I don't have a problem with this. I hope the GOP fails entirely, so it can be replaced by a new party that advocates social liberalism and (true) fiscal conservatism. Trying to get young voters when you're talking about legitimate rape and not allowing gay marriage is a waste of time. But if a new fiscally conservative party embraces things like those issues and ones like marijuana legalization, I think a lot of young voters are willing to embrace a message of small government and free market economics.
This is the Ron Paul demographic and it has shown consistently that it's nowhere near being popular enough for national elections. The simple fact is, having an effective and well-funded government which takes on particular problems that don't respond well to free markets (health care, energy reform, infrastructure, social safety net) is seen by most non-ideological people as a good thing.
Our government is extraordinarily effective for what it is. We have one of the most sophisticated countries in the world, and our tax burden as a percentage of GDP is at the low end of any country you'd want to live in.
By the way, the Heritage Foundation has gotten to the point where it's about as bad as DailyKOS. They've given up even the pretense of objectivity and descended into blatant ideological demagoguery.
Heritage Foundation has gotten to the point where it's about as bad as DailyKOS
It's impossible to find any news site, reporter, researcher, or article that doesn't have some angle.
If I find information on the DailyKOS that appears factual and is worth considering then I do so. The Heritage article linked to has a wealth of research pulled from easily verifiable sources, mostly the government itself.
There is a line between characterizing the facts to support your angle and misleading your reader. Heritage Foundation crosses that line.
I wrote them off for their recent trumpeting of the fact that 47% of people have no federal income tax liability to falsely imply that half the country doesn't carry any of the tax burden. This goes beyond having an angle, it's just plain intellectually dishonest. The standard of discourse for an ostensibly respectable academic organization should be higher than that of a political campaign. At one time Heritage Foundation adhered to a higher standard. It no longer does.
I think you're right. Those ideas aren't popular enough today, but the electorate seems to be trending more that way over time. I suspect that GOP leadership is smart enough to know this, but they've decided that this generational shift will take a few more Presidential election cycles until it matures to the point where they can capitalize on it. Until then, keep flogging the current strategy until all the value has been extracted. They've invested way too much not to do that.
Nitpick: healthcare (along with finance) is the most regulated market in the United States, with regulation picking up dramatically in the 60s. It's no accident that when you force insurance to cover lots of things the prices go up and insurance companies get pickier about who they insure. It's no accident that when you constrain the supply of doctors medical prices go up. It's no accident that medicare price-fixing causes shortages in primary care doctors. It's no accident that when you give a big tax break for employer-provided health care you wind up with insurance-induced indentured servitude.
The government spends 1 out of 2 dollars in the "market" for health care.
I hope the GOP fails entirely, so it can be replaced by a new party that advocates social liberalism and (true) fiscal conservatism.
Romney got less votes than McCain. Romney was more fiscally conservative and more socially liberal.
He wasn't as "cool" as Obama, though.
Unfortunately, issues have very little to do with the outcome of national elections. It's mostly about party identity and other groupthink cue following like hipness. It's not very surprising that our news media continues to be less and less distinguishable from our entertainment industry.
>Romney got less votes than McCain. Romney was more fiscally conservative and more socially liberal.
Was he? McCain had always been kind of a moderate -- he only went crazy to secure the 2008 Republican nomination after the failure in 2000, and apparently once you go crazy it sticks. And Romney was the same way: He sure didn't look very socially liberal to moderates during the 2012 primaries.
It seems like that's what doomed both of them, actually. To get the nomination they each had to move substantially to the right of their own previous positions, which convinced just enough of the base in order to secure the nomination while alienating the moderates. Then the general election comes around and neither the moderates nor the extremists like the candidate because he at one point or another expressed a number of positions they strongly disagree with.
Romney also had a couple of issues McCain didn't: He was a notorious Wall St. guy running at the bottom of a recession notoriously caused by Wall St. guys, and he was running following the 2010 census which gave more electoral votes to typically Democratic population centers nationwide (which, unlike the Congressional elections, couldn't then be gerrymandered by Republican state governments for the presidency since states typically don't allocate electoral votes by district).
The problem is that the same process is likely to play out again. Fox keeps giving airtime to the Huckabees and the Trumps to try to get out the base against the Democrats, but with those people going to the polls and voting on those issues, it makes it impossible for a moderate Republican to get nominated without taking positions that alienate moderate voters, and then they lose the general election.
Am I the only one that remembers that Bush ran as a moderate in 2000 and won? It was only after 9/11 that he went cowboy, and then only won in 2004 by beating the terrorism drum that has, by this point, worn out and lost its effectiveness.
