I've decided that American politics is now hopeless. In the '90's I hoped that the Libertarian Party could succeed the Republicans or Democrats as a real electoral alternative. That didn't happen, and, considering what the Libertarian Party is like, I'm beginning doubt that this is either possible or even desirable. My objections to all three of these parties are as follows.
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The Libertarian Party is the only modern political party within shouting distance of the principles of the Founders of the United States of America. Economist Walter Williams once said something like this while guest hosting for the Rush Limbaugh show. Come to think of it, I haven't noticed him guest hosting there lately. Yet Walter himself suffers from some of the problems evident in the Libertarian Party. The late R.W. Bradford, founder of Liberty magazine, one of the premier libertarian publications, nevertheless said that the Libertarian Party was doomed to be the marginized vehicle of followers of Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard. This is even worse than it sounds, since many properly orthodox Randite "Objectivists" reject the Party, as did Rand, as having "stolen" her ideas. Thus, the Party cannot benefit from the whole Randite constituency.
It to hard to bring myself to vote for anyone else, but I have come to agree with Bradford. There are four areas where the Party may be hopeless. It tends to be ideologically dominated by (1) isolationists, (2) anarchists, (3) gold bugs, (4) conspiracy theorists, and, curiously like Walter Williams himself, (5) defenders of Confederate Secession. These had been a problem for me ever since I joined the Party, but it was brought home in 2008. I had run for office as a Libertarian seven times -- four times for California State Assembly, 1994, 1996, 1998, & 2000, and three times for Congress, 2002, 2004, & 2006. In 2008, the LA Country election organizer sent out an e-mail to solicit candidates for the next election, calling for good "anti-war" Party members. Although no sensible person is gratuitously in favor of war, I had to tell him that I was not against the current war, involving Terrorism, in the way that he expected. He thought I might want to run for a State office, where the war might not be an issue, but I declined that also.
For me, enough is enough. It may be often said that the United States should not be the world's policeman. Unfortunately, somebody needs to be the world's policeman, and that task tends to fall on the country with the greatest geopolitical reach. That used to be Britain. Now it is the United States. If nothing else, the Somali pirates tell the tale. For a while, libertarian anarchists were celebrating the "success" of Somalia as a country without a government. In fact, what we got was the reductio ad absurdum, not just of that argument, but of anarchism in general. The bad guys organize. Then they do bad things. To stop them, you need at least comparably organized force. When that force gets big enough and organized enough, with laws and a judicial system, then it is a government. The organization that used to police the seas was the Royal Navy. Now there are NATO ships off Somalia, but even when they capture pirates, they don't know quite what to do with them. The Royal Navy, which used to hang pirates on the spot, now sometimes releases them (like other NATO forces), for fear of violating their human rights. This is laughable, contemptible, and dangerous. It is the result of foolish and preposterous scruples that put the innocent at risk by confusing the traditional laws of war with those of civil justice. We see something similar in Afghanistan, where, so reports have it, captured members of the Tâlibân are now being read their Miranda Rights. This is a level of stupidity now to lay at the feet of the Democrats, but, of course, the Libertarian Party doesn't want American troups there at all. Better to let the Jihadists go ahead and plan more terrorists attacks against us -- after all, many Libertarians agree with the Left that the U.S. invited and deserved the attacks on 9/11. Harry Browne, whom I was happy to vote for for President more than once, said something of the sort immediately after the event. This didn't quite make me a "9/11 Republican," but it seriously turned me off about Browne. To the Left, of course, our self-defense and policing of pirates is "imperialism" -- by which they cannot mean something like the Râj, since the United States does not wish to conquer and rule countries as did the European colonial powers, but they must think of it that way anyway, since they can only understand political events in terms of their Marxist-Leninist paradigm. A capitalist country engaging in self-defense, or the defense of civilization, is, by definition, "imperialist."
The gold bugs are back thanks to the recession and a decline in the dollar. With the massive credit collapse of the housing bubble, the Federal Reserve has needed to create money to prevent a deflation. Of course, with the Tax & Spend Democrats back, they want more money just so they can flood the economy with their spending. They probably still believe that inflation causes economic growth (the "Phillip's Curve" popular during the stagflation of the '70's). By creating too much money, perhaps for this political purpose, the Federal Reserve can create an inflation. The gold bugs, however, don't like the Federal Reserve at all (it is part of the Conspiracy) and don't believe in the creation of money to prevent deflation. Indeed, the Federal Reserve is widely accused, and not just by gold bugs, of helping to create the housing bubble with low interest rates. In all of this, however, many have failed to remember what happened to Japan during the '90's. Interest rates there were effectively zero, but the economy stagnated and actually still experienced deflation. The decline of the dollar can be the result of loss of confidence overseas in the U.S. economy. If dollars held outside the country are dumped into circulation, this can also contribute to inflation. Thus, whether the Federal Reserve needs to create money or not simply depends on what we see happen to prices.
What is true is that most people don't know or understand the workings of the Federal Reserve, or of any central bank. The interest rate we hear the most about, the "Federal Funds Rate," actually is the interest that member banks of the Federal Reserve System charge each other. This doesn't create any new money. The "Discount Rate," is what the Federal Reserve charges to create money and loan it directly to banks. My understanding, however, is that banks don't do this very much. The principal money creating activity of the Federal Reserve is to issue new money to buy assets for itself, including Treasury Bonds, on the open market. (The Treasury itself cannot create money.) The Japanese apparently were not doing enough of this. They were trying to generate economic activity with government "stimulus" spending. Republicans and, especially, Democrats have mostly failed to notice that multiple attempts in that direction didn't do any good. And we know why. As Walter Williams himself has said, taking water out of the deep end of a swimming pool and putting in the shallow end does not make the shallow end deeper. Thus, government "stimulus" spending must involve money either borrowed, taxed, or created, and that will come out of the general capital of the economy (or by devaluing that capital in the case of inflation), removing it from economic investments that are usually more productive than when politicians buy votes with pork-barrel projects. Thus, it is widely understood that the fraudulent stimulus ("porkulus") bill begun under George Bush and rushed through (as urgently needed) under Barack Obama has not and will not make much difference (except negatively) for the economy. It is a political show designed to get votes.
