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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Road Walker who wrote (314469)	12/13/2006 1:55:06 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 1572999

It is interesting. And the right of liberal/libertarian fusion could even get my vote depending on what the Republicans are doing. OTOH I don't see any strong fusion as likely, esp. in the area of entitlements and social programs. Occasionally agreement, yes that already happens. Tactical alliances? Its possible. But serious long term cooperation, joint planning, and even shifting of viewpoints to make the two factions closer to each other? I don't see it. Its possible that the conservative fusionism will fall apart or even already has. If so it will certainly help Democrats politically (whether it will help liberals, or moderate Democrats more remains to be seen). I don't think its really fallen apart but it has certainly weakened, which helped the Dems win the last election (although its hardly the only reason they won). If the Democrats do become more libertarian it will put stress both on the Democrat's coalition and the Republicans. The more socialist side of the Democratic party won't like it, and neither will the strong greens. If the shift is very strong and the alliance is stronger and more durable then the old conservative fusionsist alliance, then it will attract the more libertarian Republicans which will make the Republican party more of a religious right party, unless the conservative movement and the Republican party also move in that direction. If our system was more conducive to third parties, and both parties became more libertarian you would probably have some sort of populist party oppose it. If just the Dems became more libertarian and third parties worked better you could get a "Red/Green" party (that in addition to mild socialists would have "greens" and maybe some of the current Dem's other special interests). The best the Dems could hope for would be that they grab a lot of libertarians and maybe moderates by the change, but that the "reds" (or maybe "pinks" would be better) "greens", trial lawyers, unions, blacks/civil rights groups, etc. still support them (at least from a "no where else to go" perspective). That would be enough to give them serious electoral dominance, but I don't think such a large coalition would be stable, and the Republicans would look for pieces they could grab. The type of solutions that a "liberal/libertarian alliance" would look for would be the type of things Friedman pushed. Friedman supported a "negative income tax" to replace welfare. He was a very strong supporter of school vouchers (rather then the hard libertarian position of not having public funding for schools). He was a Republican but not a very partisan one, and not much of a "social conservative", but rather more of a "classical liberal" (but of course not a social democrat/"new deal liberal"). Not that Friedman would himself constitute the ideal of such an alliance but he would certainly be the type of person that liberals looking for such an alliance, and willing to give ground on some issues to get it, could work with. As opposed to the objectivists or Ludwig von Mises, or a conservative/libertarian "fusionist" like Buckley.