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How Has Liberalism Impacted Libertarianism? Being Libertarian Throughout modern politics, liberalism and conservatism have dominated and overshadowed other philosophies. However, the dynamic of libertarianism and liberalism is rarely discussed. Despite common misconceptions, these two ideologies are not similar ... |
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How Has Liberalism Impacted Libertarianism? - Being Libertarian
Can a third party in Florida ever elbow aside Republicans and Democrats? When the Florida Libertarian Party held its annual convention last month in Cocoa Beach, it vowed to try, and it has its work cut out: Objectively speaking, 2016 was the Libertarian Party's best year ever. It was also a savage disappointment. That was the verdict of Reason Magazine on the partys presidential candidate Gary Johnson, who won only 2.2 percent of the vote in Florida. As Libertarians look to the future, whats the state of the national party and in Florida? For a Libertarians answer, the Orlando Sentinel Editorial Board sought out Marcos Miralles, 23, newly elected state party chair.
Q: What are the lessons for the Libertarian Party from the loss of its presidential candidate Gary Johnson in 2016?
A: We need better organization from the first to the last step. Johnson never had a chance in the Sunshine State because our grass-roots game remained weak. Ultimately, the Libertarian National Committee is likely to focus more on smaller states, like Montana and South Dakota, so we need to realize that we will be on our own in 2020. Well need to set up field offices throughout the state, well need a much stronger outreach to the Hispanic community, well need to start an actual absentee ballot plan, and well need to put our volunteers to work. Thousands of individuals signed up in Florida to volunteer in 2016, and the great majority of them were never to be seen. It all comes down to organization.
Q: Libertarian members have been described as split between pragmatist converts vs. stalwart radicals. How would you describe the partys core philosophy?
A: If you look deeply into our philosophy, youll see that Libertarians have a rational and unwavering distrust of all government actions, and we will always look for free-market solutions to each problem in society. But our message resonates with both liberals and conservatives to some extent, and given our considerable support from independent voters last year, we have the potential of being the real middle-of-the-aisle party that dissatisfied voters can come to.
Q: What would Libertarians have concentrated on in the first 100 days of the Trump presidency, if they had representation in Congress?
A: If we had Libertarians in Congress, we would have focused on tax reform. Its clear that President Trump is en route to clash with Libertarians every week of his presidency, but in some occasions, we could work together. Nobody from the Republican establishment dared to touch tax reform in the first 100 days, and this is where we would have come in.
Q: Does the party have a national database of members, or those who contribute financially?
A: Yes, and yes. That database grew exponentially thanks to the 2016 presidential campaign.
Q: How does party membership in Florida and nationally stack up against figures before the 2016 vote?
A: Our membership numbers are just a fraction of what we could have if all 2016 Libertarian voters registered with our party. Although we barely cover 0.1 percent of statewide registered voters, we could be a major party by 2020 if all those who voted for our nominees registered with the Libertarian Party. And that needs to be our first and foremost focus by the end of the 2018 mid-term season.
Q: Libertarians seem to focus on the national level. What is the party doing to recruit candidates on the state and local level?
A: Weve actually just launched Operation: First Step, which focuses on recruiting candidates in each county of Florida to run for community development districts, soil and water boards, and other similar special districts. Weve focused for a long time on large elections, but if we want to be realists and be successful, we need to start from the bottom and involve ourselves in the smallest level of government. Only then can we create leaders within our society who with time, rapport and a good understanding of their community will one day step up to win those seats at the national level.
Q: What are the partys top policy goals for Florida?
A: Ideally, we would love to see an end to the war on drugs, work toward the demilitarization of police, a complete end to civil asset forfeiture, and budget trimming and severe tax cuts. However, there is only so much that Libertarians can accomplish without any presence in Tallahassee. So well need to first focus on policies that can help the party become an established presence. We want to see a change in the states determination of what constitutes a major party. Now, that doesnt mean were giving up on other potential reforms. Just this year, our team introduced, thanks to the collaboration of state senator and currently a candidate for Congress, Jose Javier Rodriguez (D-Coral Gables), SB 1750, a bill to reform special taxing districts and to give residents the power to abolish them.
Q: Without any Libertarians in the Legislature or in statewide offices in Florida, how does the party stay relevant?
A: Its a humbling realization to see how much work we can accomplish regardless of having no elected officials in the Legislature. Ultimately, all politics is local. Nebraska, Nevada and New Hampshire all have state legislators. Our turn will come. Meanwhile, were confident we can show Floridians what Libertarians can do with our multitude of local elected officials that we currently have and will add on by November 2018.
Q: Who is jockeying to be the partys presidential nominee in 2020?
A: Ill let the potential candidates to their own bidding for now. But what I can guarantee you is that whoever the Libertarian delegates pick in 2020, that candidate will have a better result than Gary Johnson had in 2016 and will have a real chance at unseating the current president.