The Federal Reserve also feeds into the world of the conspiracy theorists. The tragedy of the conspiracy worldview is that it directs attention away from the obvious and open activities of the enemies of freedom and Constitutional government. American politics is still simply the playing out the consequences of the New Deal destroying the Constitution. The heirs of the New Deal do not believe in a limited government of enumerated powers. In a way, it doesn't matter whatever else they believe in, whether that is the War on Drugs or Nationalized Health Care, or why. The Nation will not be back on course until those sorts of things are recognized as contrary, and properly so, to the letter and the spirit of the Constitution. Yet this doesn't get said nearly enough, or clearly enough in public discourse. The conspiracy theorists are worried about the Rockefellers or why 9/11 is an inside job, and they don't seem to realize that they are themselves contributing to the smoke-screen by which the truth is obscured to the American people. They are as much part of the problem as any obvious statist like Jay Rockefeller.
When Andre Marrou was the Libertarian candidate for President in 1992, a reporter asked him what the program of the Libertarian Party was. He answered, "the restoration of Constitutional government." That was a good answer and a good idea, but unfortunately it has never been the program of the Libertarian Party. The "principle" upon which the Party is founded, and to which members have been expected to subscribe in the "Pledge," is a utopian notion that government can be built out of purely voluntary relationships. Thus, the Party does not believe in things like taxes or eminent domain, or even, really, national armed forces. Since all these things, and more, are recognized in the Constitution, one cannot say that the Libertarian Party has any particular interest or commitment to the principles or historical considerations of Constitutional government. This means that the philosophical inspirations and touchstones for the movement are not primarily Locke, Jefferson, Madison, or even F.A. Hayek, but, as R.W. Bradford said, Rand and Rothbard.
The idiosyncrasy and perversity of this ideology emerges with some regularity, but it is particularly conspicuous when the Civil War comes up. One thus commonly finds libertarians, like Walter Williams again, holding that the Southern States had a perfect right to leave the Union, that the Civil War was an act of tyranny, and that the 600,000+ deaths of the War made Abraham Lincoln one of the great mass murderers of history (a favorite accusation of paleoconservative columnist Joseph Sobran). There is a certain logic to this, if one begins with the premise that government is a kind of "contract at will" from which any party can exit at any time for any reason. This, however, is not quite what the Declaration of Independence says:
Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes; and accordingly all Experience hath shewn, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing that Forms to which they are accustomed.
So exactly what "Evils" were being suffered by the Southern States that moved them to leave the Union? Well, the threat of the Abolition of Slavery. As Ulysses S. Grant said, this in fact was "one of the worse causes ever." The evils were being practiced by the Slave States, not suffered by them; and they wished to leave the Union in order to continue practicing their evils without opposition. This being the case, the libertarian arguments in relation to Southern Secession try to ignore slavery in favor of other motives, like protective tariffs, for secession. I have examined this sort of thing elsewhere. The idea is bogus, and has been well refuted by a recent book, What This Cruel War Was Over, Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War, by Chandra Manning [Knopf, 2007]. Everyone, at the time, knew that the War was about slavery. I did not know there even were Regimental newspapers in the Civil War armies, but there were; and Manning has found that in speaking of the reasons for the War, they speak of slavery, not tariffs (as do private letters, newspapers, etc. etc.). And, of course, Lincoln would not have won the election in 1860 if the Democratic Party had not split in three parts and run three candidates (Northern, Southern Unionist, & Southern Secessionist). The split was over slavery (as the Whig Party had split), not over tariffs.
Although Lincoln was an heir to Whigs and Federalists, and the defeat of secession did remove one of the threats that helped keep the Federal Government within its Constitutional limitations, the Civil War involved a noble cause and, especially through the Civil War Amendments (13th, 14th, & 15th), improved the Constitution. Focusing on the supposed evils of the Union cause, and ignoring that the cause was to abolish one of the greatest evils in history, slavery, not only conveys a message of perversity and moral confusion but, again, like the conspiracy theories, distracts attention from its proper focus, namely the outright destruction of Constutional government in letter and spirit by the New Deal. Franklin Roosevelt, despite building the Jefferson Memorial and putting Jefferson on the nickel, completely overthrew the Jeffersonian understanding of American government -- replacing it with the ideas, like unlimited Federal spending, that had been advocated by Jefferson's greatest enemy, the Federalist Alexander Hamilton. The New Deal undid the Jeffersonian revolution of 1800 and lodged a cancer in American government. The disease has grown steadily ever since.
One can spend a lot of time with libertarians and never hear much about conflict between Jeffersonians and Hamiltonians in American history. They are far beyond that in the utopian stratosphere. The result is waste and misdirection and, in terms of the policies offered (e.g. abolishing taxes), an impression that one is dealing with crackpots. I just wish that the Republicans and Democrats had something better to offer. They don't.
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The modern Republicans lack the courage of their (presumed and sometimes expressed) convictions. They usually praise the New Deal and make no real effort to restore Constitutional government. This has effectively made them co-dependents and enablers for the Democrats. Ronald Reagan at least promised to abolish the Department of Education, but then didn't, and didn't even seem to try very hard to do so. George W. Bush even vastly expanded the power and funding of the Department in his "No Child Left Behind" act. The complaint of the Democrats, of course, was that the Department still didn't get enough power or funding (nothing, to be sure, will ever been enough), while at the same time the act made some moves towards requiring competent teachers -- anathema to the Teachers Unions. But it is local control and educational choice (vouchers, etc.) that will keep the schools honest, not ultra vires Federal control.
This gives us the Republican dilemma in a nutshell. Rather than be accused of not caring about education, or children, or poverty, or the environment, Republicans have conceded the principle to the Democrats that all these things are proper concerns of the Federal Government. Beginning with such a compromise, the Republicans hope that their good faith will be recognized, while they try to restrain the growth of this constantly bigger and more tyrannical Leviathan. Of course, the Democrats never recognize any good faith in Republicans, and their rhetoric never acknowledges that the Republicans have been compromising with them step by step for decades. The very idea that the New Deal was a mistake, a failure, and a project of pure tyranny has thus been left behind in respectable public discourse since the early '50's. The greatest successes of modern Conservatism, the election of Reagan in 1980 and the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994, did not alter that in the slightest. George W. Bush exemplified the thanklessness and pointlessness of this approach, drawing nothing but bile from the Democrats and bien pensants, even while leaving office in the very act of promoting the absurd "stimulus" spending and the government nationalization of businesses that the Democrats have been happy to pursue with all their might since. George W. Bush thus made it possible for Newsweek magazine to announce, with a banner headline, "We Are All Socialists Now."
