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Since 2008 – Progress Through Politics

Has Libertarianism become the refuge of illiberal violent authoritarian xenophobes?

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My day job precludes me from writing too long a diary on this, but happy to comment, and let the subject in question speak for himself.

The editor of Libertarian Republican has resigned in the wake of the thorough trashing of the GOP on Tuesday. And what he says by way of goodbye is downright interesting.

Today starts a new course for my life. I’ve soured on electoral politics given what happened last night. I believe now the best course of action is outright revolt. What do I mean by that?

Well, to each his own. Some may choose to push secession in their state legislatures. Others may choose to leave the U.S. for good (Costa Rica, Switzerland, Italy, Argentina, Hong Kong, Israel). Still others may want to personally separate themselves from the United States here in North America while still living under communist rule’ the Glenn Beck, grab your guns, food storage, build bunkers, survivalist route. I heartily endorse all these efforts.

Jeez. There’s butthurt in electoral politics, and then there are calls from armed anti democratic insurrection. I thought libertarians believed in the sanctity of the individual.

Not so, it seems, if you are the ideological enemy. Eric Dondero urges his readers to “Express your hatred, shame, and outright disgust with anyone you know who voted Democrat”

What does that mean? Defiling your neighbours lawns for one. But it goes on

Starting early this morning, I am going to un-friend every single individual on Facebook who voted for Obama, or I even suspect may have Democrat leanings. I will do the same in person. All family and friends, even close family and friends, who I know to be Democrats are hereby dead to me. I vow never to speak to them again for the rest of my life, or have any communications with them. They are in short, the enemies of liberty. They deserve nothing less than hatred and utter contempt.

I strongly urge all other libertarians to do the same. Are you married to someone who voted for Obama, have a girlfriend who voted ‘O’. Divorce them. Break up with them without haste. Vow not to attend family functions, Thanksgiving dinner or Christmas for example, if there will be any family members in attendance who are Democrats

I thought only Stalinists were guilty of equating a person with their ideology. But in a brown red shift, the libertarian editor has gone full tilt into pure ideological venom:

There are so many other nasty little things I plan to do against the communists and those who support them. Perhaps I’ll keep Jim informed and he can report on my activities here at LR.

For now, off to my first assignment: Telling all my friends and family who voted for Obama to “fuck off, don’t ever speak to me again you slimeball mother fuckers.” Wish me luck!

So there we have it: libertarianism is reverting to hate speech, and hate speech is the precursor of hate crimes. I always thought there was something Pre-Hobbesian about an ideology which reduces everything to a binary authority/liberty axis, and makes the state the only threat to individuals.

From the sound of this guy, the threat comes from somewhere else


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30 comments

  1. Shaun Appleby

    Good.  Avoiding the company of reasonable people?  Fine with me, saves me the trouble of listening to them.  The evidence of the past decade, certainly since late 2008, seems to suggest that racism, for example, hadn’t disappeared but merely been shamed into silence.  So be it, probably the best we can hope for.

    It strikes me that these are the very people whose minority views were magnified by their volume, if they are voluntarily withdraw from public discourse there votes will be subsumed by the majority unnoticed.  It is a long overdue polemic suicide which I will gladly assist.

  2. Shaun Appleby

    If one thing has emerged in the last forty-eight hours it is that we really dodged a bullet; if the campaign is prologue to the administration the Romney folks were totally incompetent.  Beyond the mistaken assumptions and derisive mendacity which characterised the campaign, their surprise at the outcome alone demonstrates unfitness to run the executive branch:


    They based their own internal polls on turnout levels more favorable to Romney. That was a grave miscalculation, as they would see on election night.

    Those assumptions drove their campaign strategy: their internal polling showed them leading in key states, so they decided to make a play for a broad victory: go to places like Pennsylvania while also playing it safe in the last two weeks.

    Those assessments were wrong.

    Jan Crawford – Adviser: Romney “shellshocked” by loss CBS 8 Nov 12

    Consider that for a moment, their whole campaign strategy, all of their internal polling, every day-to-day decision made in a billion dollar campaign was founded on “assessments” that they simply pulled out of their collective asses.  And they were wrong.  Holy crap.

    Imagine if their repeated boasts about their clumsy, wasteful, ineffective ground game, outsourced to church groups and con artists, was an insight into their managerial culture.  For pity’s sake, blue chip managerial excellence was their whole argument in favour of Romney’s candidacy.  No, sorry, that just isn’t good enough.  And this:


    …it was during that [2008 “Listening Tour”] that [Jeb] Bush uttered a vivid reality: We’re losing the demographics game, he said, and we won’t start re-winning until we change our playbook and actually try to attract women and minorities. […] Pretty simple.

    Yet here we are, four years later, and this is all coming as news to the Republican Party? I’m sorry. It’s not so much that I violently disagree with their prehistoric ideologies, which of course I do. It’s that they’re just too stupid to govern.

    P M Carpenter – So, guys, what’s new? P M Carpenter’s Commentary 8 Nov 12

    Having drunk deeply of the post-election analysis I can’t believe the wall-to-wall incompetence of the Romney campaign, along with all their demons, minions and fellow-travellers, isn’t a story.  And I’ll bet a lot of journalists and pundits are secretly grateful their endorsements, real or implied, will never be called to account.

  3. Strummerson

    …when we are clearly Death Eaters?   Which explains why we’re so nice to the mudbloods of course.

