He would have wanted it this way —
The funeral service for Sen. Paul Wellstone commanded thousands of Democratic
activists and faithful from throughout Minnesota and beyond. Many Republican
commentators found it shocking that the services turned into a thinly disguised
political rally for his not-then-yet-announced replacement, former Sen. Fritz
Mondale.
Yet is it fair to blame the Democrats? Really, what else could have been
expected? Democrats are today primarily composed of people who see society as
nothing but politics, who see the world through politics-colored glasses. You
cannot expect to gather thousands of such people together and not have a
political rally. It is their raison d'ëtre.
At the service, some Wellstone epigrams were read aloud. One in particular
caught my ear: "Politics is the process by which people's lives are improved."
I'm assuming Wellstone's friends went out of their way to choose his most
sagacious insights for the crowd. It made me think, which is sadder: the life of
someone cut down unexpectedly in his prime at age 58; or the fact that a person
can teach political science at the university level, spend twelve years as a
senator in D.C., and still possess such a sophomoric understanding of political
power. — Ross Levatter
Proof of a beneficent God — Richard
Reid tried to sneak a bomb on an airplane in his shoes. Now every day thousands
of Americans are forced to remove their shoes during the ritual Kabuki dance of
random searching we blithely accept as a condition of flying during the War on
Terror. We should be grateful to Reid that he did not try to hide his bomb in his
underwear. — Ross Levatter
| James Barnett is
an editorial intern at Liberty. |
|
Duopoly, now and forever — With the
latest revelations that the Libertarian Party is now deep in the red, perhaps
it's time libertarians join the Republican Party. Sure Republicans aren't
perfect. They're militaristic and socially stifling, but they are the closest
vessel to power liberty lovers can get — especially now, after the GOP's
electoral success. And if you don't like the Republicans, then maybe form
something akin to the Republican Liberty Caucus within the Democratic Party. The
point is, there is nothing wrong with joining the two parties with the intent to
advocate liberty. I think James Weinstein — giving advice to the Greens
— sums up the perfect point about the modern party system:
" . . . as quasi-state institutions they are no longer political parties in
the European parliamentary sense. The Republican and Democratic parties are
legally regulated structures with fixed times and places where anyone can
register. Open to all, they have no ideological requirements for membership. To
become a Republican or Democrat, you just register as such. In fact, these are
not really parties at all, but coalitions of more or less compatible social
forces in which various groups contest for influence under a common banner."
It used to be that political parties were stagnant. Political innovation came
from stealing or merging ideas from challenging third parties, like the
Populists. Thanks to the turn-of-the-century election reforms towards direct
primary laws, however, the two parties have been reduced to Thomas Nast cartoons.
— James Barnett
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