Following the GOP debates here over the past several weeks, I'm struck by how many cheers and jeers that commentors in the live-blogs heap upon Ron Paul. He can elicit grudging praise in one moment, and disparaging remarks regarding his sanity in the next. It's not surprising. Libertarianism is a strange political philosophy to most people, and not particularly well understood. It has undergone an evolution over the past couple hundred years, and there are various strains and conflicting viewpoints even within the movement. The fact that liberals and conservatives both can listen to a guy like Ron Paul and each find something they can agree with is reflective of that.
Most of us are predisposed to writing Libertarians off as "Republicans on steroids", and as with many broad brush representations, there is an aspect of truth to that. But the fact that we can listen to Ron Paul and find kernels of thought that we wholeheartedly agree with at times is due to the fact that Libertarianism, historically, is an offshoot of the same 17th century Liberal philosophical roots. One could even argue that Libertarians owe as much to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon for their political moorings as they do Ayn Rand or the Austrian School of economists.
Just the adherents of both Islam and Judaism can both lay claim to being the Children of Abraham, one can argue that Libertarians and Communists share the same philosophical genealogy with each other. Libertarianism is the bastard child of anarchists like Proudhom or even Mikhail Bakunin. It was born before the advent of modern capitalism, though it has certainly evolved as a result of the latter, and trended towards the political Right. But the fact that we can listen to a man like Ron Paul and find nuggets within his platform that we nod our heads in agreement to is, I think, understandable. In a way, we are long lost kin.
As an American political movement, Libertarianism has found especially fertile ground in the western states. One can narrow the geography even further: the most fertile ground for Libertarians is found in America's rural West. To understand why, it is helpful to look at the history of the West and the frontier experience of American settlers who expanded the frontier more quickly than their federal government could keep up with them. That experience was altogether different from that of those they left behind in Pennsylvania, Virginia, New England or the South. It explains, I believe, the appeal of Libertarians in so many pockets of the West.
Back in 2008 Time Magazine did a piece on the Libertarian movement in America and Ron Paul that is worth revisiting. In that article they paint a portrait of a man from Las Vegas by the name of Glen Parshall who, they said, was emblematic of a growing strain of disconted voters who had gravitated towards the Libertarian Party:
Parshall is dissatisfied with a lot of what government does. He hates our gun laws. Hates the war in Iraq. He doesn't use drugs, but he sees the fight against them as another government power grab. Growing up as a Mormon in Salt Lake City, Parshall was a Barry Goldwater Republican. Now he's the kind of voter who should scare the GOP most--and he's not alone...Since 2000, Libertarian candidates have peeled off enough votes from Republican congressional candidates to cost the party races in Washington, Nevada, Montana and, most recently, Louisiana.
(emphasis mine)
Note the Western bias in the Libertarian Party's electoral muscle. The article further observes that:
The central goal of Libertarianism is hard to disagree with: freedom. Defining it is another matter. If the freedom that lives in the Libertarian imagination has an earthly home, it is the American West. If it has a temple, it's Nevada. It's not just the low taxes or the libertine veneer of Las Vegas; Nevada is free, I was told, in part because so much of it is populated by an unbroken and unbowed caste of ranchers, miners and homesteaders who believe in the primacy of private property
The modern day Libertarian Party was founded by David Nolan, who was born and raised on the East Coast, but who tellingly launched the party in his home in Colorado Springs, Colorado in 1971. He later moved to Arizona. The impetus for forming the party, as an offshoot to and in opposition to the GOP, was Nixon's Viet Nam War policies, an opposition to the draft and, equally importantly, a visceral opposition to Nixon's decision to abandon the Gold Standard. To this day, one of Ron Paul's basic party planks is to jetison the Fed and return to the Gold Standard. That's the crazy. Yet, also to this day, Ron Paul is undeniably the only candidate (excepting perhaps Dennis Kucinich) on either the Right or the Left who advocates a strict non-interventionist policy in terms of military involvements. The fact that two candidates who differ so widely as Paul and Kucinich can find common ground goes back to the common genealogy of Libertarianism. I suspect they also agree largely upon the War on Drugs and certain other social issues.
