For nigh-on fifty years, the libertarian movement has worked ceaselessly to ensure Republican electoral success. Long before the Southern Democrats broke ranks and invaded the GOP, we have been toiling in the rear, making good on the Republican pledge to minimize statism and increase personal liberty in all of its manifold forms.
And what have we to show for it? In 1980, we worked to secure the Republican nomination for Ronald Reagan. In 1988, we were no more free when he left office than when he assumed it (it is convenient to forget that Jimmy Carter was the first President to begin the push for deregulation), with a larger deficit to boot. But still we stayed true to the faith.
We acquiesced to the nomination of George Herbert Walker Bush in 1988; we voted for him en masse on the promise of "no new taxes". And we were no more free when he left office in 1992 (indeed, Bill Clinton was far more fiscally conservative than he; even in his first campaign he pledged to lower the deficit). We were lied to.
We showed our real strength in 1992. Ross Perot may not have been an ideological libertarian, but one cannot deny that he appealed to our kind in a way that few nominees in recent history have. We broke the back of the Republican machine.
And then, in 2000, we came back to the fold, and voted for a man who pledged us a 'humble' foreign policy and smaller government. We were deceived yet again - at the end of his term we were involved in two budget-busting wars, were laden with a theocratized central State, and left all the poorer for it.
And in every recent poll I've seen, Mike Huckabee has led the Republican pack.
This represents, I fear, something more than the results of 'fusionism', that outdated political philosophy we have hued to since 1964. It represents nothing less than the systematic shutting-out of political power on the part of certain elements within the Republican Party of their libertarian base.
For I am not at all convinced that those aforementioned Southern Democrats ever really abandoned their big-government, populistic political persuasions. To be sure, they can mouth the credo of "small government" like anyone. But what they mean by it is something quite other than what we who are earnest with it mean.
For them, "small government" is a catch-all phrase behind which lies one talismanic symbol: a cross. For them, "small governent" is any government that uses and abuses its monopoly of force in the pursuit of whatever cultural cause is en vogue with them at the moment. It has not yet occurred to them that a genuinely small government could never pay for the wars they so love to fight.
To yearn for freedom, to strive for liberty not only for one's self but for one's fellow men: this is the meaning of libertarianism. And it is fundamentally incompatible with purient nationalism. But I see no alternative offered by Republican policy makers.
Consider the "War on Drugs". Every Republican politician I know of - particularly those from the South - support it. And then they simultaneously pretend to be fiscal conservatives. But if they knew anything about which they speak so well, they'd know how much of a disaster that War has really been, how much an example it is of the big government they love to hate.
I am discontent with the present situation. And I reject the status quo. This does not mean that we are to automatically turn to the Democrats; it does mean that, if we fail in our fight to secure the future direction of the Republican Party, the time has come to collapse the "big tent". And the Tea Partiers are most certainly not the answer - they are one and the same with the abortion-protesting herd I loathe so much.
The political axis of the twenty-first century will not be defined by the old and outdated paradigm of liberal capitalism as against socialist collectivism. In the future the war will be waged, in the social arena, between individualism and authoritarianism. It is our purpose, as lovers of liberty, to fight always and everywhere against the man who would set himself up as God, or as the prophet of a dictatorial God, and take it upon himself to decide the destiny of free men everywhere.
In our being together as nation or State we are only human beings. How we deport ourselves in other respects as individuals, and what self-seeking impulses we may there succumb to, belongs solely to our private life; our public or State life is a purely human one. Everything un-human or "egoistic" that clings to us is degraded to a "private matter" and we distinguish the State definitely from "civil society," which is the sphere of "egoism's" activity.
The true man is the nation, but the individual is always an egoist. Therefore strip off your individuality or isolation wherein dwells discord and egoistic inequality, and consecrate yourselves wholly to the true man -- the nation or the State. Then you will rank as men, and have all that is man's; the State, the true man, will entitle you to what belongs to it, and give you the "rights of man"; Man gives you his rights!
So runs the speech of the commonalty.
- Max Stirner
