Friday, May 21, 2010

The failure of libertarianism

I've written before about how we can use the evidence of the self-fulfilling prophecy of failure in governance to reject the GOP.

Now, I have sympathy for libertarians...or at least more sympathy for them than this guy does. Most of the ones I've conversed with are pretty smart people. Probably smarter, on average, than a typical conservative.

But I think that things like race relations show clearly the failure of libertarianism in creating a just society. As Bruce Bartlett writes,
As we know from history, the free market did not lead to a breakdown of segregation. Indeed, it got much worse, not just because it was enforced by law but because it was mandated by self-reinforcing societal pressure. Any store owner in the South who chose to serve blacks would certainly have lost far more business among whites than he gained. There is no reason to believe that this system wouldn't have perpetuated itself absent outside pressure for change.

In short, the libertarian philosophy of Rand Paul and the Supreme Court of the 1880s and 1890s gave us almost 100 years of segregation, white supremacy, lynchings, chain gangs, the KKK, and discrimination of African Americans for no other reason except their skin color. The gains made by the former slaves in the years after the Civil War were completely reversed once the Supreme Court effectively prevented the federal government from protecting them. Thus we have a perfect test of the libertarian philosophy and an indisputable conclusion: it didn't work. Freedom did not lead to a decline in racism; it only got worse.
Bingo.

Monday, May 17, 2010

On crazy conservatives, again

There is a difference between being a thoughtful David Brooks-type conservative and a foaming-at-the-mouth, dismantle the entire federal government Tea Party Patriot teabagger. What I asked a while back is why so many Republicans these days seem to fall into the latter category.

It only seems to be getting worse.
Utah Republicans have denied Robert Bennett, a very conservative three-term senator, a place on the ballot, because he’s not conservative enough. In Maine, party activists have pushed through a platform calling for, among other things, abolishing both the Federal Reserve and the Department of Education. And it’s becoming ever more apparent that real power within the G.O.P. rests with the ranting talk-show hosts.
...
To be fair, however, it’s not all a matter of perception. Right-wing extremism may be the same as it ever was, but it clearly has more adherents now than it did a couple of years ago. Why? It may have a lot to do with a troubled economy.

True, that’s not how it was supposed to work. When the economy plunged into crisis, many observers — myself included — expected a political shift to the left. After all, the crisis made nonsense of the right’s markets-know-best, regulation-is-always-bad dogma. In retrospect, however, this was naïve: voters tend to react with their guts, not in response to analytical arguments — and in bad times, the gut reaction of many voters is to move right.

That’s the message of a recent paper by the economists Markus Brückner and Hans Peter Grüner, who find a striking correlation between economic performance and political extremism in advanced nations: in both America and Europe, periods of low economic growth tend to be associated with a rising vote for right-wing and nationalist political parties. The rise of the Tea Party, in other words, was exactly what we should have expected in the wake of the economic crisis.

So where does our political system go from here? Over the near term, a lot will depend on economic recovery. If the economy continues to add jobs, we can expect some of the air to go out of the Tea Party movement.

But don’t expect extremists to lose their grip on the G.O.P. anytime soon. What we’re seeing in places like Utah and Maine isn’t really a change in the party’s character: it has been dominated by extremists for a long time. The only thing that’s different now is that the rest of the country has finally noticed.

Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Teabaggers

The label "teabaggers" has been proudly endorsed by the...um, "Tea Party" people for some time. One old lady even said she was "Teabagging 4 Jesus".

Now it seems they're pissed about the President referring to them by that label.

Video from Rachel Maddow 4/09: