Paul, except that he'd be more stubborn and less willing to compromise on major rights violations such as the war on drugs.
With that kind of floating abstractions about "rights" and "liberty" (the "freedom of assembly" for cells?) in his thinking he certainly does not represent what Ayn Rand advocated and explained, and you don't find rational defenses of individualism among his slogans.
Even in conservative North Dakota he couldn't get more than "ballot status". His a-philosophical feelings sometimes stumble into political positions better than outright statists, and those contradictions apparently make him the "real deal" for the Libertarian Party, but not for us. It is not the solution to correcting the course of the country.
All surgery is healthcare, but there is no moral entitlement to healthcare at the expense of doctors or anyone else made to pay for it. When Ayn Rand spoke of a right to have an abortion she was talking about a moral sanction of freedom of the individual, not leftist entitlements posing as "rights".
You don't understand "potential".
Your emotional post is non-responsive. Your faith in mystic "rights" is emotionalism, not knowledge. We know that you "don't think". You don't "know" either. You feel it and try to rationalize it as "DNA and biological processes". You appear to have no idea what rights are and why we have them. They are not biologically inherited from cells at conception.
Your accusing those who reject a meaningless insistence on "rights" of a potential as not knowing what "potential" means, not "understanding DNA and biochemical processes", and having no "foresight" are gratuitous, irrelevant insults. Please consult the guidelines for posting on this forum.
With idiotic posts.
Yes and thank you!
You say, "cells have rights because they have "DNA and biological processes"""
Since cells do have DNA and biological processes, they also, all of them, have potential do be grown into a human being. (I take the liberty to assume you are referring to human cells.)
What about potential gives one rights??
Let me just point out that the human zygote has "potential", it has uniqueness not found in other humans, nor will be found in others. Destroying it destroys variation in human "evolution"---intellectual and spiritual evolution.
An amoeba does not have that. (That's for Dawkins, who said an amoeba is more biologically complex than a human zygote.) He may have since changed his tune.
I think in some ways Dawkins has more of a mystical outlook on life than I do myself.
And as you know, oldtk, I am singularly unmystical.
What we need first, before any more unknown presidential candidates, is an intelligent, consistent, liberty-loving and presentable candidate for a lower office who wins and THEN runs for higher office, and eventually president.
https://www.facebook.com/FreeStateWes...
I'd love to help him campaign here.
You were confused as was I that libertarianism was about the ideals that created the Declaration of Independence and the US generally. It is not.
Regarding true liberty - That is something I've come to realize the voters probably won't ever grasp. This is why, to my horror watching the early GOP debates, we hear promises of what government will do for us from both sides. This brings me to Rand Paul and, especially, his father. When those guys speak it almost always rings true in my ears. Not always, but very often it does. Trump was needling Rand, "...with your 1% approval rating..." But, Rand was the only one on that stage of 16 (or so) candidates who really made any sense to me.
It is too soon for any fundamental reform of government by political means. Changing the course of a nation requires a philosophical revolution. The Libertarian Party does not understand that and doesn't even know how to articulate and defend rational individualism -- as it shows over and over, from Gary Johnson to the pining for anarchism to the obsession with drug laws.
All that is possible politically today is to appeal to what is left of common sense and the American sense of life in order to affect specific policies for the better where and to the degree possible, and to elect the least statist candidates at least partially sympathetic to freedom. Libertarian Party activists don't even know how to do that. They are well known for not operating in reality, being a fringe party that cannot win elections, and having no impact on policy.
Rand objected to Libertarian attempts to attach her name to their movement, to their anti-reason positions, and, I think, to their obvious political ineffectiveness.
I contrasted the effective politicians of the 1970 era with L's. The statist Tip O'Neil said "all politics is local" and was effective. The supposedly non-statist L's had no interest in talking with anyone who didn't already agree with them on the political point-of-the-moment.
Anarchism promoted as a form of society is a floating abstraction that is not a rational point of reference or basis for anything and certainly not a moral ideal. Yet the 'minarchy' term was cooked up and promoted for that purpose and is used only by a small cadre of libertarians mostly ignorant of or opposed to Objectivism, including those still promoting "anarcho-capitalism" claimed to be implied by Ayn Rand, which it is not. It is not part of our rational vocabulary. Anarchy and its offshoots are not related to Objectivism and have no conceptual or political role in it. The whole scheme is conceptually invalid..
Back to your statement that statism and anarchy are a false alternative. I disagree with you on a conceptual level. I believe you conceptualize anarchy only being accomplished by a means of force, while I would maintain that the free market and private institutions could perform the role of government without infringing on anyone's rights. Am I an objectivist, an anarchist, a conservative?
You're right - back when the LP had "core values" and people fought it out on the convention floor to decide just EXACTLY what the Party Platform would say, the membership was small but cohesive. Now that the candidates as whose who would never have supported that platform, there are probably more "members".
I don't think that party CAN be "big" and have a cohesive, logical and rational set of core values. Someone's always gonna say "But you can't..."
We had the best luck in getting people to agree with us when we began every discussion with "As we talk, we're going to disagree. Can we agree now that something not initiated by force or fraud, even if one of us doesn't like it, can still "make the cut" and be a LP value?" If you can get someone to go that far, you have a potential libertarian. But that takes time, and that is something most people won't spend on politics now. I have gotten more people to look deeper into libertarian ideas with that one question than any other.
For Ghu's sake, there were less than 10 NOTA votes for the presidential candidate at the last convention!
Besides, the Probability Broach is out as a graphic novel now, so you can read a comic book and think about politics as the same time.
N.B. I thought long and hard before leaving that sentence from "so..." in, considering politics and graphic novels in the same room. Then I left it in, just to see what happened.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXhR4...
I'm not convinced Gov Gary Johnson is one of them. He went around the country for months giving speeches and interviews. If you compile a few minutes of missteps into one video, he appears crazy. Hardcore politicians are very careful never to say or do anything that could be turned into candidate-is-crazy video. They have a handful of canned answers memorized that they can give if their mind goes blank. I always remember President G W Bush doing it when he blanked on a question about the flu vaccine shortage, which was a big concern at the time. Bush launched into is canned speech about medical liability, even though it had nothing to do with the vaccine shortage. It worked, though, because at least it was related to medicine.
Gary Johnson on several occasions failed to do that. Sometimes when he got angry at questions that assumed statism or when he kept being confronted with the same wrong figures. I sympathized with him, but if he were a hardcore politician he would have handled it much more smoothly.
Of course the media propaganda concludes the opposite of reality.
I saw Gary fly off the hook a few times at interviewers. If I were one of them I would have just told him to chill out and watch his tone. But, I didn't see any of them do that. He really got wound up at times about stuff that didn't make sense to me - like his answer, "They came here because THEY DIDN'T HAVE JOBS!..." Uh...um...ok...
As a campaign consultant, that is what I try to stress: Stick to the basic point, which is freedom.