Category Archives: Libertarianism

Why are we the way we are?

Can we blame it on somebody else, like British colonists, for instance?

By we I dont mean just you and me. I dont even include us necessarily. I am thinking about folks who live in North Carolina and the surrounding regions.

You know the kind I mean.

Hardnosed, sometimes rebellious, resistant to direction from those who think they know it all, suspicious of people in charge, unwilling to give up individual choice to some kind of group direction.

It is not just those anti-vaxxers those who will not accept an infinitesimal risk to themselves or their children in order to reduce to great risks all of us face from the ongoing series of COVID epidemics. Its not just them whom I am talking about.

Nor is it just people in a particular political party. Lots of us on both sides of the political divide share a common resistance to authority.

In The New Yorker on Oct. 4, author and columnist Joe Klein gave it a try by writing, The divide between maskers and anti-maskers, vaxxers and anti-vaxxers is as old as Plymouth Rock. It is deeper than politics; it is cultural.

For his ideas, Klein credited a 1989 book, Albions Seed: Four British Folkways in America, by David Hackett Fischer. This book, Klein says, explains how the history of four centuries ago still shapes American culture and politics.

Focusing on the South, Klein says original settlers were, a wild caste of emigrants from the borderlands of Scotland and England. They brought their clannish, violent, independent culture, which had evolved over seven centuries of border warfare.

According to Fisher, these emigrants came from a society of autonomous individuals who were unable to endure external control and incapable of restraining their rage against anyone who stood in the way.

Fisher writes that the Scots-Irish in the Southern hill country were intensely resistant to change and suspicious of foreigners. In the early 20th century, they would become intensely negrophobic and antisemitic.

Other parts of colonial America were settled by different groups.

For instance, Klein writes about the Virginia-Cavalier tradition, The Virginia definition of freedom was complex, contradictory--and remains problematic. It was hierarchical, the freedom to be unequal. I am an aristocrat, John Randolph of Roanoke said. I love liberty; I hate equality. Freedom was defined by what it wasnt. It wasnt slavery. It was the freedom to enslave. It was a freedom, granted to the plantation masters, to indulge themselves, gamble and debauch.

Over time, Klein continues, this plutocratic libertarianism found natural allies, if strange bedfellows, in the fiercely egalitarian Scots-Irish hill country folk.

Neither wanted to be ruled by a strong central government.

Klein says things were just the opposite in New England. For the Puritans, Everything was regulated and order was an obsession. Local officials reported on the domestic tranquility of every family in their jurisdiction. Cotton Mather defined an honorable person as one who was studious, humble, patient, reserved and mortified.

About a different group of settlers, Klein writes, The Quakers seem an afterthought, but their migration was larger in size than that of the Puritans or Cavaliers. And their version of liberty seems most amenable today. It was reciprocal freedom, based on the golden rule.

Fischer notes the Scots-Irish practiced the opposite: Do unto others as they threatened to do unto you.

The Scots-Irish, Virginia, Puritan, and Quaker legacies are very different and are, perhaps, diluted over the almost 300 years since these immigrants came.

But the influence of each continues.

The Scots-Irish influence in our region is still tenacious, which explains why the Do unto others as they threatened to do unto you rule is widely practiced by people across the political spectrum.

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Blame the Scots-Irish influence | Opinion | journalpatriot.com - Wilkes Journal Patriot

Chilean presidential candidate Jos Antonio Kast, from the Republican Party, during a rally in Concepcin.GUILLERMO SALGADO (AFP)

A few days before a second round that will oppose the candidate of the radical right, Jos Antonio Kast, who prevailed in the first round (27.9%), and that of the left, Gabriel Boric (25.8%), the polarization The discourse between the moral duty of defeating fascism and that of saving the homeland from communism or terrorism reached its climax. How to interpret the rise of an ultra-conservative and libertarian right after a plebiscite in which 78% of Chileans spoke out in favor of the construction of a new social pact through a constitutional process? What are the characteristics and connections of this new radical right?

The vote for the Republican Party has different dimensions: it can be interpreted as a rejection of the model of society offered by the candidate of the left (an anti vote) or as a restorative reaction that seeks to return Chile to its greatness (in the style of the Donald Trumps slogan Make America Great Again). It also appears as an anti-emancipatory reaction to the important cultural transformations experienced by Chilean society since the return to democracy. These three dimensions, of course, are not exclusive.

During the last 30 years, surveys have revealed a greater appreciation of individual freedoms by Chileans, particularly in the moral sphere, as well as the role of the State in providing rights in pensions, health and education, which was part of the demands of the social explosion. In May 2021, the poor electoral results of the Republican Party in the municipal, governor and constituent elections (in which the right was left without veto options in the articles of the new Constitution) confirmed the inadequacy between that political offer and the feel of citizenship. Between 30 and 50% of right-wing voters also voted for approval in the plebiscite, while Jos Antonio Kast campaigned for rejection. How, then, to explain the greater weight of a far-right project in a society that is otherwise without clear signs of ideological polarization?

