From Matt Welch. And just feel the Jonah love in comments:
Go f**k yourself. Seriously. Shut the f**k up you fascist f**k. Eat s**t and die. You go to hell, you go to hell and you die.
Ah, the urbane and enlightened civility of Internet discourse…
It’s fascinating to look at the two parties through the distorted prisms of many of the commenters.
I continue to think that aligning with Democrats is utterly hopeless for anyone who favors limited government. The party is simply too far gone, too enamored of state power, and too duplicitous and/or delusional about the fact that it is. The real deal killer for me is their leftist tendency to tendentiously appropriate inappropriate words for themselves, from “Bolshevik” (when they weren’t really a majority) to “progressive,” when much of what they propose is a regression to the oldest idea in the world — a government ruling the individual, with little freedom of trade, and the ongoing lie that they are “liberal,” when no true child of the Enlightenment would recognize them. Not to mention their Orwellian concepts like “Fairness” for censorship and “Freedom of Choice” for union intimidation.
At least Republicans, for their multitude of flaws, occasionally pay lip service to true liberal values.
[Afternoon update]
John Hood weighs in again:
While there are plenty of libertarian-leaning politicians and activists within the GOP, albeit with varying levels of consistency and success, their ranks within the Democratic Party are scant, at best. This should be an unsurprising state of affairs. I understand there have been some serious efforts by libertarians in Washington to engage liberals intellectually and Democrats politically. I can’t comment on what I haven’t seen personally, but I can talk about my two decades of experience engaging liberals and Democrats in a state capital (Raleigh) where Dems have been in power virtually the whole time.
There are thoughtful, open-minded Democratic politicians who will listen to new ideas and are flexible enough to endorse market-oriented policies in certain favorable circumstances. You can get a Democratic mayor to try an asset sale, a Democratic governor to try toll roads, or a Democratic lawmaker to endorse a particular regulatory or tax reform. Sometimes you can even get Dems to challenge a powerful constituency in their base, as has happened in many states on issues such as charter schools. But on fundamental principle, there’s just not much overlap. They can’t get past their conflation of government with society, their vision of government as parent, and their belief that only big government has the knowledge and resources to fix social problems, keep selfish businessmen in line, and “run” the economy.
Yes, I think that Democrats are much too unlibertarian in their basic DNA to ever provide any kind of home for libertarians, particularly if the Republicans can get back to their free-market small-government roots in a post-Bush-McCain era.