Pragmatism vs Ideology

I rarely like the internet political quizzes, because frankly most of the questions suck. I found one that I really liked that was as close as it gets. I Side With. It gives "yes" and "no" answers, but also other choice "C" answers as well.

The Results:
Gary Johnson - 96%
Mitt Romney - 76%
Virgil Goode - 64%
Rocky Anderson - 16%
Jill Stein - 10%
Obama - 5%

Romney on social, Johnson on the rest.

I'm not that surprised except that I usually don't score as high with libertarians and my marks with LP/RP are both in the 70-75% range with the rest under 25%. They didn't ask trade questions which skewed it away from the populists more.

However, I didn't write in Johnson. No, Romney wasn't my first choice. Like many, I didn't like the coronation attempt between Foxnews and also the rules changes for Mitt. On the same note, I didn't care for EITHER side in the Ron Paul vs Romney dual coronation attempts. In Romneys defense, he at least won a majority of the primaries. Luckily for Romney, I want Obama fired. In Ron Paul's case, I voted for him in 08, but not this year. The coronation push alienated me. The RNC and Paulite gamesmanship didn't look good for either side in Tampa. The former didn't need to spike the football. The latter has no business claiming anything until it won enough actual primaries (at any level, let alone presidential) to contend. My candidate lost too. It sucks. It happens.

Would I like to see more liberty candidates in the GOP? In some areas, if they aren't too hung up on technicalities. There's no way a candidate who claims to be a libertarian (and pro-life) republican would vote against defending planned parenthood. Or vote against national CPL reciprocity, all while incorrectly (especially on the CPL) claiming "constitutional" grounds (Full Faith and Credit). There are times due to language where a bill should be voted down, or amended. There's also times when there's nothing wrong with the bill's language. If you claim to really be a liberty candidate, be for liberty, don't just fall on your sword when the end result of that is less liberty than before. 

I realized over my years that 3rd parties are a protest vote. No more, and no less. If Teddy Roosevelt can't win as a 3rd party, no one can. I used to vote about 1/3 R and 2/3 L when I was a new voter, then considered myself independent. I have protested vote or 'voted for blank' on occasion, although I am less apt to do so than in my early years. This year was a bit of an exception as I did leave a few more of the uncontested races blank than normal with Green Oak pushing another millage. Again.

Many of the Paul hardliners are either writing in Ron Paul or voting for Johnson. Some are doing so because they really like Gary Johnson and damn the torpedoes. I can understand that. A couple of my family members took that stance. No games are involved there and they can't bring themselves to support either candidate.

Then, there's this mindset by some. "You didn't let us take over the party, so we're going to spite you and hope you lose to a 48-49% Obama so you'll be forced to come back begging to us." Ain't gonna happen. Even if Obama won due to Johnson votes, it ain't gonna happen.Two words. Ralph Nader. Nader's name since 2000 among democrats is mud. Ron Paul's name (as he'll get the blame) will be mud if Obama wins with 48-49%. There won't be begging, but a declaration of political war. 

Some people like Herman Cain are clamoring now for a 3rd party. All I have to say to that is the following. 
1. How will the third party get enough support to win?

"“I never thought that I would say this, and this is the first time publicly that I’ve said it: We need a third party to save this country. Not Ron Paul and the Ron Paulites. No. We need a legitimate third party to challenge the current system that we have, because I don’t believe that the Republican Party … has the ability to rebrand itself,” Cain said."

It is so easy to say "We'll get a new conservative party and the conservatives will join us and all will be well." The problem is that it's all bullshit. Third parties failed, have failed, and always will fail. Teddy Roosevelt, Ron Paul, Bob Barr, Virgil Goode, John Anderson, George Wallace, Ralph Nader and Pat Buchanan all failed as 3rd parties. In order for a 3rd party to be relevant, one has to be competitive in 34% of the seats in congress or compete for a majority in a electoral college. Ain't gonna happen.

Steve Schmidt also has his head up his ass. That's not surprising. He was McCain's campaign manager. We all know how that went. I could have done a better job than that clown in 08. I doubt I would lose Indiana at least. That takes work in a presidential election.