On 9 September 2009, the official Republican response to Barack Obama's speech to Congress promoting the fraudulent health care "reform" advanced by the Democrats contained the sort of fatal compromise that is all too typical of them. Part of the Republican proposal for "reform" includes the requirement that insurance companies accept people who have "preexisting conditions," i.e. if you are already sick, with no insurance, an insurance company will be required to insure you anyway and pay for the treatment of the problem you already have. Well, if you don't need to buy insurance until you get sick, then why bother buying it beforehand? Indeed. There is then no incentive to spend money on medical "insurance" until you need medical care. That erases the very meaning of insurance, which is a practice to pool risk, i.e. a group of people who may be subject to some harm pay enough so that it will cover those who will suffer that harm. But if risk is not pooled, and everyone waits to buy "insurance" until they need treatment or compensation, the actual cost for the "insurance" will be no less than if the "insurance" didn't exist. Thus, as the Democrats understand all too well, if medical "insurance" must cover preexisting conditions, then everyone must be required to buy insurance -- which is indeed part of the Democrat's health care "reform." The Republicans, by wanting to sound nice, by requiring coverage of preexisting conditions, play into the hands of the Democrats, since, if the Republican "reform" is accepted, it will cause skyrocketing insurance rates, or drive companies right out of the insurance business -- leaving the smiling Democrats with their socialized "public option" to come to the rescue. Good work. Rather than explain why preexisting conditions cannot be covered by insurance, let alone why this has nothing to do with the Constitutional powers of the Federal Government, Republicans go along, again, to get along.
It is no surprise then that we see a "ratchet effect" in the growth of government and of socialism. Thus, the Democrats push through something, often with Republican support, that increases the power, spending, and taxing of the government (at any level). The results of this begin to alarm the voters, so Republicans are returned to power. They make a few changes and slow the growth of government power, taxing, and spending, but they really never roll things back to where they were. The "ratchet" of Republican timidity prevents fully undoing the damage caused by the Democrats. As with recent Republican Congresses (2001-2007), what we consequently get is "Democrat lite," which slowly begins to produce many of the same effects already experienced from Democrat policies. Republican spending began to go out of control. So where do the voters turn? The Democrats look like the only alternative. But if Republican spending looked bad, wait till the Democrats get their chance, especially after the frustration of years out of power. So the Republicans may eventually return to control; but will they undo all the new damage? Almost certainly not. They might look mean -- although the Democrats will call them that anyway.
This all began with Dwight D. Eisenhower. Eisenhower was in general a good President, and he was loathed by right thinking Democrats, but he began the Republican slide into fatal compromises. He announced that he would not roll back the New Deal. He was able in practice to defuse its worst effects for a while, but he left in place the mythology that the New Deal had been successful and that the changes it introduced into the Constitutional theory and practice of American government were good and useful. The time bomb that Eisenhower thus allowed to tick away later exploded in the '60's, when the worthy cause of enforcing the civil rights embodied in the 14th and 15th Amendments became the means of eliminating civil rights in the on-going totalitarian project of the Democrats. I have examined the details of this elsewhere.
But it is possible that Eisenhower did no greater damage than when he decided that Joseph McCarthy was getting to be too much trouble. Indeed, the mythology of the New Deal pales in comparison to the lies and misrepresenations that have grown up around McCarthy. The way history is now presented, one might miss that there were anti-Communist Democrats like John Kennedy, or that Robert Kennedy had been a lawyer for McCarthy, made McCarthy the godfather of his eldest child (Kathleen Kennedy Townsend), and quietly attended McCarthy's funeral. Instead, Joe McCarthy is one of the most reviled men in history -- far worse than his distant adversary Joe Stalin, who was busily engaged in mass murder and, as we now know, bestowing his permission and blessing on the North Korean invasion of the South in 1950. Yet all McCarthy did, in the whole course of his brief career in the spotlight (1950-1954), was to complain about Communists and security threats in the State Department, in the Army, and in some other Federal programs -- for instance, why Communist authors were prominently featured in American Information Libraries overseas. And he was quite right about all of it, as we now know both from declassified American documents and from the access to Soviet records that historians briefly had in the 1990's.
McCarthy was popular and helped Eisenhower get elected in 1952. When he became a public figure in 1950, he exercised no power in the Democratically controlled Congress. The Democrats kept investigating and smearing him because of his (true) accusations about the State Department. With the Republicans gaining control of the Senate in 1953, McCarthy had a little more than a year to do actual investigations -- before Einsenhower decided (in a now popular turn of phrase) to throw him under the bus. Yet part of the common mythology about McCarthy is that somehow for years the Senator had been in charge of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, that he was responsible for the blacklisting of Communists in Hollywood, and that "McCarthism" consisted of falsely accusing people of being Communists in order to silence liberalism. None of this was true, and even the substance of the Censure of McCarthy in 1954 was simply for having been rude to members of the previous Congress -- a sanction unprecedented in American history. No other charges against him could be maintained to any standard liable to win a vote in the Senate, even among Democrats.