This greater weight benefited from a very fluid critical juncture, which opened a window of opportunity for the success of this project. The CEP national public opinion survey of August 2021 In effect, it shows that crime became the main concern of Chileans, that there was greater public rejection of the demonstrations that began in October 2019 and the violence that they unleashed. Confidence in the constitutional conventions ability to improve the countrys situation also diminished, which can be attributed to internal disputes during the adoption of its regulations. This pendular movement of restoration of order after social movements of a re-founding nature is not exceptional, as shown by the example of the events of May 1968 in France, followed by a victory for the right.

Added to this social upheaval and situation of institutional uncertainty was the installation in the presidential debate of two critical issues: the migratory crisis in the great north of Chile, where the number of migrants exceeds that of its population, and the radicalization in the southern macrozone of Chile. Mapuche conflict indigenous population that demands the restitution of ancestral lands, partly infiltrated by armed groups. Jos Antonio Kast tripled the vote for Gabriel Boric in Araucana. An economic scenario marked by inflation and low growth projections also contributed to instilling fear towards those who want to destroy the country in the words of Kast with a program that received cross-cutting criticism for neglecting fiscal balances and driving investors away .

Regardless of who wins the second round, Jos Antonio Kast managed to install a counter-hegemonic narrative about the social explosion and the constituent process. In it, two legitimacies are opposed: the representation of the social outbreak as a necessary milestone to give way to social transformations postponed thanks to a new Constitution; and the perception that this was the beginning of a faltering political itinerary in which the government of Sebastin Piera whose approval then fell to the lowest level in thirty years for a president compromised with the left. Kast was able to take advantage of this window of opportunity to challenge the center-right in the name of its founding values: the defense of order and the rule of law, which had already been an axis of his first candidacy for the presidency in 2017, in which he achieved 7.9% of the votes.

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The Republican Party shares a family resemblance with the European extreme right: it is strengthened in a context of crisis social, political, economic and health that reinforces fear and pessimism about the future. This fear is expressed through a feeling of rejection or vote for the lesser evil, which opposes anti-communism and anti-Pinochetism. Like other ultra-right leaders, Kast also appeals to common sense, combining a certain discursive radicalism with the tools of contemporary marketing to spread messages aimed at providing radical solutions to specific problems (for example, building trenches to fight against illegal immigration). By last, those rights are not usually considered extreme. Kast has insisted on his adherence to democratic values and constitutional order, but at the same time he relativized the guilt of one of the military men with the most convictions for violation of human rights, Miguel Krassnoff.

Fundamentally, the Republican Party belongs to the family of radical rights (Mudde, 2019) that accept the essence of democracy but do not agree with fundamental aspects of liberal democracy such as minority rights. They express a new type of cultural reaction (Norris, Inglehart, 2019) with their criticisms of the so-called gender ideology, a discourse that Vox in Spain, but also Zemmour in France or Bolsonaro in Brazil. They rub shoulders with the same ultra-conservative network of parties, associations and churches that seek to stop the conquest of rights for sexual diversity. Although Kast announced that, if elected, on moral issues he would submit to the decisions of Congress, his 2017 program proposed repealing the current abortion law that decriminalizes the voluntary interruption of pregnancy only in the event of rape, a danger to the womans life or fetal infeasibility. This network also seeks, through the Madrid Forum, to stop communism in the world, installing itself as a counterweight to progressive conclaves such as the So Paulo Forum or the Puebla Group.

Beyond that global agenda, and as pointed out by one of his advisers, Kast is much more Ronald Reagan than Trump or BolsonaroIn other words, a libertarian who wants to shrink the State by updating the Chicago Boys recipe. Whoever wins on December 19, with 14 deputies, the Republican Party has already become the third largest force in Congress, managed to mobilize the center-right around its candidate and will probably play a key role in restructuring the bloc. The question of whether this is positive or negative for the health of liberal democracy remains open.

Stephanie Alenda She is the Director of Research at the Faculty of Education and Social Sciences, Universidad Andrs Bello (Chile). She is a contributor to Agenda Pblica.

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The rise of the new radical right in Chile | International - Market Research Telecast

OPINION:

The Mississippi abortion case (Dobbs v. Jackson Womens Health Organization), like Roe v. Wade, is about abortion, but it is also about much more. It is not a stretch to argue that both cases are about the American way of life, or what it means to be an American.

As with most constitutional cases, the logic behind the ruling is what really matters. In the case of Roe, Justice Harry Blackmun relied on arguments that served his purposes but lacked substantive grounding in the reasoning behind the Constitution itself.

Blackmun construed an unenumerated right of privacy as protecting the right of persons to pursue a preferred lifestyle. This right was deemed to be fundamental (not absolute) and thus subject to restrictions, but only restrictions that can withstand the strictest judicial scrutiny.

As indicated in Roe and later cases, the outer boundary to this right is the threat of harm to a human being. Since Blackmun concluded that a nonviable fetus is not a person under the Constitution, the door was open to abortion on demand during the first two trimesters of pregnancy. Mississippi wants to shrink that period to 15 weeks.

The claim that the Constitution protects a right to pursue a preferred lifestyle in the absence of harm to human beings warrants the closest scrutiny of the Supreme Court and the American people. This language, of course, appears nowhere in the Constitution. More importantly, this construction of a constitutional right to privacy, even if such a right in some form is conceded to exist, is highly problematic.