    I’d snort and laugh.  But this is the same tone employed by Allen West, who raised more money than any other candidate for The House.  And even those one would expect to be a tad more responsible, given positions of leadership, dabble in rhetoric that comes awful close.  When Paul Ryan accuses Obama and us of endangering Judeo-Christian values, and when they all wrap themselves in the Constitution and either implicitly or explicitly accuse us of disregarding it, there’s no place to go.  We are an evil threat.

    But this really is not new.  What Peter raises here is how these degraders of the concept of Liberty have seized upon Libertarianism, which once upon a time was the label that described fiscal conservatives who were socially liberal.  Libertarians, for most of my life, were the people who wanted lower taxes, legal abortion and drugs, and dismissed homophobia.

    But let me share an interchange I had just yesterday on a guitar blog with a self-described libertarian conservative:


    Him: of course black celebrities monolithically supported Obama; blacks are the most racist group in America, hating whites, Jews, Hispanics, and Asians with equal fervor because they’ve been programmed to believe that everybody else is benefiting to their detriment.

    ME: What percentage of blacks are racists? Or is it all of them? And where do you get your figures?

    Him: it’s prima facie obvious. just listen to their leaders spewing anti-Semitism, note the explosion of black youths’ “flash mob” attacks on defenseless whites, and look at the warfare between hispanics and blacks in areas where hispanics are moving in. in San Francisco, blacks have rioted to drive ethnically Chinese out of public housing because “it belongs to US.” and let’s not even talk about the rate of black-on-white crime compared to the converse.

    I dropped it there and then as others suggested he switch his avatar to a hood and be done with it.  But clearly this is someone who thinks “Birth of a Nation” was a documentary.

    The communism charge is just as historically ignorant or flawed…or manipulative.  It follows from an elision of socialism and communism, which itself follows from a total misrepresentation of socialism.  See, they define socialism according to level of commitment to government administered SOCIAL programs and services.  Socialism actually relates to government ownership and control of the means of production and/or regulation and potentially the elimination of private property.  Clearly, one can have a robust public sector with a high level of social programs without the government taking over all private industry, finance, and property.  

    But, to paraphrase someone in that thread further excerpted and linked below, try and tell them that a horse chestnut has nothing to do with a chestnut horse.  When I pasted in a dictionary definition of socialism from Merriam Webster, I received this response:

    And to all those getting hung up on dictionary definitions: you’re being fooled. I know you won’t believe it, but you are.

    When the moderator stepped in to try to calm things down, asking if we could simply stop for the day, he received this response from our bold and stalwart opponent of socialism and of Black on White racism:

    no. the two ideologies are mutually exclusive and cannot coexist. to compromise with evil is to endorse evil.

    If you want, you can read the whole thread here: http://gretschpages.com/forum/…

    BUT, and this is a big but, we cannot simply assume that these voices represent the totality of GOP voters.  It is absolutely incumbent upon us to continue to be reasonable in the face of unreasonableness.  We must not mirror the worst among them, or we will feed their divisive aims.  We must posit, as an act of faith, that among them are people who are simply scared and manipulated, misinformed, or committed to principles they hold dear that are not in and of themselves toxic, but who are deeply frustrated.  Imagine the best among them and reach out.

    As for libertarianism, I’d point to Ron Paul, but his newsletters exposed during the primary suggest that the racism and xenophobia of contemporary libertarians have significant antecedents.

  4. DeniseVelez

    a serious, though hyperbolic statement by this Dondero person, I would up chortling


    Starting early this morning, I am going to un-friend every single individual on Facebook who voted for Obama, or I even suspect may have Democrat leanings. I will do the same in person. All family and friends, even close family and friends, who I know to be Democrats are hereby dead to me. I vow never to speak to them again for the rest of my life, or have any communications with them. They are in short, the enemies of liberty. They deserve nothing less than hatred and utter contempt.

    I strongly urge all other libertarians to do the same. Are you married to someone who voted for Obama, have a girlfriend who voted ‘O’. Divorce them. Break up with them without haste. Vow not to attend family functions, Thanksgiving dinner or Christmas for example, if there will be any family members in attendance who are Democrats

    If he is serious, and if his cadre follow his example, think how lucky all those wives, girlfriends and family will be to have such loathsome creatures remove themselves from intimate circles and relationships.  

    Too bad he didn’t also vow to find a ship to take him into exile to Antartica.  

  6. Peter Jukes

    Lee Atwater in 1981, on how to win the racist vote without appearing racist

    You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”-that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites…. “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

    http://www.thenation.com/artic…

  7. fogiv

    It seems to me, in contemplating the history of the past two years,that all the people of our country, North, South, East, and West, have been undergoing a salutary political schooling, learning lessons which might have been acquired from the experience of other people; but we had all become so wise in our own conceit that we would only learn by actual experience of our own. The people even of small and unimportant localities, North as well as South, had reasoned themselves into the belief that their opinions were superior to the aggregated interest of the whole nation. Half our territorial nation rebelled, on a doctrine of secession that they themselves now scout; and a real numerical majority actually believed that a little State was endowed with such sovereignty that it could defeat the policy of the great whole. I think the present war has exploded that notion, and were this war to cease now, the experience gained, though dear, would be worth the expense.

    –William Tecumseh Sherman, General of the Army of the United States (postbellum)

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