The case for a Libertarian coalition

Thirty-some years ago, that branch of the Republican Party which preaches free enterprise and a smaller, less intrusive government (I say "preach" - practice is a different thing) entered into a marriage of convenience with the Christian Right. In exchange for the evangelical Christians delivering large numbers of voters, particularly in the Midwest and South, Republican politicians on the order of this year's failed Senate hopefuls Richard Mourdock of Indiana and Todd Akin of Missouri would pay lip service to a socially conservative agenda which included overturning the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court abortion decision and somehow rolling back the social acceptance of open homosexuality, re-instituting public prayer in the government schools, etc.

This was always a cynical deal. Experienced politicians knew most of these agendas were going nowhere, politically. But if the candidate could dragoon voters by preaching that old-time religion to the parishioners of the Yokelville Baptist Church, why not?

The Internet is why not. I believe the electorate made their own very bad bargain with the big-government state socialists by voting Democratic Tuesday, but let's acknowledge the Democrats did a great job of tying Mitt Romney - at heart a northeast liberal - to the likes of the aforementioned Bible-thumpers Akin and Mourdock. What such characters say in Yokelville now goes viral on the Internet overnight. As church memberships dwindle, a major political party that allows such characters to write anti-abortion planks into its platform cannot succeed on a national scale in the 21st century.

The most encouraging results of Tuesday elections were state votes to legalize marijuana in Colorado and Washington state and medical marijuana in Massachusetts (though similar measures failed in Arkansas and Oregon). Thus, in a logical world (has it occurred to anyone that Gene Roddenberry created Mr. Spock as comic relief for "Star Trek"?) the obvious step would be for the GOP to tell the Christian Right, "These social issues aren't the proper domain of government in the first place - better than prayer in the government schools would be to get government out of the schooling business in the first place; go work on that," instead forming a new coalition with the Libertarians.

If Americans vote Republican where they figure economic freedom and prosperity are paramount, and Democratic where they want to reject the GOP's troglodyte social agenda, they should be jumping up and own about the Libertarian Party, which wants to get government out of the boardroom and the bedroom, slashing taxes and spending and regulation and ending the wars on drugs and guns.

But they're not. Former New Mexico Gov. and Libertarian Party presidential nominee Gary Johnson won 1,140,000 votes this year ­- admirable in the face of a press boycott, but still not enough votes to carry a single major state.

Besides, the GOP did everything it could this year to drive away the insurgent Ron Paul supporters - the very base on which such a future coalition could have been built.

Real Libertarians are a mismatch with electoral politics as currently practiced in this country, anyway. Newcomers to the halls of Congress quickly learn that if you vote for someone else's corrupt bill at the behest of the lobbyists who're making your colleague rich, he'll turn around and vote for your loathsome piece of pork fat, and that's what makes the world go round.

A real Libertarian who says, "No, I can't find any constitutional authorization for that kind of spending, so I'm voting against all of it" is basically told "You're joking, right?"

Real Libertarians are nonstarters as candidates because they can't get that first million-dollar down payment on future bribes - pardon me, that first million in "campaign donations" - they need to start running TV ads.

We have thus reached the point where "what's-in-it-for-me" voters with minimal knowledge of how businesses grow and create jobs (just as Mr. Obama and his cohorts have minimal knowledge of how that works), concentrated in our urban cores (the small blue areas dotting the huge red maps at http://tinyurl.com/am3kql7) can now institute the kind of mob rule against which the founders tried to guard us when they gave us the Electoral College, U.S. senators elected by our state legislatures, voting rights tied to property ownership (so the franchise would extend only to those who actually paid taxes), and so on.

It is this urban gang who now tell us they "want everyone in Washington to roll up their sleeves and work together to get things done," and that "The Democratic message that we're all in this together has triumphed over the Republican message that everyone is on their own."

Funny, I thought it was Mitt Romney, not millionaire Barack Obama, who has voluntarily given millions of dollars to charity (hardly sending a "You're on your own" message) and returned many businesses to profitability and job creation without nationalizing them, without shafting private bond-holders, without turning over the reins to the extortionate union bosses who drove the firms into bankruptcy in the first place.

At any rate, any Republican who wants to disprove the "everyone should now compromise and work together" mantra need only say, "OK, the first priority is clearly to balance the budget; here's the GOP plan to trim federal spending by 47 percent next year, let's see yours, and we can start to compromise," or "Clearly we need to get energy prices down; here's our plan to build more refineries and coal-fired plants; where's yours?"

Those, of course, are two of the many sensible things the state-socialists do not "want to get done." So "compromise," it turns out, is still defined as "Republicans caving in and voting for Democratic agendas."

Meantime, while "we're all in this together" sounds great, it's nothing but a new euphemism for state-socialism, if not outright communism of the Frank Marshall Davis variety. As the merchant class of St. Petersburg learned following the 1917 revolution, "We're all in this together" means the man with the rifle knocking on your door is here to introduce you to Boris and Sergei. Since your house has more bedrooms than you need, these comrades will now be living with you, unless you want to get shot.

It didn't work for long. The merchants in question gathered up what possessions they could and fled to the West. Their daughter took up the pen name Ayn Rand.

The two most bittersweet letters we received this week were one from a local lawyer advising "It's time for Atlas to shrug and for the rest of us to watch as they run out of other people's money. Directions to Galt's Gulch requested," and one from a local resident who writes, "I hereby tender my resignation for life from the political process in America. ... My life experiences have shown me that you cannot change the reality of your life until you accept responsibility for creating it. ... Since I can no longer use my vote to address this problem because the state is enslaving millions using the same methods as the dope dealer on the street, I must step aside and simply let it happen."

Unfortunately, amen.

Vin Suprynowicz is the author of "Send in the Waco Killers" and the novel "The Black Arrow."