The Constitution was a means to something larger than itself, that is, a certain type of republic or political community, and that republic, in turn, was a means to something larger than itself, that is, nurturing a people distinguished by a distinctive way of life.

The natural rights reasoning that legitimated the American Revolution has been variously associated with a libertarianism that erodes community-spirit, a rampant egalitarianism that endangers individual liberties and limited government, and a culture that prioritizes physical self-indulgence. None of these dispositions captures the complex way of life that was the end goal of the Constitution. James Madison, the person we call the father of the Constitution, argued in Federalist Paper No. 10 that the new constitutional order was intended to protect persons in the full exercise of their faculties, which should not be confused with a do your own thing way of life.

Protecting persons in the exercise of their faculties, for Madison, was inseparable from his desire to give the American people a real shot at flourishing as individuals and as a distinctive people. He carefully pointed out the connection between republican manners and what he called rational dignity.

Individual rights under the Constitution are only intelligible when examined in the context of the way of life that the Constitution was intended to promote. Not surprisingly, from the Founding forward, the American people have supported regulations that restrict individual liberties to the end of promoting decent and civilized behavior, whether based on appeals to nature as in the Declaration of Independence or to the popular will.

Blackmuns liberal construction that the right to privacy protects a right to pursue a preferred lifestyle in the absence of harm to some person does not take Americans to the same place as the conviction that good habits in addition to fundamental liberties are at the heart of the way of life that the Constitution intended.

Consider, for example, the prosecution and conviction of former NFL quarterback Michael Vick for running a dogfighting ring. If discarding fetal tissue during the early stages of a pregnancy can be reconciled with Blackmuns construction of a right to privacy, then pursuing a lifestyle that endangers animals that will never evolve into human beings seemingly should be protected by his reasoning.

The argument for prosecuting Michael Vick rests in truth on the conviction that a society that values moral decency does not tolerate his behavior. Significantly, this is the same argument used by pro-life advocates who object to Roe v. Wade. Minimally, they argue that civilized societies do not legalize abortion on demand or abortions for the sake of mere convenience.

Blackmun leaves us little basis to critique self-indulgence. Still, an important presupposition of Americas civic culture is that liberty can only lead to safety and happiness if our conduct transcends mere self-gratification or uninhibited self-expression. None of this is accounted for by Blackmun in Roe.

The task of giving meaning to a way of life that is good for human flourishing was entrusted by the Constitution to the people this is the meaning of self-government. In extraordinary cases, the American people may consider something so significant that it deserves to be protected by the Constitution itself. However, in most cases, our judgments about what to praise or condemn are made within the many political jurisdictions that make up our federative republic.

While it is the case that our effectual or everyday republic needs to be constantly inspirited to make our ideals concrete; what does not change each day is the end goal of the documentary republic, that is, a commitment to a way of life that encourages people to acquire rational dignity, to quote Madison.

The debate over abortion regulations should not be separated from considerations intimately connected with what Americans believe constitutes a defensible way of life. These political and moral considerations are hardly synonymous with Blackmuns construction of an unenumerated right to privacy in Roe.

The challenge facing the Supreme Court in Dobbs is to reconcile the right to privacy with the reasoning that underlies the Constitution, which is the same as saying that the right to privacy must be made compatible with a preference for liberty over servility and civilization over barbarism.

David Marion is Elliott professor emeritus of government and a faculty fellow at the Wilson Center for Leadership in the Public Interest at Hampden-Sydney College.

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The Mississippi abortion case and the American way of life - Washington Times

By Thomas L. Knapp

White supremacists embraced cryptocurrency early in its development, Michael Edison Hayden and Megan Squire report at the Southern Poverty Law Centers Hatewatch blog, and in some cases produced million-dollar profits through the technology, reshaping the racist right in radical ways.

I have no doubt the claim is true. Whats also true is a note several paragraphs into the piece: Nothing is inherently criminal or extreme about it, and most of its users have no connections to the extreme far right.

Youre not going to hear much about that angle on the story in mainstream media reports on the topic, though. Political coverage of cryptocurrency tends more toward cultivating moral panic arousing the public to fright whether the facts justify that concern or not than about care with such inconvenient facts.

Having mined out the moral panics over cryptocurrency being used by drug dealers and human traffickers, it was certain beyond doubt that the next step would be tarring Bitcoin and its siblings and children with the brush of racism and antisemitism (and trying to dip libertarianism in that tar as well). NBC News gets right to work on the matter, quoting report co-author Squire:

Crypto looked to [the far right] like an interesting toy and a way of being in charge of their money and not having to use central banking. Then when you layer the antisemitism, on top of that, as in the banks are controlled by the Jews, it makes a lot of sense why these early adopters, these libertarian-styled guys, would get involved in Bitcoin so early.

Just to be clear, libertarianism is neither inherently right-wing (Im a left-libertarian myself) nor has anything whatsoever to do with anti-semitism. Many of libertarianisms foremost framers and thought leaders, from Ludwig von Mises to Ayn Rand to Milton Friedman to Murray Rothbard, have been Jews, and the Libertarian Partys platform condemn[s] bigotry as irrational and repugnant. Libertarians dislike government currencies and central banking because we like freedom, not because we hate Jews.

