As I seem to have gotten some dander up on a previous post (for which I am utterly unrepentant), this may be a good time for me to discuss a more general topic: why Libertarians are no closer to the Right than to the Left. I’m not going to do this by writing a philosophical treatise but by describing a personal journey.
I have been a Libertarian-writ-capitalized for almost as long as there has been a Libertarian Party. I missed the beginning by a few years and much regretted that lost chance to have voted for someone other than Jimmy Carter. I certainly would not have voted for a Republican (other than Goldwater but I was far too young then) under any circumstances, then or now, and most certainly not for one tainted by association with that most evil and dishonest of all 20th Century Presidents, Richard Milhouse Nixon.
I was a libertarian from the time I was a young teenager, but there was no Party to associate myself with or to tell me that I was not the only one with beliefs about individual liberty. I admired Barry Goldwater greatly and respected his opinion that the Vietnam war should either be fought or not fought. This earned him an undeserved warmonger label and succeeded in electing the man whose name I was chanting in marches around the Pittsburgh Federal Building a few years later when I was one of the organizers of a Guerilla Theatre troop of the Yippy variety:
Hey, Hey LBJ, How many kids did you kill today!
Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, NLF is gonna win!
This was partly youthful nose-thumbing at holier than thou right wing bigots and partly a major dislike of the concept of draft slavery. I might add that our troop broke up because most of it was involved in a court house riot after their targetted arrest at a demonstration in front of Draft Board member Julius Steinsaper’s house. I was away for Easter and missed the fun. I use the word advisedly as quite a few of my friends went to the hospital with patches of hair ripped out, broken bones, you name it… and I think one policeman pulled a muscle in his back while beating someone and another whacked his own hand with a billy club. That part of our troop became “The Pittsburgh n”, where n equals some number I have long forgotten.
In an earlier action we set up a baby doll in Mellon Square Park and offered passerby’s imaginary shots for a quarter. We were soon surrounded by about 20 or more police and police dogs; the street was blocked due to the number of police vehicles parked there while Pittsburgh’s finest debated whether we were violating a City or a State ordinance by carrying a toy Tommy Gun in public. Their boss finally came by, probably to find out why the rest of the city was denuded of police… he looked at the 6 of us with one toy tommy gun… he looked at the 20 some of well armed police surrounding us… he looked at us again… he looked at them, shook his head in disbelief and waved at us to just simply go away. I could not help the strains of “Alice’s Restaurant” going through my head.
One cannot say I came away from the incidents above with a great deal of respect for the police and the State. That is not even to mention the busts of friends for grass, the busts of others with planted drugs, the newspaper reports about friends busts that listed items that turned out to be birth control pills and the like…
Above all else, the 1960’s and early 70’s were a battle against an extremist right wing society that had no compunctions about the use of violence to suppress people. If you did not conform (and god help you if you were so nonconformist as to be black!) you were a Commie and the Enemy. This attitude in the government culminated in the Kent State murders of 1970.
On the day it happened I was at an antiwar demonstration at which my girlfriend was tossed in the back of a Tactical Police van. You know the sort, the cops they keep in a cage and feed raw meat to. So I was not in the best of moods towards the evil state when I saw the news about the murders a few hours later. I and thousands of other students were ready to go out and bring down the government that night, and if anyone had truly had a clue there would have been a nationwide attempt at something foolish. Even as it was, the reaction was so large and so angry and so sustained that it was the turning point. The kids who died at Kent State very directly helped end the draft, the war and everything the Right wing stood for.
Much of the New Left (ie the kids) in those days were profoundly non-statist. The by-word was “do your own thing”. Live and let live. Don’t enslave me to go fight your war for your reasons.
But there was another element. The left may have been the flag around which we rallied, but the flagholders had their own agenda, and towards the end that agenda started to be foisted on us. I could probably do a bit of research and give you the precise day on which I parted company from them. A Senator from Ohio was speaking in Skibo ballroom (the CMU student union) and instead of asking about the war or some other “correct” issue, I asked about support for the Mars program. For those who don’t know, this was the post-Apollo time when Mars programs were still being discussed… just before the long knives came down and the remaining Saturn V’s became horizontal bird houses.
After the talk, I was caught near one of the ballroom doors by one of my co-radicals, and a co-founder of CMU’s “Effete Snobs for Peace” (ESP). The exchange went something like this:
John: That was a really pig question Dale.
Dale: <3 beat pause> Go fuck yourself, John.
At which point I dropped all connection to campus radical organizations. John had done me the favour of explicating that the Left was as profoundly anti-liberty and anti-individualist as the Right.
This left me politically homeless for some years. I worked hard, did theatre, played music, partook of the musicians holy rites of SD&RR and in general lived the life of a free man (one that would curl the hairs of a Right-Winger) and utterly ignored politics other than to wish as much ill as possible on Tricky Dicky during the Watergate hearings.
Finally, in 1978 I ran across the Libertarian Party. I have voted straight party ever since. Or at least when I can get my absentee ballot sent over here, something which seems to be beyond the organizational capabilities of Allegheny County.
So if I seem a bit harsh on Right Wingers… it is because I am and I simply don’t much care. I do not see them as any more of a fellow traveller than I do those on the left, and the left has much better parties and is a lot more fun to hang out with.
