How does one begin to make sense out of the gooey, smelly mess that is today’s Republican Party?
My question must be accompanied by a confession. I recently joined the GOP for the very purpose of screwing it up. I wanted to cause even more chaos within it, or at least my own local corner of it. But my purpose was not to do it harm, but to do it good. I hoped that the chaos to which I contributed would be creative, not destructive.
I keep being told, you see, that to “make a difference,” I must belong to a “major” political party. The term “make a difference” makes me grit my teeth; I’m sure Stephen Cox has exposed it to justifiable ridicule in at least one of his “Word Watch” essays. The term “major” political party will make a great many of our readers grit their teeth, too. But my friends’ incessant arguments that I could be more politically effective as a Republican than as a Libertarian — at this crucial hour, when statism threatens to gobble up this country like the Blob — pushed me over the edge. In one of those deeply desperate moments when craziness seemed like sanity, I switched parties.
Here, however, I must make another confession. Though I do know a lot of very nice Republicans, there are quite a number of others I simply cannot stand. I’d hoped to remain in the GOP at least long enough to vote in its primary later this year. Already I’m not sure that I can last that long.
I was a Democrat from the time I first registered to vote, at the age of 18, until only a couple of years ago. During the eight years when Bush II practically demolished liberty in this country, I found myself moving increasingly in a libertarian direction. I’d hoped Obama would be the anti-Bush, but when he turned into George’s little brother, that was simply too much for me. The cowering, groveling, toadying attitude of so many Democrats to Emperor O just proved unbearable. I couldn’t keep that clothespin on my nose any longer.
Statists both left and right jabber about power, power, power. They are savages, and that is all they understand.
As a capital-L Libertarian, I got a brief chance to breathe again. But now that my mania to “make a difference” in the GOP has been quelled by reality, I find the clothespin pinching me once more. The vast majority of Republicans were very willing subjects to George Junior. As soon as another of their warlords seizes the scepter, they will surely revert to their former serfdom. I’m particularly disgusted by their babble about “libertarianism.” They show no evidence of knowing even the meaning of the word.
Like other politically active people, they love power as a junkie loves heroin. The Tea Party, which started out as a libertarian enterprise, captured the popular imagination and began to exert an influence. Then the social conservatives got hold of it — seeing it as a vehicle to power — and now the movement divides its energies between combatting the leviathan state and attempting to harness it to serve theocracy. They will do anything to get control, while the Dems will stop at nothing to hold onto it. In either camp, principle is nothing but a quaint, outdated notion.
Leftists with whom I regularly spar keep asking me how libertarians — small-L or large — ever hope to “take power.” For a long time, I really tried to take their question at face value and answer it. Then I realized that libertarians, whether in the party that bears their name or outside of it, are interested in something other than power for its own, brutal sake. We want to exert an influence as great as possible, but the direction in which we would steer this country is back toward principle.
Like a missionary from the last civilized land on earth, I try to explain this to statists both left and right, but they merely jabber at me about power, power, power. They are savages, and that is all they understand. We don’t dare abandon our enterprise to these people. They will tear the body politic limb from limb.
I am being too kind to today’s GOP to describe it as savage. It is no longer even human. It is, indeed, a B-movie monster. It may have honestly attempted, at one time, to fight the Blob, but it has long since been devoured and digested. I deeply fear that its bright, young, libertarian-ish stars will be unable to save it.
They still have to genuflect to lunatics. Perhaps to avoid being torn limb-from-limb himself, Rand Paul accompanied his assertion that the gay marriage issue should be decided by the states with a joke so blatantly in bad taste that even professional homophobe Tony Perkins claimed he’d gone over the line. “The president recently weighed in on marriage,” Paul told a gathering of Iowa’s Faith and Freedom Coalition, “and you know he said he views were evolving on marriage. Call me cynical, but I wasn’t sure his views on marriage could get any gayer.” Though Perkins, head of the notoriously anti-gay Family Research Council, said “this is not something to laugh about, to poke fun of other people about,” Paul’s joke drew plenty of yuks from the crowd.
“He said the biblical golden rule caused him to be for gay marriage,” Paul went on to say about President Obama. “I’m like what version of the Bible is he reading?”
As a gay person of faith, I could have told the senator that Obama was reading from the same Bible I do. The same one I thought the people at that conference read from, because I know of no other.
The atmosphere in the Republican Party has gotten so sulfurous that rhetoric like this is represented to us as fresh air.But I find it next to impossible to vote for a politician who says such things. Nor do I believe I can stand to remain in a party that requires every successful candidate to say them.
I am being too kind to today’s GOP to describe it as savage. It is no longer even human.
I’m glad that Senator Paul doesn’t want to throw me in jail for loving someone whose genitalia don’t meet with his approval. Perhaps it is overemotional on my part, but I simply don’t want to stand shoulder-to-shoulder in sweaty rooms packed with people who think like the “base” he still feels he needs to appease. My unease is based not on some childish fear that I might catch a disease, but on a sense that the whole party is headed over a cliff with the rest of the country.
Libertarianism offers an alternative that does something better than win the latest round in the tournament of big-government power. “Together,” writes Max Borders in The Freeman, “whatever our moralistic stripes, we are simultaneously creating a new order while rendering the old order obsolete. And now we’re aided by technology. This is not a libertarian ideology, but a libertarian reality carved out by people who simply refuse to be controlled by peers who purport to be superiors.”
That’s right — it’s what I really cared about all along. Perhaps the only difference I can make is by being different. We’re oddballs, and it may be inevitable that the savages won’t understand us. But every day new converts are joining us — if for no other reason than disappointment with the two major parties. Principle is roaring back.
We may need to opt out of the game. To “go Galt” on the system. The major-party minions may not like us, but we have probably already become too numerous not to count. The time may be coming when — dare I say it? — we may no longer be so odd.
Wherever I go, I will do good. That choice is mine, and as long as I insist on exercising it, I retain at least that much power. I refuse to accept savagery as the new normal. I will not be gobbled by the Blob.