One attractive feature of cryptocurrency is that it reduces interference from intermediaries who might not want to do business with marginalized groups, and from governments persecuting those groups. It doesnt care whether those groups are good or bad, loved or hated, socially accepted or socially ostracized.

That doesnt just include drug dealers, or human traffickers, or child pornographers, or racists. It includes immigrants who need an easy way to send money home. It includes adult, consensual sex workers whose incomes and assets remain under constant threat from the police. It includes anyone whod like a little privacy, please.

Nor is cryptocurrency unique in that respect. You know what else all of the groups I just named use? Cash. Yes, all those people use the same little green pieces of paper you probably keep in your own wallet for times when the fast food joints debit card terminal is down.

Cryptocurrency is money that doesnt care who you are. It just does its job. And thats a good thing.

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Cryptocurrency and the Shocking Revelation That White Supremacists Like Money - tntribune.com

At the recent National Conservative Conference, a panel discussed the possibility of a new fusionism among conservatives. In the post-World War II era, traditional conservatives, libertarians, and anti-Communists joined together to form the modern conservative movement. But now, odd political realignments are occurring outside of the traditional fusionism project. The growing strain of anti-wokism is producing a coalition of unlikely allies who share a certain set of goals, but who are chiefly animated by their disgust with the reign of leftism.

The panels makeup was an eyeopener. First, there was Yoram Hazony, an orthodox Jew who advocates for America re-claiming its heritage as a Christian nation. Next was the Catholic Integralist, Sohrab Ahmari. Then add the British journalist Douglas Murray and Dave Rubin, two gay men representing classical liberalism. There was no evangelical Protestant on the stage.

The topic was the feasibility of a new conservative coalition consisting of a libertarianism that affirms same-sex marriage and a rather old-fashioned American civil religion in which the Christian majority would promote a Judeo-Christian public morality. The urgency to create such an unlikely coalition arises from the threat of a powerful worldview that is in the process of taking political power using the Democratic Party as its vehicle. Political power is within its grasp because of its massive cultural dominance in universities, public schools, Hollywood, Big Tech, multinational corporations, and so forth.

The two-party (liberal v. conservative) system that has persisted through most of modern American history has broken down. We now have a three-cornered battle between the Marxist Left and traditional conservatives, with liberalism as a third but increasingly irrelevant party. When the Left calls liberals who speak up in defense of free speech fascists, they mean it. For them, everyone who disagrees with their ideology is the enemy.

For 60 years now, liberals have been negotiating a step-by-step surrender to the radical Left. It started with university administrators negotiating with Students for a Democratic Society instead of expelling them. Fast forward six decades, and the long march through the institutions has resulted in leftist hegemony over education, entertainment, and so on. Liberals want to join the conservative movement because they are being forced out of their own institutions.

The liberals are even bigger losers in the culture wars than evangelical Christians. So, how much value do they bring to the conservative movement? They have no metaphysics, no natural law, no divine revelation, no absolute truthjust procedural liberalism for carving out the space for individuals to self-actualize. This was always a recipe for the dissolution of tradition, social order, and peace.

Since liberalism is empty to its philosophical core as a governing vision for society, it cannot resist when unbridled ideologues become clever enough to frame their demands in the therapeutic language of self-actualization they learned from the liberals. Liberalism always collapses before a determined, ideologically driven foe. The Left uses liberalism to weaken the bonds of tradition for its own purposes, which, as Rubin and Murray have belatedly come to see, are totalitarian and much more dangerous for minorities than Christendom ever was.

The moment the wheels came off for me was when Rubin casually tossed out the comment that he and his partner are thinking about having kids. That, of course, is biologically impossible. God did not design for offspring to result from two males or two females, but the conjugal union of husband and wife. What Rubin means is surrogate motherhood, which rents a mothers womb and severs the childs development from the need of a mother. It is its own radical proposal pushed off as routine. There is no such thing and never has been, or could ever be, any such thing as same-sex marriage. To claim that there is such a thing is to live in unreality where words dont have any stable meaning.

And do the panels liberals think transgenderism is beyond the pale? Transgenderism is the logical extension of their own beliefs. Natural marriage is a man and a woman living in a life-long covenant that is open to children. Once you tinker with natural marriage, you destabilize the complementarity inherent to marriage, eventually removing gender from nature altogether and placing it under the arbitrary control of human will.

Rubin and Murray may think they are close to conservatism, but they are destroying the traditional wisdom they hope will protect them. They are progressives driving the speed limit who often say profoundly true things, but that is about it. Instead of forming a coalition with them, we should defend the metaphysical order of Christianity as the only building block for society to conform itself tonot for Christianitys own power, but for the sake of truth, human flourishing, and the common good. The question is what is going to replace liberalism. Will it be a new totalitarianism or a return to traditional wisdom bequeathed from the Judeo-Christian worldview?

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A coalition without a core | WORLD - WORLD News Group

Is Betteridges law of headlines (any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no) being observed solely on a technicality as, in Nevada, voters who refuse to affiliate with a political party are nonpartisan, not independent?

Perhaps if our data is right.

