Watching the Iowa caucuses last night, the rising popularity of libertarianism really struck me. Although Ron Paul came in third place, he had near majority support among Republican voters under 30. If we are not proactive, libertarianism could be our future.
If you do not find that scary, check out the Tea Party plan to destroy the government and any sense of collective responsibility for societal problems.
Let’s hope the religious impulses on the Right will continue to temper the threat of radical individualism, even as they pose their own threat to democratic values.
Better yet, let’s hope the religious Left and the Occupy movement are able to turn things around and revive the values of fairness, accountability, and respect for human dignity.
Young people also voted for Obama. Basically they’re idiots.
The problem is that a lot of young people will end up voting for Ron Paul, if he wins the nomination. His lip-service to anti-war, anti-imperialist, and pro-civil liberties causes does not offset the fact that he intends to cut $1 TRILLION during his first year with his proposed genocidal austerity measures against the American people – coupled with a hyper-deflationary crash if he can get the US dollar back on the gold standard. The worst-case scenario is that his radical Austrian School economic policies will cause more American deaths at home than were accrued during all the wars the United States has ever been involved in. He could potentially be a worse president than George W. Bush and Obama combined. The danger of 2012 is that the choice could boil down to one between Ron Paul and Obama, both of whom are unacceptable in light of their disastrous policies – whether enacted or proposed; let us hope and pray that the crazed Obama hysteria of 2008 is not transmogrified into something far worse, which could potentially destroy the United States itself as a functional modern democracy and civil society under the lunatic banner of Libertarianism.
I would like a defination of the vague statement ” collective responsibility for societal problems” From the author please, it could mean almost anything.
I just meant that the Tea Party has no sense that Americans should act collectively to take care of shared problems or that we have a responsibility to address the needs of the disenfranchised, the casualties of the market.
It’s weird when a “non-kosher” figure says important things you agree with. One response is to dismiss the good stuff as lip service, quickly, so you can rail against the bad stuff.
I respect Paul for 2 reasons: He visibly (in my judgement) is a person of thought and integrity — which I can’t say about any of his competitors except maybe Huntsman — and I am no longer willing to say about our President (unless “integrity” includes having internalized the values of American exceptionalism and empire).
Although he was uncomfortable and pulled his punches, Paul is the only one to suggest something that is essential for any possibility (however unlikely) for post-911 healing. And something which breaks all the rules of US politics and mythology:
We had SOME CONNECTION to what happened. Not guilt or responsibility, exactly, but bad policies that make us unpopular, and create the larger pool from which extremists can be recruited. Try finding THAT discussion in the Washington Post! But without that discussion, the so-called discourse not only of the election campaign, but of everything else “mainstream” — is that of hard-working self-righteous US who took ten years of war to get back at THEM.
How about “The Existing Threat of Gov’t-Corporate Convergence”?
Those guys have in part bought up the Tea Party franchise. I suspect that any Libertarianism they coopt won’t have Ron Paul’s face on it.
Meanwhile I say: Look for allies among teapartygoers and liberty folk — beause they are responding to the same crisis, and talking to ourselves is not very hopeful.