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Libertarians plot a ground game in Florida - Orlando Sentinel - Orlando Sentinel
Dennis Heiman Published 10:11 a.m. PT June 2, 2017 | Updated 5 hours ago
Speak your piece(Photo: Record Searchlight)
Feeling great pressure to do something, the House Republicans have finally made good on their promise to repeal and replace Obamacare. Their plan, which now goes to the Senate, appears to be generally unacceptable to both sides of the aisle.
There will be lengthy debate and if something does pass out of the Senate, it is likely to be equally unacceptable. One possible upside of this debacle is that the time may have come to take a look around the world and perhaps come up with a better way to provide and fund healthcare.
I make no claim of expertise on the subject but it seems that logic would steer us in the direction of a single-payer, universal system.
For the Libertarians among us, this would not have to be a federal government run operation. Why not a private, nonprofit board of directors, occupied primarily by medical practitioners, business persons and entrepreneurs (i.e. Warren Buffett and Bill Gates types) with a couple of politicians thrown in?
The government would play the role of bill collector and paymaster, just as it does for other provided services wanted and needed by all (think fire, police, and military protection, education, highways, etc.), and as with those other provided services, there would also be an individual mandate to contribute payment.
Let's put an end to this idiotic notion that healthcare coverage should be a "pick and choose"menu as if people somehow have a pretty good idea what kind and how much healthcare they will need 30 years into the future, or the thought that men shouldn't have to pay for pregnancy care or women pay for prostate cancer treatment.
Decisions on the overall content and operation of the healthcare program would be made entirely by the board and its team of advisers. The private, for-profit insurance companies could pack it in and find another line of work (like selling real-estate or automobiles). Once the board has come up with a program to provide affordable health coverage for all, it could turn ots attention to the reasons (and solutions) to why healthcare in the U.S. is many times more costly than in other parts of the developed world.
Dennis Heiman lives in Palo Cedro.
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A Libertarian solution to healthcare - Redding Record Searchlight
The latest in Libertarian drama comes this week following a debate among three prominent figures in the Libertarian party, Marine Corps veterans Adam Kokesh and Larry Sharpe and National Vice Chair Arvin Vohra. Vohras statements have led many in the party to call for his resignation and he has definitively lost the argument within the majority of the party, especially after some unapologetic apologies.
Having met Vohra at the National Convention and personally talking to him on some other issues, I might have voted for him myself had I been a delegate. The cause of outrage? How Libertarians should view the military, particularly its service members. I recommend watching the initial YouTube debate titled Freedom and the Military hosted by Vin Armani.
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LEONE: Libertarian views on US military forces - Seguin Gazette-Enterprise
We dont know the reality underlying recent reporting about Jared Kushners meetings this past December with the Russian ambassador to the U.S. and the head of Russias government-owned development bank. The only two plausible explanations seem to be that Kushner was involved in something supremely sketchy, or that hes extraordinarily nave and incompetent.
What we do know for certain is that if the Washington Post and New York Times had run similar stories about the top-level son-in-law aide to a Democratic president, that son-in-law would have been out the White House door before the dead-treeversions of the newspapers hit doorsteps the next morning.
Or not. Its more than likely that,if a Democratic president attempted to put their son-in-law in a comparable position of power, the intense outcry would have prevented it from happening at all.Try to imagine Hillary Clinton proposing that Chelseas husband Marc Mezvinsky like Kushner, a rich New Yorker with a convict father and no relevant experience should be in charge of reinventing government, solving the opioid epidemic, reforming the criminal justice system, and negotiating peace in the Middle East.
Even speculating about such a thing, however, is irrelevant, because a Democratic president whod bragged that shed fired the director of the FBI in order to relieve the pressure of a counterintelligence investigation would already have been impeached 37 times. In the run up to the 2016 election, prominent Republicans were calling for Clinton impeachment hearings to start on her inauguration day, or even before she took office.
All of this is a symptom of the extraordinary rightward tiltof the U.S. political system one that goes deeper than even most Democrats and progressives understand and which makes it unlikely that well ever get the full story about President Trump and Russia, nefarious or not.
To take a particularly salient example, there hasnt been a significant investigation headed by a Democratic special prosecutor or independent counsel since the Nixon administration. The last one was Archibald Cox, whod been solicitor general during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and then was the first special prosecutor appointed to look into Watergate.
After Richard Nixon ordered the Justice Department to fire Cox in 1973, the next special prosecutor was Leon Jaworski. Nominally a Democrat, Jaworskivoted for Nixon in 1960 and again in 1968. After Watergate, he went on to support George H.W. Bush in the 1980 presidential primaries and then, after Bush lost, founded Democrats for Reagan.
And thats essentially it. In the subsequent four decades it became accepted D.C. wisdom that a special prosecutor investigating a Republican administration cant be a Democrat, whereas one investigating a Democratic administration must be a Republican.