Like most people, I generally prefer my personal choices to become more popular over time. Since Ive never been registered to vote as a major party voter I first registered to vote as a Libertarian, then changed my voter registration to nonpartisan after the Libertarian Party started opposing vaccines entirely and pushing arcane conspiracy theories I was naturally intrigued when I learned non-major party voters now enjoy a registration plurality in Nevadas two most populous counties (and, consequently, the rest of the state). Ive been refusing to support the two major parties my entire adult life, so I was understandably overjoyed to see evidence of an increasingly large percentage of Nevadans joining me.

The Republican and Democratic parties are, after all, uncontrolled trash fires, especially in Nevada.

Institutionally, the Republican Party in Nevada has been a mess for the better part of a decade. In 2012, the state party made headlines when Ron Pauls supporters took over first the Clark County GOP, then the state party. Their enthusiastic yet amateurish efforts led elected Republicans, along with Mitt Romneys presidential campaign, to create Team Nevada, a shadow party and fundraising organization, to try to route around the damage. Though Republicans enjoyed some success in 2014, due in no small part to Democrats taking that gubernatorial election off as a gap year, Republicans have largely become increasingly irrelevant they havent won an electoral vote from Nevada since 2008, constitute less than a third of the lower house of the Legislature, have elected only one of Nevadas four congressional representatives, and only have one statewide elected official willing to identify under their banner.

What are Nevadas Republicans doing to turn things around? Just in the past year, the state GOP censured its highest ranking elected official, Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske, because she refused to use (and abuse) her position to fight the imaginary phantoms of voter fraud former president Trump conjured up on his way out of the White House (it later turned out there was a real case of voter fraud in the 2020 election only it was committed by a Republican). That censure, along with a Clark County GOP meeting that ended in a near-riot amid reports of party officials inviting members of the Proud Boys to party meetings, made national news.

Since then, matters havent improved. The Clark County and state Republican parties just finished spending months in court trying to establish who will be unlucky enough to be considered legally responsible for the actions and budget of a recurring source of institutional embarrassment and shame. As for the Washoe County GOP, it expelled Michael Kadenacy, its former chairman, presumably in no small part because he refused to support the state partys pile-on against the only Republican elected to statewide office.

Before Nevadas Democrats conceptualize their key performance indicators and collateralize their vision and mission into electoral buy-in, however, its worth pointing out that the Reid Machines much-vaunted professional and managerial dominance over the means of Democratic institutional class perpetuation is rather visibly over. Like the state GOP, the state Democrats also made national news after self-styled Democratic Socialists seized control of the state party. To route around the damage, Nevadas elected Democrats (and whats left of the Reid Machine, including the state partys six-figure bank account) moved their campaign operations to Reno and rebranded themselves as Nevada Democratic Victory. In response, the state party attempted to annex Nevada Democratic Victory as well. Since control over Nevada Democratic Victory, unlike control over the Nevada State Democratic Party, is actually important, however, it was swiftly and humiliatingly defeated.

Looking beyond the state party itself, Nevadas elected Democrats and their supporters have been spending the past few years treating voters with something closely approximating open contempt. Freshman state Senator and former state Democratic Party Chair Roberta Lange put forward a bill in the last session, which I complained about at the time, which sought to make reelection easier for elected Democrats by introducing straight-ticket voting and making it twice as hard for minor political parties to qualify for Nevadas ballots her bill passed, though most of the most objectionable portions of her bill were ultimately amended out.

Voter initiatives to reform the electoral process, by contrast, are swiftly met in court before we can even read and sign their petitions, much less vote for or against them. An initiative to create an independent redistricting commission was challenged in 2020 by a pastor with obvious ties to elected Democrats the organizers behind that petition are filed again this year. Meanwhile, an initiative to implement ranked-choice voting is already being challenged in court by someone close to Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-NV).

On the one hand, as Ive argued in the past, nobody cares (nor should care) about the sturm und drang of local and county party politics. State and county political parties were legislatively, judicially and procedurally defanged decades ago; even if they werent, most politics is national now and party identification has far more to do with cultural affiliation than any sort of loyalty to local political organizations. Journalists arent going to spend hours sitting through party central committee meetings unless they know a chair is going to be thrown or a riot is going to break out because, unless a chair is thrown or a riot breaks out, nothing of consequence can be accomplished at the meeting central committees legally cant do much else. As for the rest of us, it doesnt take long to realize party meetings are an excuse for people to forcibly recruit everyone into some non-consensual live action role play, only instead of entertaining themselves in the privacy of their own homes with Dungeons and Dragons manuals, theyre wasting everyones time with Roberts Rules of Order instead.

(For the record, unlike Dungeons and Dragons, Roberts Rules of Order is absolutely Satanic in origin or, at least, sure feels like it is once anyone quotes it during a meeting. I, of course, have copies of the last three editions.)

On the other hand, whatever the effect party dysfunction might have on Nevadan voters willingness to identify with either of the major parties, its clearly not positive and it may be mutually reinforcing. Over the past twelve months, Republicans and Democrats both lost tens of thousands of voters each, while over 75,000 additional voters now identify as nonpartisan. The numbers for minor parties arent much better all other parties, except for Other, lost overall voter share, and the Green Party lost nearly a sixth of its registered voters over the past year.

Before I break out the champagne and leave the party officials to their rending of garments and gnashing of teeth, however, I have one question are there really more than twice as many voters writing in their own party affiliation as there were a year ago?