“When I talk about a civil war in the Republican Party, what I mean is, it’s time for Republican elected leaders to stand up and to repudiate this nonsense [of the extreme right wing], and to repudiate it directly,” he said.

Screw off, Steve. We just ran a moderate. We ran a moderate before that in 2008. Your boy McCain. Hell, Bush was a moderate, at least fiscally. What we need is to repudite bullshit like what you are slinging to try and salvage your incompetent reputation.

Conservatives can win. Conservatives can win in moderate or even liberal districts. Moderates can win. Moderates can win conservative and liberal districts. They both win by not doing a Steve Schmidt and putting their big mouths away and by doing their jobs properly on constituent issues and being competent people. That's what's most important. Don't be incompetent like Steve Schmidt was in his election work. Don't be a dumbass like Todd Akin (establishment, Huckabee wing). Don't be a dumbass like Richard Mourdock (Tea Party). They made the same error. Don't be something that you aren't. I think Mitt would have done much better in the primary if he was just who he was. I think that came out in the first debate.

Be who you are. Be competent at what you do. Be tactically smart and principled. Have a good plan. That's the starting success to build from at any level.  Pick fights when you must, but not when you don't have to do so.

Conservatives need moderates (true moderates, not leftists). Moderates need conservatives. Tea party needs establishment. Establishment needs tea party. Right now, we don't have the leverage. We need to create it and create it now, so Obama doesn't spend the next four years turning this country into Chicago.  

Conservative Libertarianism's Comeback

A good column by David Paul Kuhn was published in Real Clear Politics. I don't think conservative libertarianism (small  l) ever completely went away, but it was dormant for a long time, with grumbling during the 2002-2008 period. Conservative libertarians (which I consider myself to a degree) were still extremely angry at the Clinton administrations power grabs and while we wern't real Bush fans, we stomached him because of the alternative. Gore, and worse, John Kerry. 

From his column

The philosophical casualty of the Great Recession was supposed to be libertarianism. But signs to the contrary are thriving.
Americans are increasingly opposed to activist government programs. The most significant social movement of 2009, the Tea Party protests, grew out of that opposition. Libertarian heroine Ayn Rand is as popular today as ever. Rand's brilliant and radical laissez faire novel "Atlas Shrugged," sold roughly 300,000 copies last year, according to BookScan, twice its sales in 2008 and roughly triple annual sales in recent decades.
We are witnessing a conservative libertarian comeback. It's an oppositional advance, a response to all manners of active-state liberalism since the financial crisis. It's a pervasive feeling of invasiveness. The factional bastions of traditional libertarianism, like Washington think tank Cato, now have an intangible and awkward alliance with a broad swath of the American electorate.

I mostly agree. It started before that, but exploded with the bailout. The right is more apt to keep the complaints about "their guys" in house. One other thing common on the right even if go back to Iraq is that a lot of people were against the original decision.(particular paleoconservatives), but once the decision is made, shut the hell up, don't be an anti-American protester hurting morale, and stay out of the way since losing a war is worse. I know many war veterans with that exact view. That's one of the big reasons why I usually stick to domestic policy and limit my foreign policy comments to treaties on this blog.

In my own case, I never supported the Patriot Act, either in its Clinton/Hatch/Reno form under a different name to fight the "war on (some) drugs", or in Bush/Ashcroft's "war on terror." Rule of thumb - anytime you hear "war on" anything - war on povery, war on drugs, war on terror (in a Politically correct fashion), expect to lose some freedoms. Stuff like this, and Bush's spending, and Ted Stevens and his 83 votes (including Stabenow and Levins) pork barrelled bridge to nowhere. Eventually there was open revolt and people staying home in elections. Less government no longer became associated with either party. It drive up the f'ing wall when dummies say that opposition to Obama's powergrabs is called "the same stuff for the 8 years". That's crap.  Bush was big government. Obama has all of Bush's bad traits on steroids (although he still looks and acts like a wuss. I know, that's not nice.)  Bush and Obama are both Keynesians in their approach to economics (and Keynesian economics gave us stagflation in the 70's).