So Lawrence Walsh, who ran the Iran-Contra inquiry beginning in 1986, was a member of the GOP. For his troubles he was mercilessly attacked by his fellow Republicans.
The first independent counsel to investigate Whitewater during Bill Clintons presidency was Robert Fiske, a Republican. When he found that White House aide Vince Foster had in fact killed himself rather than being murdered by the Clinton octopus, columnists and GOP politicians predictably declared that this raised questions about Fiske. So he was replaced by Kenneth Starr, another Republican, whose inquiry went so far afield from Whitewater thathe ended uplooking into Clintons affair with Monica Lewinsky, leading to Clintons impeachment. Whitewater was finally wound down in 2003 by Robert Ray, a third Republican.
Next up was John Danforth, a special counsel for an investigation of the FBIs siege of Waco, Texas, and, of course, a Republican.
Patrick Fitzgerald, who was appointed in 2003 by then-Deputy Attorney General James Comey to look into the Valerie Plame affair, broke the pattern, sort of. Fitzgerald wasnt a Republican, but he wasnt a Democrat either;he was a self-declared independent.
Things have returned to normal, however, with the appointmentof Robert Mueller to head the investigation into whatever happened with Russia and the Trump campaign in 2016: Mueller is a Republican.
A similar phenomenon exists with two key D.C. power positions, director of the FBI and secretary of defense.
Since the ultra-conservative J. Edgar Hoover, there have been six FBI directors, three appointed by Democratic presidents and three appointed by Republicans. All six directors have been Republicans, although James Comey recently changed his longtime GOP registration.
Not all defense secretaries have been Republicans. But three of the seven chosen by Democratic presidents since Jimmy Carter have been and in fact President Obama simply kept George W. Bushs secretary of defense, Robert Gates, who served under Obama longer than he did under Bush. Meanwhile, six of the seven defense secretaries appointed by Republican presidents post-Nixon have been Republicans, while James Mattis does not have a declared political allegiance.
President Obama presents the Presidential Medal of Freedom to outgoing Secretary of Defense Robert Gates during the Armed Forces Farewell Tribute for Gates at the Pentagons River Terrace Parade Field in Washington on June 30, 2011.
Photo: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images
An in-depth New York Times examination of why Comey broke with FBI policy to publicly discuss the FBIs 2016 investigation of Clinton while following the rules and keeping that of the Trump campaign under wraps was headlined Comey Tried to Shield the FBIFrom Politics. Then He Shaped an Election. But what the Times article reveals is that the politics Comey feared was solely attacks from Republicans. Michael Steinbach, the FBIs former top national security official, is quoted saying that if Comey had not revealed the Clinton emails found on Anthony Weiners computer and Clinton went on to win, Republicansfury would have been so intense that he didnt think the organization the FBI would have survived. None of the people around Comey had any comparable apprehension that keeping the Trump investigation secret could lead to Democrats destroying the bureau.
Similar D.C. stories are legion. In 2009, right-wing provocateur James OKeefe released misleadingly edited videos about the 40-year-old Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, which did critical work registering poor voters. Within weeks, congressional Democrats, then with large majorities in both chambers, killed federal funding for ACORN. Five separate investigations later found that ACORN personnel had not broken any laws or misspent government money. Nonetheless, within a year, ACORN collapsed.
Then in 2010, Andrew Breitbart posted an excerpt from a video of a speech by Shirley Sherrod, a Department of Agriculture official, falsely presented to make it appear that Sherrod held bigoted views toward white people. It quickly spread throughout the rest of the right-wing media ecosystem. Predictably, the Obama administration immediately folded, asking Sherrod for her resignation the same day. Even prominent progressive Benjamin Jealous, then head of the NAACP, criticized her. Sherrod later sued Breitbart for defamation, settling the case in 2015 withundisclosed terms.
And now, as the Trump administration gets going, government staff reportedly fear being personally targeted by right-wing media attacks more than ever before.
In the end, whats most remarkable about this phenomenon is that both parties and the journalists who cover them have accepted it as the natural state of American politics. No one in D.C. seemseven to perceive anything could be any different. Republicans and their conservative media apparatus are engaged in a continuous war against Democrats orany Republican who moves an inch out of lock step. Democrats exist in a permanent defensive crouch, willing to throw any part of their coalition to the wolves at a moments notice and failing to even articulate this dynamic, let alone fight it. For their part, many Washington journalists allow Republicans to setthe agenda by credulously covering even the flimsiest of attacks at legitimate scandals.
So dont fear for Jared Kushner or Donald Trump. As Bruce Bartlett, a GOP apostate and former staffer for Jack Kemp, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, glumly put it, if Watergate happened today, Nixon would have finished his term.
Top photo: Jared Kushner, senior White House adviser, attends a luncheon with Mauricio Macri, Argentinas president, and U.S. President Donald Trump at the White House in Washington on April 27, 2017.
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Jared Kushner Still Has a Job Because Washington Only Fears Republicans - The Intercept