Yet now everyone "knows" that the Censure was for persecuting innocent people with false charges, especially those gifted and honest (Communists) in Hollywood. On a recent anniversary of the censure vote, an anchor on Fox News (Shepard Smith), supposedly the cat's paw of Conservativism, announced that McCarthy had "ruined the lives of hundreds of people". This was hardly possible in the brief period when McCarthy had any real power [note]. A recent McCarthy scholar enjoys statements like this at his lectures, because he then asks the audience, "Name one." Respondents, if they can name anyone, characteristically name people who had nothing to do with McCarthy (e.g. the Communist Dalton Trumbo) or people who, from available evidence, almost certainly actually were Communists (e.g. Annie Lee Moss). The iconic American writer Dashiell Hammett, who was quite openly a Communist, did appear before McCarthy's committee (as a Communist author) but avoided trouble by taking the Fifth Amendment -- he had previously gone to jail for simply refusing to answer questions of the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
Having laid the groundwork for this mythology, we might ask what benefit Einsenhower derived from it. Well, the Democrats won Congress back in 1954 and kept control of all or half of it for the next 40 years. And children are taught in American schools that to be a dissimulating and treasonous agent of totalitarian tyranny and mass murder -- which is what members of the Communist Party were -- is morally laudable and politcally exemplary. It is perhaps no surprise then that in 2009, twenty years after the collapse of Communism, socialist economics and totalitarian politics are more threatening and popular in the United States than ever. And after the eloquence of Ronald Reagan, the "Great Communicator," the Republicans have been unable to provide better Presidents than the inarticulate and uninspiring two Bushes -- who both began their Presidencies with oblique swipes at Reagan (the "kinder and gentler nation" and "compassionate conservatism") and who governed through constant (thankless) compromises with Democrats. The Bushes both proved to be the kind of "Country Club" Republicans, going along out of good manners, that all too easily become RINO's, "Republicans in Name Only," and then perhaps, like the despicable Arlen Spector, open Big Government Democrats.
Every Republican defeat, as in 2008, results in advice from Democrats and RINO's that the Republicans have been too extreme and Conservative. General Colin Powell, an appealing person but politically inept, announced after the election that the American people wanted bigger government and higher taxes and, of course, the Republicans were running people who were too Conservative and ideological. This was a bizarre thing for him to say after the Republican Presidential candidate in 2008 was John McCain, a Senator who had been collaborating with Democrats and thumbing his nose at Conservatives for years. McCain was supposedly just the kind of Republican that Democrats could vote for. But, of course, they didn't. To be the Republican endorsed by the New York Times was all part of a con by the Democrats. McCain was so disliked by Conservatives that when Arlen Spector jumped parties, Rush Limbaugh exclaimed, "Take McCain (and his daughter) with you!" McCain's daughter Meghan, as it happened, someone who had previously registered as an Independent, had joined Colin Powell with the "too Conservative" complaint -- making her a darling of the Media. Meanwhile, McCain accompanied Democrat Russell Feingold to the Supreme Court on 9/9/09 to defend their Campaign Finance "Reform" bill. The "McCain-Feingold" bill violates the First Amendment, and McCain still does not seem to understand that he has handed the Democrats something they want more than anything: the ability to silence political opposition.
Not only do Republicans often lack the courage of their convictions, but they are often so disloyal that their collaboration with Democrats serves to directly maintain Democrat power. Stunning examples of this (apart from the obvious, like Colin Powell and former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan endorsing Barack Obama -- as Riordan had previously endorsed Democrat U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein) have occurred in California. In 1994 Republicans gained a bare majority in the California State Assembly. Nevertheless, the Democrat Speaker, Willie Brown, held onto his position by suborning one Republican after an another, three in all, to vote for him. As the disloyal Republican would lose a recall election, Brown would move on to the next one. This continued almost all the way to the next general election in 1996, when the Republicans lost their majority anyway (and Brown was term-limited out). Democrats are very rarely so disloyal, and it is still hard to believe that these Republicans could have been so, especially in the face of certain electoral suicide. It is still not clear what incentives or threats were offered to them, or what they thought they were doing. It almost looks like they were Democrat sleeper agents who ran as Republicans just for such an eventuality as this.
Nevertheless, other examples of the sort have happened again in 2009. Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, having given up on early efforts at reform, began collaborating with the Democrats on spending and taxing. As spending went up, Democrat policies were also wrecking the economy, which meant that tax revenues have sunk steadily. With a two-thirds rule in the State Assembly for tax increases, they were not going to get passed without some Republican votes. The Republicans caved in, evidently as the result of an deal where particular Republican Assemblymen agreed to take the heat as long as they retained the support of the Party. This then became public. 
With recall elections now in the works (as against Anthony Adams), the support of the Party may not be enough. Meanwhile, the betrayals by Schwarzenegger and the Party to the Democrat big government conspiracy led to a special election in May 2009, where the Governor and Legislature tried to get voters to agree on several bogus "reform" measures that would lock in tax increases. Voters slammed them down hard, resulting in whining editorials from liberal newspapers about how California voters don't know what is good for them. The whole experience, however, leaves the Republicans discredited and in disarray as a genuine Opposition to the Democrats.
More public and spectacular on the national scene has been the 2009 election in 23th Congressional District of New York. The moderate Republican incumbent was appointed to an office in the Obama Administration, so there was a special election to fill the seat. The New York Republican establishment, behind closed doors, decided to run State Assemblywoman Dede Scozzafava, whose voting record, according to the Wall Street Journal (11/2/2009), was "to the left of many Democrats." She was then endorsed by Newt Gingrich and other establishment Republicans; but the Conservative Party candidate, Doug Hoffman, was endorsed by Conservatives, like Sarah Palin. It soon became clear that Hoffman would split the Republican vote and Scozzafava could not win. She dropped out of the race. But did she endorse Hoffman? Oh no. She endorsed the Democrat! According to Rush Limbaugh, this exposes the RINO's for what they really are -- Democrats. Scozzafava has behaved exactly like a sleeper agent or a double agent for the Democrat Party. When the Democrats in Congress are ready to pass socialized medicine and other outrages, this is the most despicable stab-in-the-back disloyalty since Arlen Spector. 
Since the Democrat then won the seat (for the first time in a century, even while Republicans won the governor's races in New Jersey and Virginia), Scozzafava perhaps can hope for some kind of Red Star commendation from the Democrats for her disloyalty.
When Republicans do demostrate the courage of their convictions, they often choose the wrong convictions and, like Libertarians, adopt pointless, Quixotic causes. Thus, for a few years many Conservatives have decided that their ultimate enemy is Charles Darwin. Although many Americans have religious reasons for not believing in Evolution by Natural Selection, and they are natural Republican constituents, the cause makes them look like fools to anyone properly informed about science. Nor has it even been shown to be any help in actual elections. Nevertheless, Ben Stein, otherwise a charming, appealing, and smart guy, wasted millions of dollars to make a movie promoting the "Intelligent Design" anti-evolution hoax. Weren't there any leftist documentary makers to refute? Like, say, Michael Moore? Al Gore? Couldn't Ben have shown us what the medical system is really like in Canada, Britain, or, for heaven's sake, Cuba? Apparently not.