Even before the Bush/Obama/McCain banks bailout, which was voted on by all three of them, there was a revolt on the right against big government, and not just on this blog either. The Draft Mike Pence and Mark Sanford (before we know about his Appalachian Trail adventures...what were ya thinking) movements were in response to the big government economics of Bush and Congress. In 2007, Ron Paul did announce and re-ignited the small government movement. He had his critics because of how far he pushed, but even his critics acknowledge that Ron Paul had some good issues that he brought to the debate. He didn't look so dumb with the banks bailout.

Obama accelerated Bush's spending with his so called stimulus bills, auto takeovers and micromanagement, job shedding, and health care bill that screws people and benefits big insurance. No wonder people are pissed off.


More:

There is no wide-ranging call for government to withdraw from social issues however. A rebirth of traditional libertarianism this is not. It's a more limited libertarianism that it is on the march.
Every year, since the early 1990s, the Gallup poll has sought to measure the degree of libertarianism in the American mind. First question: does the public believe the government is "trying to do too many things that should be left to individuals and businesses?" Fifty-seven percent said yes last August, the highest level since 1998.
Gallup's second question asks whether Americans believe "government should promote traditional values in our society" or "not favor any particular set of values." A traditional libertarian would side with the latter point. But 53 percent favored the state promoting "traditional values" in 2009, a five-point rise since 2008.
Those who believe government is doing "too many things" and should also not favor any moral value system sum to slightly more than a fifth of U.S. adults in recent years. This is the loose libertarian bloc of American politics. Today, roughly another third of the electorate allies with this bloc on issues regarding government's reach into private industry.

I don't like this question. What is "promoting traditional values?" Does that mean protecting the 2ndAmendment? That's quite libertarian. Life issues can be either way. There are libertarian arguments for life if you, as I do, consider the baby a separate being from the mother. Gay marriage. Legalizing state sanctioned gay marriage I'd argue is not a libertarian stance. Having the state get out of marriage altogether is.

This limited libertarian resurgence has haunted Obama's domestic agenda. The fundamental mistake of the Obama administration in 2009 was underestimating the American public's ongoing tension with active-state liberalism, a fact visible from the outset and one only belatedly confronted by Obama.
The irony is that the stock market collapse began this revival of active-state liberalism. The drumbeat of rising anti-government sentiment grew from the financial bailouts that followed. And yet this libertarian resurgence fractures on one issue, and that's Wall Street. Support for regulating the financial sector has grown, even amid the growth of conservative libertarianism.

Right now, there's already too much government involvement in Wall Street (and mortgages). The reason of these views is that WallStreet screwed up and is taking a trillion in tax money because government, especially the democrats, are in bed with big business. The one good thing is that Chris Dodd is retiring. He and Barney Frank have done more damage to this country than any politician not named Jamie Gorelick in the last 20 years.

Lastly:

Indeed. Today's limited libertarian revival is a response to a sense of overreaching elite technocrats as well as fear of an intrusive bureaucracy. Responsiveness is the core impulse. Rand's radical libertarianism, where man is an ends in himself and the welfare state is fundamentally immoral, was a response to the radically invasive Soviet state that weaned her as a girl. On a drastically less extreme scale, one side of this American debate could not exist without the other. The Obama administration brought with it ambitions of a resurgence of FDR and LBJ's active-state liberalism. And with it, Obama has revived the enduring American challenge to the state.

There always needs to be a healthy challenge to the state. Government is force. Government is power. They can only do for us what they can do TO us. Government dictates is enforced by men with guns. That is what happens if you don't obey what they demand. Men with guns arrest you and send you to prison. That more than anything else pisses me off about the senate health care bill. Five years in the clink. Government power needs to be used cautiously and with extreme discretion. Politicians need to be kept in check. That's shown in the wisdom of the founding fathers, especially the anti-federalists, with the Bill of Rights. That's why we have the 1st and 2nd Amendments. That's why we have elections.

The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. To those are finding what I'd consider true conservatism again. Welcome back. As far as 2010 goes, if the GOP does take over the house (possible) and senate (unlikely, but possible), one piece of advice. Don't chicken out or blow it this time, because there might not be another chance.