In November 2019, 16,851 voters chose Other Party (and, consequently, the choice to fill-in-the-blank for their partisan party identification). In November 2020, after the DMV finally implemented automatic voter registration and began fulfilling its responsibilities in earnest, the number of voters who chose Other Party increased to 27,258. Most recently, the reported number of Other Party voters is 61,796 a difference of more than 35,000 voters, including over 28,000 additional Other Party voters in Clark County alone. That means Clark County alone added more Other Party voters over the past year than there were in the entire state.

Thats not impossible. Clark County has over 70 percent of Nevadas population, registered voters, and registered drivers, after all. It just seems a little improbable, and perhaps worth double-checking.

The reason I ask is because public service agencies in the United States do a notoriously poor job of sharing data and information with each other a systemic issue which has been plaguing the CDC throughout the pandemic, but is certainly not unique to it. This is especially true when an agency like the DMV, which has been struggling at considerable expense to modernize its systems for years, and is now trying to figure out how to refund some of the money it collected from us to fund its thus far unsuccessful system modernization, is tasked with collecting new data and transmitting it successfully to another agency.

Dont get me wrong, Nevadans growing increasingly frustrated about the increasing dysfunction of our two largest political parties would confirm my priors and biases. Ive been frustrated with the increasing dysfunction of our political parties for years and I think every other Nevadan should be, too. Its impossible to look at what the Republican and Democratic organizations have been up to in this state, both among themselves and with the public at large, and conclude they need more power and responsibility than they already have. I also wouldnt be surprised if many Nevadans, when faced with an opportunity to update their voter registration while they renewed their drivers license, decided choosing to associate with a political party wasnt worth the effort (I agree with this as well).

But the idea that 35,000 additional Nevadans this year suddenly decided to write in their own party seems odd. If its true, its a story. If its not, its a very different story.

One of two things is happening to our voter registration statistics either more Nevadans than I thought are becoming interested in manually filling in blanks on voter registration forms than they used to be, or theres going to be a story in this publication in the next month or two revealing that there was a technical issue between the Department of Motor Vehicles and the secretary of state. I dont know which one itll turn out to be, but Ill tell you this it wouldnt get easier to figure out how independent voters might vote if some of them dont think theyre independent in the first place.

David Colborne was active in the Libertarian Party for two decades. During that time, he blogged intermittently on his personal blog, ran for office twice as a Libertarian candidate, and served on the executive committee for his state and county Libertarian Party chapters. He is now an IT manager, a registered non-partisan voter, and the father of two sons. You can follow him on Twitter @DavidColborne or email him at [emailprotected].

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Is 2021 the year of the Nevada Independents? - The Nevada Independent

Why are we the way we are?

Can we blame it on somebody else, like the British colonists, for instance?

By we I dont mean just you and me. I dont even include us necessarily. I am thinking about folks who live in North Carolina and the surrounding regions.

You know the kind I mean.

Hardnosed, sometimes rebellious, resistant to direction from those who think they know it all, suspicious of people in charge, unwilling to give up individual choice to some kind of group direction.

It is not just those anti-vaxxers, those who will not accept an infinitesimal risk to themselves or their children in order to reduce the great risks all of us face from the ongoing series of Covid epidemics. It is not just them whom I am talking about.

Nor is it just the Republicans.

Or the Democrats.

Lots of us on both sides of the political divide share a common resistance to authority.

How do we explain it?

Writing in The New Yorker on Oct. 4, the author and columnist Joe Klein gave it a try, writing, The divide between maskers and anti-maskers, vaxxers and anti-vaxxers is as old as Plymouth Rock. It is deeper than politics; it is cultural.

For his ideas, Klein credited a 1989 book, Albions Seed: Four British Folkways in America, by David Hackett Fischer. This book, Klein says, explains how the history of four centuries ago still shapes American culture and politics.

Focusing on the South, Klein says the original settlers were, a wild caste of emigrants from the borderlands of Scotland and England. They brought their clannish, violent, independent culture, which had evolved over seven centuries of border warfare.

According to Fisher, these emigrants came from a society of autonomous individuals who were unable to endure external control and incapable of restraining their rage against anyone who stood in the way.

Fisher writes that the Scots-Irish in the Southern hill country were intensely resistant to change and suspicious of foreigners. In the early 20th century, they would become intensely negrophobic and antisemitic.

Other parts of colonial America were settled by different groups.

For instance, Klein writes about the Virginia-Cavalier tradition, The Virginia definition of freedom was complex, contradictory and remains problematic. It was hierarchical, the freedom to be unequal. I am an aristocrat, John Randolph of Roanoke said. I love liberty; I hate equality. Freedom was defined by what it wasnt. It wasnt slavery. It was the freedom to enslave. It was a freedom, granted to the plantation masters, to indulge themselves, gamble and debauch.

Over time, Klein continues, this plutocratic libertarianism found natural allies, if strange bedfellows, in the fiercely egalitarian Scots-Irish hill country folk.

Neither wanted to be ruled by a strong central government.

Klein says things were just the opposite in New England. For the Puritans, Everything was regulated.

Order was an obsession.