Despite this foolishness, the religious and socially conservative side of the Republican Party, although demonized by Democrats as the "religious Right," appeals to many Democrat voters. There was an astonishing demonstration of this in the 2008 election. The Democrats won California by a landslide at both State and National levels, yet Proposition 8, which overturned the California Supreme Court's establishment of gay marriage, won with some ease. And its margin of victory was largely due to the black vote, which otherwise went for Barack Obama by 96%. The next day, demonstrating gay activists were actually using the "N" word against black bystanders -- before activist leaders wisely directed everyone to attack Mormons instead. Something of the sortwith gay marriage had happened a while back in Hawaii, which has been more or less a One Party State for the Democrats. The Hawaii Supreme Court instituted gay marriage, but then they were overturned by popular vote with a Constitutional Amendment.
I have little sympathy for the causes of social conservatives, except where they object to efforts to silence religious expression in public spaces, or to the public funding of abortion. Otherwise, I might even vote for Democrats, as I used to before 1992, on issues like abortion (privately funded), gay marriage, drug legalization, prostitution, pornography, etc. Indeed, although I respect pro-life arguments, it has annoyed me to find pro-lifers in the Liberatarian Party. I think it is appropriate that Ron Paul, the libertarian Republican Congressman, who is against abortion, is now in fact a Republican. However, I think that there is actually enough public support for social convervative causes, even among hard core Democrat constituencies, like black and Hispanic voters, that the Republicans are not really at a disadvantage with them on these issues. In other words, the Republicans do not fail with such voters (as they do with me) because of their social conservatism. Republicans fail with such voters because they are unable to properly articulate the truth about economics, government, and liberty, where the collectivist Democrats are only persuasive through sophistry, ignorance, and lies. I think the Republicans hope that they can win these Democrat voters with a socially conservative message -- and that is possible (it has won a few black social conservatives, like Alan Keyes or Armstrong Williams) -- but it looks more like these voters cannot be won over as long as they believe leftist Democrat propaganda on economics, civil rights, and government. That is just where Republican politicians, since Reagan, have done the worst job getting out their message. The best that can be said for the tongue-tied, unprincipled, and often feckless Bushes is that, at any rate, they were still better than Democrats. The "hog wild" spending of the Republican Congress, so outrageous and disillusioning at the time, suddenly looks like small potatoes now that the Democrats have gotten going. Never have we heard so much so quickly about "trillions" of dollars.
In one key area the social conservatism of Republicans undermines a principle that otherwise should be a matter of prime commitment for them. The issue concerns the drug laws. All Federal laws prohibiting certain drugs are unconstitutional. This used to be well understood. When Congress wanted to prohibit opium in 1913 or marijuana and cocaine in the 1930's, they wrote the bills as tax laws (Catch 22 laws where it was impossible to legally pay the tax -- laws whose dishonesty raises a different question), since it was universally believed that the Federal Government did not have the authority to simply prohibit some kind of drug. The Supreme Court had ruled the opium law Constitutional on the grounds that it was a tax law. The prohibition of alcohol was effected by a Constitutional Amendment (the 18th, repealed by the 21st Amendment). Nevertheless, by the 1960's, the use of the Commerce Clause to regulate all activities that might "affect" commerce, led to the idea that the Federal Government had the authority to pass laws about anything -- since anything could be construed to "affect" commerce in some way. This was actually the end of Constitutional Government, since it meant that the Federal Government was no longer a government of limited and enumerated powers but a government of absolute and unlimited powers.
Republicans were therefore faced with the unenviable choice between Constitutional Government and their own conservative, paterialistic desire, so clear with alcohol Prohibition, to protect people from their own vices. Their choice, of course, has almost universally been to go along, as in so many other things, with the Democrats, scrap the Constitution, and take credit for drug prohibition. Some conservatives, like William Bennett, have even made the absurd argument that alcohol Prohibition was actually successful. Since much of the public, thanks to years of propaganda from the Democrats and their subsidiaries, public education, the press, and the intelligentsia, no longer has much understanding or sympathy for the principles of limited government, the Republicans may actually be taking the more politically popular position. Indulging their socially conservative sympathies and constituents, however, means that Republicans, in all too typical a fashion, have abandoned any principled support of Constitutional Government. In 1996, Republican Presidential candidate Bob Dole got the idea to wave a copy of the 10th Amendment around at campaign appearances, indicating his support of the principle of a limited Federal Government. Unfortunately, this was about the first time that such a principle seemed to have occurred to him, since there was little he could point to in his legislative career that would testify to any awareness of it. In its own way, this was the perfect Republican moment, summing up their abandonment of Constitutional principle, their opportunistic me-to-ism of going along with the tyranny of the Democrats, and their (unwelcome to me) social conservatism.
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The Democrats are in a rage for socialism [note]. The degree of their frenzy seems to be owed in equal parts to (1) a level of self-righteousness that by comparison would make Christian fundamentalists look like libertines ready for the Playboy Mansion, and (2) simple and pure lust for power. Since the latter is a moral failing that Democrats like to charge their opponents with, part of their rage looks like a psychological defensiveness that probably reflects their sense of their own bad faith and dishonesty, whether they are consciously aware of it or not. Bad faith is evident, for instance, in the way they carefully avoid admitting that they are socialists. They know that people are aware of the meaning of socialism -- the ownership and control of everything by the government -- and that Americans especially have an immediate and visceral antipathy to that. Democrats think that if they talk about freedom (while promising free stuff) while in fact creating tyranny, they will be able to deceive enough people to get away with it. They have, indeed, been doing rather well with that strategy. And they have learned that it is possible to lie in the face of overwhelming evidence and still avoid exposure. Thus, after the collapse of the mortgage and housing bubble, Congressman Barney Frank, confronted with videotape of he himself saying earlier that Federal mortgage lenders Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac were financially sound, and that only enemies of poor people and minorities were calling their financial health into question, nevertheless simply denied, in a bald-faced lie, that he had ever said any such thing. In terms of the response of his supporters and the public, it looks like he can get away with such absurd denials. But his defensiveness is obvious: at a public meeting, where a student simply asked Frank if he accepted any responsibility at all for the mortgage collapse, Frank, rather than just answering "yes" (the truth) or "no" (the lie), immediately began verbally attacking the student -- as though the poor fellow were an paid agent of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy. Nevertheless, we immediately know the Democrats for what they are when they use one of the code-words that signal their orthodoxy to the faithful. Democrats don't need to say "socialism" when they can say "social justice" (or, even better, "economic justice" or "economic democracy"), and the insiders know what that means.