I certainly don't mean to imply we need another Bush, but at some point the Republicans need to realize that pandering to crazies loses elections. (And in the meantime I'm happy to help them realize that by not voting for them, and I don't think I'm alone.)
The problem is that the GOP doesn't truly support any of that stuff-- simply listening to what a wealthy few campaign donors tell you is right and blindly proselytizing this warped view until you have nearly 50% of the vote is a much easier platform.
In the 2000's (I cannot find the figures for this last election), the Democrats were the party of big donors and the Republicans had more total donors each donating smaller amounts (avg was around $50). In other words, if you removed the over $1,000 donors the Democrats would be hurt more than the Republicans.
The GOP leadership seems to have forgotten that this week with its shuffle of budget committee members.
I doubt that party would be able to beat out a socially conservative alternative; there are likely more religious/morality-driven voters than libertarians in support of the GOP. Maybe if the DNC were to implode at the same time.
As the security apparatus becomes increasingly intrusive, perhaps a new party could be swept in with the promise of dismantling it.
>Maybe if the DNC were to implode at the same time.
Right? It seems that's why neither party will ever lessen. It's like an arms race in which parties will never intentionally weaken their numbers by any means. It's led to piecemeal parties that would probably be better as separate-but-aligned than being a small voice in a large party.
I just can't imagine anything to begin such a split at the same time. If, say, fiscal conservative/social liberal people all actually made the jump to Libertarian (or another party), maybe a further left liberal faction of Democrats party might follow, but probably not. I just can't imagine anything that would incite a sizable group to give up that balance.
Shame. If large enough, and they pulled a few members from the other side, there's the potential they would become king-makers.
Yeah, I don't see it. Liberals are generally in favor of improving and expanding the safety net, whereas fiscal conservatism typically espouses the opposite. Likewise for issues related to women and minorities, or income inequality; liberals generally favor more government intervention rather than less.
Certainly there's a lot that liberals and libertarians have in common (drug war, religious freedom, wars), but they have very, very different principles and premises motivating their policy positions.
I blame that stupid political compass the libertarians are always trotting out.
For example, suppose I want to leave government spending where it is, but take fifty billion dollars a year from Medicare and spend it on student loan forgiveness and basic research grants. Which quadrant does that put me in?
We need to give up on the tired old categories and start over. We built parties around heuristics like "government spending bad" or "social programs good" instead of evaluating specific programs on their merits.
Ideologically pure libertarians are really anarchists. I've encountered people who advocate private police forces and private roads. People who don't understand that there is no difference in the harm that can be caused by de facto and de jure governments when they go bad.
But if you allow public roads and a public police force, why not public schools? Why not public universities, or public parks? Why not publicly financed scientific research? The answer to any of these questions is, at bottom, "because that program is better or worse than allowing private enterprise to handle it." But you have to answer that question on a case by case basis -- and it changes with demographics and technology and everything else.
And of course, you have to throw in the nature of coalition politics. Publicly funded universities are an extremely valuable program for college-aged voters and those with college-aged children, but seen as a complete waste of money by childless retirees. So sure, you have to build a coalition, but the existing parties exist as they do only by historical happenstance.
What could be interesting it to start a party with the following principles: First, for any given issue, evaluate what the majority of the population would want. Then, evaluate whether that position is manifestly unjust or based on assumptions contrary to the evidence. If not, adopt it as the party's position. Repeat for all issues.
Take the platform that party puts out, it's pretty much guaranteed to win a majority of the votes by definition. Then the other party can try to pick off a group of minority positions to form an opposing coalition, but any success they have is liable to just change the majority's view on that particular issue -- which changes the first party's position on it going forward from the date of the next election. And if you want to change policy, get on your soap box and convince the majority, which will chance the party's position.
It's kind of like direct democracy, but with a filter for extremely bad ideas.
Whatever you do, you cannot call it Libertarian though. The word has been tarnished by both crypto-anarchists (the disguised/hiding kind, not the strong crytography kind) who adopt the label to appear more mainstream and by mainstream pundits who paint a picture of Libertarians as anarchists.
(Also Ron Paul not really being socially liberal but rather just being kind of "state's rights"-ish hasn't helped... but I think that is more of a particularly sharp edge-case and not a systemic issue. A social conservative wanting to cut back government isn't a Libertarian, it is just a Republican being what Republicans have always claimed to be, but rarely are.)
The label is toxic now. Everybody knows that Libertarians exist, the reason today that they don't have the numbers is that nobody really wants to associate with the label.