Local officials reported on the domestic tranquility of every family in their jurisdiction. Cotton Mather defined an honorable person as one who was studious, humble, patient, reserved and mortified.

About a different group of settlers, Klein writes, The Quakers seem an afterthought, but their migration was larger in size than that of the Puritans or Cavaliers. And their version of liberty seems most amenable today. It was reciprocal freedom, based on the golden rule.

Fischer notes the Scots-Irish practiced the opposite: Do unto others as they threatened to do unto you.

The Scots-Irish, Virginia, Puritan, and Quaker legacies are very different and are, perhaps, diluted over the almost 300 years since these immigrants came.

But the influence of each continues.

The Scots-Irish influence in our region is still tenacious, which explains why the Do unto others as they threatened to do unto you rule is widely practiced by people across the political spectrum.

D.G. Martin hosted North Carolina Bookwatch for more than 20 years.Although the program had come to an end, you can view prior programs at https://video.pbsnc.org/show/nc-bookwatch/episodes/.

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One on One with D.G. Martin: Blame the Scots-Irish - warrenrecord.com

By NANCY MARTLAND

My heart belongs to New Hampshire. I love our state. I love our land, our people and our way of life. But as I look around me today, my heart is breaking. Breaking for the meanness of our politics, the callous disregard for the welfare of our citizens, and the utter breakdown of any kind of cooperative spirit.

Those in control of our legislature seem to want to abandon the social contract that most of us take for granted. Getting together to provide a public education to all of our children, basic services like police and fire protection, roads, libraries, and recreational facilities. Working with our neighbors to find solutions to problems that need solving. Thats my New Hampshire.

Not so long ago, I was deeply involved in the Northern Pass opposition. I saw it as a way to protect something essential about New Hampshire, and most people seemed to agree. The opposition represented the best of our state. It included people from all walks of life, all regions, and all backgrounds. For ten years we stuck together and we got the job done. Nobody cared about a persons politics. Everybody cared about New Hampshire. We were successful, in part because we were so varied and different with a wide range of strengths all across the spectrum.

I am not certain that such an alliance could even exist today.

I struggle to make sense of what is happening. It seems like our common interests have fractured. Everything is politicized. Extremists have inflicted terrible wounds on our state. Anger and hostility have overtaken respect and civil decorum. So-called Free Staters are here explicitly to create a libertarian paradise that worships the individual and seeks to eliminate government. Republicans with whom I have worked in the past and thought to be sensible go along with their efforts and are moving further and further to the extreme. They seem to have entirely lost the thread of what New Hampshire is all about.

Our Governor either agrees with this crowd or is too afraid to stand up to them.

One faction actually wants us to secede from the United States nine Republican legislators have filed a bill to do so.

Others oppose public education. Republicans created Education Freedom Accounts, purported to offer choice to parents, but in reality designed to drain funds from our public schools to undermine them and eliminate them. They seem to think we should all home school our children. Why should government provide an education?

Still others see absolutely no reason for us to pull together to protect each other from COVID, with enraged individuals busting up meetings because their medical freedom is more important than the health of everyone else. Republicans have fought sensible measures to mitigate and control the spread of disease, right up to Governor Sununu allowing unvaccinated staff to work in our nursing homes caring for our parents and grandparents, exposing them to serious illness.

Then there are the legislators who seek to control what we do and think. Enacting abortion restrictions that include the requirement for a medically unnecessary and invasive vaginal probe ultrasound. Controlling what our teachers say about American history by requiring that they say only positive things about our countrys past. One group offered a $500 bounty to anyone who informed on a teacher.

I am profoundly sorry to say that if we want a New Hampshire that is kind and decent, where we work together to achieve our goals and meet our needs, we cannot return the present Republican legislature to power in 2022. Sadly, the NH Republican Party is more interested in scoring ideological points than they are in us.

Dont get me wrong. I have voted for plenty of Republicans in my life. I expect to do so again. Like many people, I tend to want to vote for the person, not the party. It was a pleasure to vote for Ray Burton, for example.

But for right now we owe it to ourselves and our children to restore the New Hampshire we all love. And that means not voting for any Republican who supports these extreme policies.

More here:
Op-Ed: The New Hampshire We Love - InDepthNH.orgInDepthNH.org - InDepthNH.org

Ideological faction within the U.S. Democratic Party

In American politics, a libertarian Democrat is a member of the Democratic Party with political views that are relatively libertarian compared to the views of the national party.[1][2]

While other factions of the Democratic Party, such as the Blue Dog Coalition, the New Democrat Coalition and the Congressional Progressive Caucus, are organized in the Congress, the libertarian faction is not organized in such a way.