After outright transpartent lies, we get the strategy of statements that are simply preposterous, but are presented in all seriousness and are apparently swallowed by loyalist and believers. A good example we see in the Wall Street Journal:
For a laugh-out-loud moment on all of this, we recommend yesterday's performance by New York Senator Chuck Schumer on NBC's "Meet the Press." Mr. Schumer declared that "Barack Obama and we Democrats -- this is counterintuitive but true -- are really trying to get a handle on balancing the budget and we're making real efforts to do it." Counterintuitive? He said this four days after Senate Democrats lost a vote to add $250 billion to the deficit for doctor payments without any compensating spending cuts. ["The Spending Rolls On," 10/26/2009]
The preposterous thing here is that any major Democrats, especially "Chucky" Schumer, worry in the least about balancing the budget. The only reason they ever complained about Republican spending or deficits is that they wanted to sucker people into putting them in power so they can have even greater spending and deficits. The Democrat explanation for all their failed programs is always that they didn't spend enough -- the programs were not "fully funded." Since their spending will never make their programs successful, they will, by necessity, always need greater spending. If they ever worry about paying for this, they only think about raising taxes. Indeed, when it was pointed out to Barack Obama by a reporter that revenue could be increased by cutting taxing, candidate Obama responded that "fairness" was more important than revenue. Thus, although the stock Democrat response is to deny that cutting taxes increases revenue (although one of the best examples is when Lyndon Johnson, a Democrat, did it), Obama incautiously revealed, as he has done more than once, his real agenda -- attack wealth, regardless of the damage it may do to all. Revenues may fall, unemployment may soar, the Nation may be impoverished; but the government will prosper.
A favorite rhetorical strategy of the Democrats, as with the mortgage bubble, is to introduce a policy or program and then, when it goes bad, act as though they had never done anything and/or that their program has nothing to do with what went wrong. This strategy goes back to the Depression, when the recession created by the collapse of the Stock Market, which was recovering by 1930 (unemployment was back down to 6%), was turned into a Depression by the Smoot-Hawley Tariff bill and then when the Federal Reserve allowed the banking system to collapse. This was actually the fault of Herbert Hoover and the directors of the Federal Reserve System. However, the Democrats wanted to blame it on "speculators" and on the banks themselves. Thus, when FDR came to power, what was wrong was misdiagnosed and policies were implemented, usually following in Hoover's footsteps, that prolonged the Depression through the rest of the decade. This failure is what the Democrats have never wanted to admit, and still will not admit. Roosevelt kept attacking business and finance until he wanted to put the country on a war footing and needed industry to manufacture war materiel. Then the anti-business rhetoric stopped and the crippling policies moderated.
In the 2008-2009 collapse of the housing mortgage bubble, we get the same attacks on "speculators," finance, and banks, with calls for greater regulation of the credit and banking markets. What the Democrats leave out is that banks were threatened by regulators (and Democrats) that if they did not make loans to underqualified borrowers, they would be subject to regulatory and legal sanctions. Lenders were thus coerced into making loans they would not have done otherwise. They would be accused of racial discrimination if the statistics did not show the right "diversity" balance in their lending, with all the evils of legal prosecution and bad publicity falling on them. There was a remedy for this, which was for lenders to pass on the risky mortgages, often packaging them with other securities to conceal or balance the liability. These became "toxic assets," which could be passed around like hot potatoes. Insurance companies also tried to step in to protect the asset holders in case of default. However, the risk was badly calculated, and when the bubble finally burst, banks, brokers, and insurance companies all took the hit. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Federally chartered corporations that had been encouraging the lending, while soaking up many of the assets, under the protection of Democrat politicians (like Barney Frank and Maxine Waters), simply collapsed and now have been directly taken over by the government. Unfortunately, the policies that got them in trouble in the first place, risky loans, have deliberately been continued, because all the (Democrat) political pressure has been to do so. We are therefore going to see a new credit bubble forming.
Another area where Democrat responsibility has been deflected is in medical care. Medicare (for the old) and Medicaid (for the poor) were begun by Lyndon Johnson, with very unrealistic expectations about their cost. Of course, in Basic Economics, one learns that demand explodes for anything desirable that is offered for free. So now the programs are quickly headed for bankruptcy, even as they now only reimburse part of recipients' medical expenses (for which they need "medi-gap" insurance), while also limiting the compensation that physicains will receive for what they do -- with the result that some physicians will not treat Medicare or Medicaid patients. In Canada, where some provinces (Quebec) have simply capped the income of physicians, they often take the rest of the year off once they have hit the cap. Thus, for the most obvious economic reasons, Medicare and Medicaid can limit their costs only by price fixing -- an economic practice that then necessarily produces shortages (as, indeed, in Canada). But now enter the Modern Democrat, Barack Obama, whose argument for socialized, government run medicine is that it will reduce costs! Only in a country with a general ignorance of economics and history (the fruit of Democrat "education") could anyone actually get away with this. Indeed, I think most Americans already know that government ends up doing everything in the most wasteful and inefficient way, thanks to things like the dynamics of bureaucracies. People encounter this all too often in their own dealings with the government. The idea is simply preposterous, even if one was not aware of the dismal experience with Medicare.
