patrick stephens at psjs.net

Shawn has a good post up about libertarianism. Spurred by Ron Paul fiasco, Shawn cautions his readers to, “Beware the label libertarian. It has come to be a meaningless term that doesn’t tell you anything useful about the beliefs of an individual.”

While I wish that Shawn was correct, I’m afraid that may no longer be true. I used to call myself a libertarian. I was a member of the party. I ran for office as a Libertarian. I believe in liberty, reason, and responsibility. I wanted to believe that my compatriots felt the same way. I learned the hard way that far, far too many of them do not.

The movement — like the party with the same name — has long been a big tent group. In an effort to grow their political influence, the party and the movement grew to include the single-issue pot heads, the radical greens, petty socialists, moral relativists, conspiracy theorists, and, of course, all manner of racists and bigots. So saying libertarian didn’t mean very much.

The problem is that, like the massive, field-covering awnings that charismatic preachers use in their traveling revivals, the tent is too big. There are too many people in the back who can’t hear the ravings of the man up front, and too many up front who are complicit in the farce. As it stands now, if you enter the libertarian tent you’ll just be fleeced. The man up front is a bigot, a huckster, and a joke; there’s no real healing in that tent, only the worst kind of sham.

If you don’t know that the man in a white suit who sells empty promises in a fallow field is a liar, a crook and a thief, well… you’re a fool.

But it’s not just the man up front, it’s the armies of the complicit and ignorant who feed him money and power and credibility. It’s the magazines that sell out principles and deep thinking for market share and hot invitations. It’s the political party that turns its back on history and buries its head in the sand. It’s the populist pandering that blames mysterious secret organizations, demands special favors, and condemns immigration. It’s the moral relativist who decries age-of-consent laws, the tyrant that seeks escape from the constraints of the 14th amendment, and it’s the racists and the bigots who seek power at the expense of others.

As Timothy Sandefur says,

I think we must face the fact that the libertarian community does include many racists and other unsavory characters who see in our message of limited government an opportunity to act on their creepy impulses—people whose own hostility to the state is rooted not in a love of individual freedom and human initiative as ours is, but in an opposition to modernity, secularism, equality, urban life and bourgeois values. We must make it clear that they aren’t welcome in our big tent.

(emphasis in the original)

It’s not our tent anymore. It might once have been our farm, but we gave it to the craven and the crazed for their revival, and they’re not leaving.

By all means, beware the label libertarian; everyone in the tent is suspect.

Me? I’m getting out now.

Philosophy, Politics Libertarianism, Ron Paul