Libertarian Democrats support the majority of positions of the Democratic Party, but they do not necessarily share identical viewpoints across the political spectrum; that is, they are more likely to support individual and personal freedoms, although rhetorically within the context of Democratic values.[3]

Libertarian Democrats oppose NSA warrantless surveillance. In 2013, well over half the House Democrats (111 of 194) voted to defund the NSA's telephone phone surveillance program.[4]

Former representative and current Governor Jared Polis of Colorado, a libertarian-oriented Democrat, wrote in Reason magazine: "I believe that libertarians should vote for Democratic candidates, particularly as our Democratic nominees are increasingly more supportive of individual liberty and freedom than Republicans".[5] He cited opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act, support for the legalization of marijuana, support for the separation of church and state, support for abortion rights and individual bodily autonomy, opposition to mass surveillance and support for tax-code reform as areas where the majority of Democrats align well with libertarian values.[5]

While maintaining a relatively libertarian ideology, they may differ with the Libertarian Party on issues such as consumer protection, health care reform, anti-trust laws and the overall amount of government involvement in the economy.[3]

After election losses in 2004, the Democratic Party reexamined its position on gun control which became a matter of discussion, brought up by Howard Dean, Bill Richardson, Brian Schweitzer and other Democrats who had won in states where Second Amendment rights are important to many voters. The resulting stance on gun control brought in libertarian minded voters, influencing other beliefs.

In the 2010s, following the revelations by Edward Snowden about NSA surveillance in 2013, the increasing advent of online decentralization and cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, the perceived failure of the war on drugs and the police violence in places like Ferguson, Democratic lawmakers such as Senators Ron Wyden, Kirsten Gilibrand and Cory Booker and Representative Jared Polis have worked alongside libertarian Republicans like Senator Rand Paul and Representative Justin Amash to curb what is seen as government overreach in each of these areas, earning plaudits from such traditional libertarian sources as Reason magazine.[6][7][8][9] The growing political power of Silicon Valley, a longtime Democratic stronghold that is friendly to economic deregulation and strong civil liberties protections while maintaining traditionally liberal views on social issues, has also seriously affected the increasingly libertarian leanings of young Democrats.[10][11][12]

The libertarian faction has influenced the presidential level as well in the post-Bush era. Alaska Senator and presidential aspirant Mike Gravel left the Democratic Party midway through the 2008 presidential election cycle to seek the Libertarian Party presidential nomination,[13] and many anti-war and civil libertarian Democrats were energized by the 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns of libertarian Republican Ron Paul.[14][15] This constituency arguably embraced the 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns of independent Democrat Bernie Sanders for the same reasons.[16][17] In the state of New Hampshire, libertarians operating from the Free State Project have been elected to various offices running as a mixture of both Republicans and Democrats.[18][19] A 2015 Reuters poll found that 22% of Democratic voters identified themselves as "libertarian," more than the percentage of Republicans but less than the percentage of independents.[20]

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Libertarian Democrat - Wikipedia

Minimal state

A night-watchman state or minarchy, whose proponents are known as minarchists, is a model of a state that is limited and minimal, whose functions depend on libertarian theory. Right-libertarians support it only as an enforcer of the non-aggression principle by providing citizens with the military, the police, and courts, thereby protecting them from aggression, theft, breach of contract, fraud, and enforcing property laws.[1][2][3]

In the United States, this form of government is mainly associated with libertarian and Objectivist political philosophy. In other countries, minarchism is also associated to some non-anarchist libertarian socialists and other left-libertarians.[4][5] A night-watchman state has been advocated and made popular by Robert Nozick in Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974).[6] The United Kingdom in the 19th century has been described by historian Charles Townshend as a standard-bearer of this form of government.[7]

As a term, night-watchman state (German: Nachtwchterstaat) was coined by German socialist Ferdinand Lassalle in an 1862 speech in Berlin wherein he criticized the bourgeois-liberal limited government state, comparing it to a night-watchman whose sole duty was preventing theft. The phrase quickly caught on as a description of capitalist government, even as liberalism began to mean a more involved state, or a state with a larger sphere of responsibility.[8] Ludwig von Mises later opined that Lassalle tried to make limited government look ridiculous though it was no more ridiculous than governments that concerned themselves with "the preparation of sauerkraut, with the manufacture of trouser buttons, or with the publication of newspapers".[9]

Proponents of the night-watchman state are minarchists, a portmanteau of minimum and -archy. Arche (; Ancient Greek: ) is a Greek word which came to mean "first place, power", "method of government", "empire, realm", "authorities" (in plural: ), or "command".[10] The term minarchist was coined by Samuel Edward Konkin III in 1980.[11]

Right-libertarian minarchists generally justify the state as a logical consequence of the non-aggression principle.[1][2][3] They argue that anarcho-capitalism is impractical because it is not sufficient to enforce the non-aggression principle, as the enforcement of laws under anarchy would be open to competition.[12] Another common objection to anarchism is that private defense and court firms would tend to represent the interests of those who pay them enough.[13]

Left-libertarian minarchists justify the state as a temporary measure on the grounds that social safety net benefits the working class. Some anarchists, such as Noam Chomsky, are in agreement with social democrats on the welfare state and welfare measures, but prefer using non-state authority.[14] Left-libertarians such as Peter Hain are decentralists who do not advocate abolishing the state,[4] but do wish to limit and devolve state power,[5] stipulating that any measures favoring the wealthy be prioritized for repeal before those which benefit the poor.[15]

Some minarchists argue that a state is inevitable because anarchy is futile.[16] Robert Nozick, who publicized the idea of a minimal state in Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), argued that a night-watchman state provides a framework that allows for any political system that respects fundamental individual rights. It therefore morally justifies the existence of a state.[6][17]

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Night-watchman state - Wikipedia