As the public has become alarmed about the Administration's intentions in the summer of 2009, and citizens have expressed outrage at "Town Meetings" called by Congressmen in their home districts, the response of Democrats has been curious. Their charge is that the angry citizens have been organized and planted by Republicans and Right Wing -- even Neo-Nazi -- groups. The irony and hypocrisy of this is stunning, although of a piece with the brazen arrogance of the Democrats. This is a President, after all, who is proud to have begun his career as a "Community Organizer," which means doing exactly what the Democrats are accusing the Ring Wing of doing now. Rush Limbaugh himself responded to these first accusations by saying, that even if the charges were true (which they weren't), "It's about damn time." The Democrats are the masters of the rent-a-mob, calling out often disruptive and violent protesters from organizations like the SEIU (the Service Employees Interantional Union) and ACORN (the "Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now," which once asked to be exempt from minimum wage laws because, duh, they wanted to hire more people than they would be able to otherwise). The conceit of the Democrats is always that their protestors, whom Obama has now explicitly called to mobilize and attend these public meetings (when Democrat politicians will still actually hold them), show the spontaneous Uprising of the People, while their opponents can only be paid mercenaries (as with Barbara Boxer charging that the anti-socialism protestors were "too well dressed" -- obviously suits from the drug companies or insurance companies). Now we hear that Union members ("goons"? "thugs"?) have been threatening and strong-arming citizens who show up at the public fora. Democrats simply cannot believe, or don't care, that their promotion of socialism will evoke a genuine viceral and spontaneous reaction from Americans. They are also absurdly and hypocritically shocked and outraged that people should portray Obama or the Democrats as Nazis or Fascists ("We can't allow this incivil discourse!"), when we heard no such cautions for all the years that George W. Bush was portrayed as as a Fascist, Nazi, or Adolf Hitler himself. The grotesque conceit seems be that, well, smearing Bush was true, while labeling Obama the same way is an intolerable misrepresenation, outside reasonable political speech! [note]
What has happened to the Democrats is that they have become the Party of Government, where all of their purposes are to promote the interests of Government, as opposed to the interests of citizens. You can spot this when Democrats say "We are the government," meaning that the interests of government and citizens cannot possibly diverge. But then we see the divergence in action when Democrat policy protects and expands the power and privileges of politicians, in the first place (hence their opposition to term limits, usually quite popular with voters), of public employees (hence the support of Public Employee and Teachers Unions for the Democrats), and of people dependent on the government -- hence Democrat support for welfare, protectionism, corporate welfare, and the other spawn of rent seeking (e.g. the Trial Lawyers). Democrats want us to think that only Republicans promote corporate welfare, but we have recently seen their participation in that form of corruption in the corporate bailouts of 2009 -- and they have all but institutionalized corporate welfare for the corn lobby in subsidies and mandates for ethanol (e.g. the Archer Daniels Midland Company). The logical goal of Democrat politics would be to put all business under the control of the government, a goal now achieved with General Motors, and to render all citizens into helpless peons who receive all goods and favors from politicians. Political enemies thus can be immediately deprived of jobs, housing, medical care, etc., as in the Soviet Union.
This danger was foreseen by John Locke:
But in Governments, where the Legislative is in one lasting Assembly always in being, or in one Man, as in Absolute Monarchies, there is danger still, that they will think themselves to have a distinct interest, from the rest of the Community; and so will be apt to increase their own Riches and Power, by taking, what they think fit, from the People. ["The Second Treatise, of Civil Government," in Two Treatises of Government, edited by Peter Laslett, Cambridge University Press, 1960, 1988, §138, boldface added]
"A distinct interest" is now the whole story of Democrat politics. It is thus not surprising that one of the brainstorms of Democrat politicians is the "full time" legislature. This was accomplished in California under Democrat Party boss Jesse Unruh (d.1987). The idea was to create a "professional" body of law-makers, who would then, of course, be all the better and wiser for it. Now, of course, California is close to financial collapse, hemorrhaging jobs and businesses, while Texas, where the legislature only meets for five months every two years, has a budget surplus, with more jobs created there in 2008 than in the whole rest of the country put together. Texas, in short, is America, while California is a France wanna-be.
After the lessons of history and economics, it is now impossible to be a socialist except out of ignorance or dishonesty. Deception, dissimulation, and dishonesty have been the bedrock of leftist politics for decades. If Communists in the '40's and '50's had publically admitted they were Communists, all the mythology of "red-baiting" and "witch hunts" would have evaporated. If Alger Hiss had admitted he was spying for the Communist Party and the Soviet Union, decades of anti-anti-Communist rhetoric never could have happened. If Barack Obama admitted that he wants a "single payer" government medical system, and that the "reform" of the Democrats is designed to drive insurance companies out of the medical insurance business, the debate over "reform" would be a lot clearer. Obama denies this is what he wants, but then, like Barney Frank, he is on audio and video telling audiences not along ago that this is exactly what he wants and intends to do. Thus, it is not enough for the Democrats to be dishonest. They must rely on the ignorance of the public to get away with it.
On the other hand, ignorance, unfortunately, is now the stock-in-trade of American education, at all levels -- as the Democrats and the lefist allies of the Democrats have seized the educational institutions -- from the worthless Schools of Education, to the accreditation agencies, to the professional societies (the Modern Language Association, the MLA, may be the worst), to the administrations and faculty of the schools themselves. The higher the education, the purer the Marxism and Leninism, although leftist anti-capitalism and anti-Americanism infuse all levels of education. One way this could happen is that most college students who go into education major in "education" rather than in any real disciplines. What they pick up otherwise is from the humanities, rather than the sciences, and they soon discover that courses, for instance, in English departments have little to do with literature and language and much to do, like Sociology and now History departments, with political propaganda.
It usually doesn't matter how good the Economics department in a college may be, students get their economics in the form of "English Department Marxism," from professors who have no real education in economics, and usually even no rigorous philosophical education in Marxism (but may be active in the MLA). They get it all secondhand from "Theory," a cheap pastiche of Marx, Nietzsche, deconstruction, and other nihilistic knock-offs. Marx and Nietzsche, although sharing few values in common, nevertheless make a heady combined brew where everything is analyzed and explained in terms of power. There is no truth, knowledge, goodness, etc., simply power -- as Lord Voldemort says, "There is no good and evil, there is only power, and those too weak to seek it" [Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, J.K. Rowling, Scholastic Inc., 1999, p.291]. The goal of leftist and Democrat politics then is to gain power by any means necessary.
As "tenured radicals" have come to dominate academia, the press, and the intelligentsia, a major conceit of leftist and Democrat politics is how smart they all are. In turn, the common theme of trendy humor and opinion is how stupid Republicans are, from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush. 
