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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ManyMoose who wrote (280389)	11/13/2008 1:00:53 PM
From: TimF	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 794373

Well then, how about the libertarians join up with the Republicans and start lobbying for their principles there? A lot of them have done so. A big part of the old "fusionism" was to bring moderate and/or conservative leaning libertarians in to the conservative movement and/or the Republican party to link up with the fiscal conservatives (who to an extent may be their natural allies), and social/religious conservatives (who on most issues aren't) But one of the factors that helped it work, shared anti-communism, is less of a factor now, with marxism/lenninism/maoism etc. on the retreat across the world. And also with the spending increases under Bush, many libertarians have been turned off from the Republicans, enough to consider or to actually follow through on supporting the Democrats. I believe the self identified libertarian votes in exit polls was very close between the two major parties, instead of having a noticeable advantage for the Republicans. Part of that is Obama's ability to make disparate groups of people believe he supports their ideas (I've seen liberals exited about all the economic intervention, and step back on open trade, that he talks about in certain contexts, and I've read posts or articles by libertarian bloggers and columnists who think something like "Obama really doesn't mean that, he just says such things to nail down his base, but he's really much more moderate".) But part of it is the spending, anti-terrorism efforts (not that libertarians like terrorism, or think it shouldn't be opposed, but many of them see the reaction to it as leading to an unhealthy growth of the state), increased regulation (for example Sarbanes Oxley), and now all the intervention by the treasury and the Fed and the calls for more regulation (sure the Dems largely support these things as well, esp. the regulation, but if the Republicans are no longer seen as the "good guys" they lose support from the libertarians, even if the opponents aren't seen as good either). Also even though things have not been moving in the direction of more real support and actual policy changes along the lines of what the social/religious conservatives would want, many libertarians increasingly dislike and distrust the social and religious conservatives. The GOP, if it is going to gain power again, either needs the Dems to mess up really bad, or it needs to get a lot of votes from both social/religious conservatives, and libertarians. Doing the later is tricky and difficult but probably not impossible.