She Is Bad At This

CK MacLeod in reply to RTod says:

I don’t think that’s correct – or anyway it’s ambiguously phrased, in a way that reflects a common difficulty in partisan politics. “Strongest” candidate might be taken to mean “candidate most likely to get votes,” or it might mean “candidate most likely to advance the authentic libertarian cause.” Some people might believe that “getting the most votes” would satisfy “advance the cause,” but it wouldn’t if the best way for a libertarian to get votes is to deny libertarianism, while what it means to advance or deny libertarianism is something that partisans may also disagree about in any number of ways: For some the amount and type of emphasis to put on relative electoral success vs other aims may become the most important issue of all.

The problem is usually more obvious for fringe parties or highly committed factions in larger parties, but this year we’ve seen the disagreement over which matters most – “principles” or “democracy” (in multiple dimensions) – underlying central conflicts within the major parties.

On some level, the general election itself will address an underlying “crisis of self-definition.” It always does. When things seem in some sense to be falling apart, rules and precedents no longer apply, predictability dies, and so on, the crisis becomes more readily discernible as such.Report

CK MacLeod in reply to Will Truman says:

Well, to be libertarian devil’s advocate: Either the non-existence of “a law against,” or the affirmation of “a right to,” does not imply the proliferation of “acts of.” But surely you’ve heard the argument already, so I won’t belabor the point except to say that for a true-believing libertarian, conceding the rationality of this type of objection might amount to conceding the whole libertarian enchilada.Report

CK MacLeod in reply to Tod Kelly says:

@tod-kelly

You aren’t under any obligation at all, RTod! Never implied you were. Indeed, my presumption that you could be under any such obligation might, for certain libertarians, be a very un-libertarian way of viewing politics!

Other realities having intruded, I never went to part 2 of my little-read projected series on why this is in fact a core problem for libertarianism and by extension for all American political parties, roughly in proportion to their commitment to the older (but not oldest!) liberalism rather than the newer (post-WW2) social- or state-liberal one. I imagine that the guy who did the striptease at this typically unconventional convention sees the Libertarian Party more as a vehicle to express defiance of common political presumptions – presumptions about what’s “serious” – than to re-produce them. We can feel chagrined that it leads to missing the moment or what we might hope was a moment, but he’s not interested, I suspect, or, to the extent he sees this moment as a moment, he probably sees it as a moment to let you know exactly what he thinks about conventional politics.

Anyway, as I’ve been assuming was his main point, you can’t accuse him of having a hidden agenda. The larger point, that somehow remains easy to miss even and now especially for many of those previously dedicated to advancing it, is that for libertarians and fellow travelers, following a longstanding and “foundational” American tradition, the political system or the political administrative state (and its conventions, predispositions, etc.) should be de-emphasized and reduced in importance. Producing stink-bomb candidates is a very rational way of seeking or affirming this end. The methodology is hardly restricted to libertarians and self-styled conservatives. It’s typically embraced on the other end of the conventional political spectrum as well, against the existing state and its quo, but in favor of leftist statism.Report