After the Democrats took Congress in 2006, however, the American public has had a good chance to see a lot of Democrat politicians in action. What seems obvious about the likes of Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Barbara Boxer, or Barney Frank, then, is that they are just idiots. They make George W. Bush look like Albert Einstein. They will say anything just because they want it to be true, however absurd or incoherent it may be [note]. Meanwhile, most academic leftists are unable to write intelligible sentences. They load them with a specialized jargon, in the tradition of Hegel and Marx, in a way that provides a substitute for any real thought, and they expect people to regard this as profound. Usually the public never hears examples of it, which is fine, since academics only need to impress other academics. But if one reads this stuff with the understanding that it is all about the promotion of naked power, its mysteries usually become obvious enough.
And when it comes to power, the Democrats know their hardball. This is where, to be sure, they make the Republicans look stupid. Everyone knows about Democrat political machines, whether historically in New York or Kansas City, or with a long tradition in Chicago; and many people know about the Democrats stealing elections, including the 1960 election, where Illinois and Texas went for John Kennedy just because Mayor Richard J. Daley of Chicago, and Duval County, Texas, cooked up enough votes to swing the States. (Richard M. Daley, J's son, has been Mayor of Chicago since 1989.) What is different now is the open and shameless way in which the Democrats have learned to do it. As with Barney Frank on the mortgage collapse, they've discovered that the more open and outrageous the lie, the better the chance they may have of brazening it out. It is an infantile attitude, but they have discovered its usefulness. This may have started in 2000. The election was close, and the outcome would be determined by Florida, where the vote itself was very close. The strategy was adopted of successive recounts. With each recount more Republican votes could be disqualified and more Democratic votes "discovered." This was done so openly that in one news report, the vote counter held up a ballot that had no vote for President and said it would be counted as a Democrat vote because the other votes were for Democrats. There was a furor that the computer card punch ballots were unfair because people didn't check whether the "chad," the small piece punched out, had actually come out and detached. The implication seemed to be that the Democrat voters, being stupider (the opposite of the usual conceit), were more strongly affected by this. The result, however, was that vote counters could make subjective judgments about votes that, obviously, the vote counting machines would not have done.
As the Florida Supreme Court was going to allow endless recounting in the whole State, contrary to all State and Federal law, the United States Supreme Court stepped in and stopped the farce. The Democrats, having brazened out their own attempt to steal the election, then began screaming that the Republicans had stolen the election. This went on for years -- even until today. Meanwhile, the Democrats have perfected their strategy and have now stolen two major elections. In 2004 the Republican Dino Rossi won the Governor's race in Washington State by a small margin. The Democrats then began endless recounts, especially in urban districts with Democrat officials, until the Democrat, Christine Gregoire, moved ahead and could be proclaimed the winner. The next case would be of greater national signifance. In 2008, Minnesota Republican Senator Norm Coleman won his race by 725 votes. After eight months of recounts and challenges, Democrat comedian Al Franken was credited with a victory by 312 votes. Perhaps an all too typical Republican, Coleman, instead of appealing to Federal Courts, conceded defeat, as Richard Nixon had in 1960. The result was firm Democrat control of the United States Senate, enabling them to pass socialized medicine, or whatever else they want, and override all opposition.
It is remarkable to me that people in a democracy would want to steal elections, but I have no doubt that the Democrats are willing to do this, as historically they often have. Sometimes self-righteousness and lust for power may not be enough to explain it. I am perfectly willing to consider the possibility that Supernatural Evil is involved, as in the N.I.C.E. ("National Institute for Coordinated Experiments") institution of C.S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength [1945]. Much of what the Democrats do looks like N.I.C.E., in both its rhetoric and its police state reality [note]. If I were a Christian, and if I thought that abortion or homosexuality were morally wrong, I think it would hard not be believe that Satan, as in Lewis' novel, was behind Democrat politics. The mix of lies, seduction, death, sterility, and corruption seems Satanic in its combination of fair face and vicious substance, hedonism and rot. As it is, self-righteousness and lust for power will have to suffice, and Thomas Jefferson understood the dynamic well enough:
Mankind soon learn to make interested uses of every right and power which they possess, or may assume. The public money and public liberty, intended to have been deposited with three branches of magistracy, but found inadvertently to be in the hands of one only [as in adminstrative law], will soon be discovered to be sources of wealth and dominion to those who hold them; distinguished, too, by this tempting circumstance, that they are the instrument, as well as the object of acquisition. With money we will get men, said Caesar, and with men we will get money. Nor should our assembly be deluded by the integrity of their own purposes, and conclude that these unlimited powers will never be abused, because themselves are not disposed to abuse them. They should look forward to a time, and that not a distant one, when a corruption in this, as in the country from which we derive our origin, will have seized the heads of government, and be spread by them through the body of the people; when they will purchase the voices of the people, and make them pay the price. Human nature is the same on every side of the Atlantic, and will be alike influenced by the same causes. The time to guard against corruption and tyranny, is before they shall have gotten hold of us. It is better to keep the wolf out of the fold, than to trust to drawing his teeth and claws after he shall have entered. [Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, 1784, boldface added].
Unfortunately, there is no modern politician with the wisdom of Jefferson, the wolves are among us, and the teeth and claws are in us. These are the Democrats, supposedly the heirs of Jefferson's own Party. It is all their project. The worst that can be said about the Republicans is that they have largely gone along with it and (since Reagan) have grossly failed to articulate the danger. The worst that can be said about the Libertarians is that they are off in a utopian Cloud-Cuckoo-Land, muttering about gold and the Confederacy, while Democrats and most Republicans urinate on the Constitution every day.
The result is that I don't know where the American people can turn. The Democrats are liable to get their way just because they are the most ruthless and shameless in the mix. Even if they drag down the economy into another Depression, they may still get away with it. FDR did, and we know that Obama is expected to provide a New New Deal. So we may be entering a very long night of decline, corruption, decay, and tyranny in American history. We will really know it when the Democrats commission a monument to Fidel Castro in Washington. I am sure, after the Congressional (Democrat) Black Caucus went to Cuba to praise and adore Castro early in 2009, and Representative Diane Watson recently made the statements below, that they already want to do it.
the Cuban health system?"