Ooooh I love this. Read now, and be enlightened
Ok let me make this clear (in case it isn't already). I am a small "L" libertarian. On the left to right scale I am absolutely nowhere because I dont believe it works. I'm a follower of the Pournelle Axis myself, upon which I fall at about 2,4
I believe that all government of any kind is inherently bad, but that sometimes bad is better than really really bad.
Example: War bad, Hitler being allowed to dominate Europe and kill all the untermenschen, really really bad.
I especially believe that collectivist, eglalitarian, authoritarian government is really really bad. For more bout why look up Harrison Bergeron (or see the Sean Astin TV movie of it, which was actually damned good).
Every time a liberal wakes the fuck up to reality, my life gets a little bit better, and hopefully so does yours because he won't be out there working for the subjugation of us all to the nanny state.
More in the extended entry ...
I read a great book a few years ago by Harry Stein "How I joined the vast right wing conspiracy", about a raving liberal who over time (and children), became a part libertarian/part conservative. The first step for him, like for so many others, was realizing that most of what they believed in, or at least SAID or THOUGHT they believed in, was either flawed, naive, or just plain complete bullshit.
"Ask yourself: Who is a truly influential liberal mind in our culture? Whose ideas challenge and whose ideals inspire? Whose books and articles are read and passed around? There's no one, really. What's left is the laundry list: the catalogue of programs (some dubious, some not) that Republicans aren't funding, and the blogs, with their daily panic dose about how the Bush administration is ruining the country."
The actual liberals really have no ideas any more. The only ideas on the left are coming from the socialists, the statists, and the anti-capitalists (not all of whom are communists, some are actually anarchosocialists), and I think you can suss out my general opinion of THOSE ideas.
"The conflict between right and left in the United States is different. What animates American conservatism is the future of the regulatory state and the trajectory of federalism. The conservatives have not themselves agreed on how far they want to retract either regulation or the authority of the national government. These are not axiomatic questions for them, as can be seen by their determined and contravening success last week in empowering not the states against Washington but Washington against the states in the area of tort law. As Jeffrey Rosen has pointed out in these pages, many of these issues will be fought out in the courts. But not all. So a great national debate will not be avoided."
Of course it's not like the conservatives ideas are much better. They are mostly focused on tearing down the really bad ideas that the liberals and socialists have been building up since 1932.
And then you have Pat Buchanan.
Now this article isnt all good, in fact it's still mostly lefty bullshit, but it's a least a step in the right direction.
I don't think that this bullshit can last long term. I really believe that the distribution of information and changes of attitude that seem to be building in our country, and in the world as a whole, will eventually let us take back our governments (read the Heinlein book NOW if you actually give a damn about how the country is run BTW).
As I said in my post on the disintegration of the dems, I think this fundamental lack of ideas is a good thing. It means that we are coming closer to the day that the two party false dichotomy politics we have today is replaced by something, hopefully, maybe, just a bit more oriented toward a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.
UPDATE: This Article is another good example today of liberals waking up to smell the bullshit
HT: Revealed Truth , The Smallest Minority