Some call Ron Paul the philosophical father of the Tea Party Movement. I'm not sure I quite agree. I don't think most Tea Party followers have a very developed sense of what it is they truly believe in, and many latch onto some of Paul's viewpoints at first blush without fully delving into the totality of what it is he stands for. Too much reading...too much contemplation. There is a strain of anti-Big Government bravado that immediately appeals to them, yet there is also a strain of "live and let live" social tolerance that he also believes in that would be very much to their distaste if they didn't willfully blind themselves to it in favor of the parts they like. For Liberals, however, Ron Paul is like an old fashioned watermelon...a mixture of sweet flesh with a lot of seeds that must be spit out...too many seeds, in fact.
But what was the agar dish like from which American Libertarianism grew? For that we must turn to history.
We tend to think of American History in East Coast-centric terms...The Mayflower, the 13 Colonies, the Civil War even. But even as the United States is now more than 235 years old, and the Johnstown Colony was established in the early 1600's, the reach of anything closely resembling today's Federal Government did not fully extend to the American West until less than 150 years ago. The last of the Plains Indian hostilities weren't even fully tamped down until the 1870's.
Settlers who ventured West in the 1830's experienced almost 50 years of forming a society that, in many ways, had to make up and enforce its own rules as they went along, without much if any help coming from "the government." In fact, they were often completely neglected by the young government in Washington, in an environment that was both harsh physically and fraught with the dangers of coexisting with a Native Indian population that, for obvious reasons, was hostile to their presence and incursions. It's no wonder that there is a strong current of distrust and ambivalence towards government in the West. It's equally telling that one of the most common epithets hurled by conservatives these days is that of "The East Coast Liberal."
In fact, the history of western pioneers is replete with examples of settlers forming extra-governmental, private organizations in order to insure the rule of law and the enforcement of property rights in the absence of any organized State authority. To the extent that the young Federal Government had any pressence at all on the frontier, it was the U.S. Army, which was relegated to scattered outposts and limited itself to trying to protect settlers from Indian attacks. And for most of its history, the Army was rather ineffectual even in that limited effort.
Settlers rushed westward well in advance of the Federal Government's ability to project itself, both with and without Washington's encouragement. In that vacuum, they were forced to make up their own rules and formulate methods for enforcing them that those who never left the East never had to deal with or consider.
As that Time Magazine quote put it, they were homesteaders, ranchers and miners. And each group organized locally to forge a communal mechanism for maintaining order, the rule of law and protection of property rights. We're all familiar with the Homestead Act, but many, many settlers moved West before any such official provisions were made for obtaining a legal stake to property. They were, to put it bluntly, squatters. They moved, they chose a spot, and they built a cabin and plowed a field. And they thereby laid "claim" to land that noone...no official entity, at least, had given them deed to. And they weren't alone. How, then, to sort out such claims, and prevent the usurptation of those claims by competing parties?
They formed private associations. Land Clubs. They elected officers from amongst themselves, and assigned arbitrators to resolve disputes, and they formulated rules by unanimity by which they agreed to live. If one party had a grievance, he went before the arbitrator. Both he and the contesting party had to pay up an agreed upon fee to cover the cost of bringing forward corroborating witnesses and paying for the arbitration. Anyone who didn't abide by the rules was, by agreement, economically shunned from the settlement. No trading, no bartering, no associating. You were on your own.
Cattlemen formed similar private arrangements for enforcement of property disputes. These efforts have been largely mythologized in Western literature and by Hollywood (think of Eastwood's Pale Rider, and "the Stockman gang"). It's true that the cattlemen used private parties, if you will, that were more disposed to using the threat of violence in order to resolve legal disputes than their "sodbuster" counterparts further East, but all in all the violence has been largely overblown by Hollywood.
The Gold Rush in 1848 gave rise to countless mining camps in California, Nevada, Colorado, Idaho and elsewhere. There, too, local camps were largely on their own when it came to deciding how to police the integrity and primacy of competing stakes. While there was a U.S. Army presence in California at the time, they concerned themselves solely with the American Indians, and left the miners to attend to their own civil matters.
So...all this is to say that the American West, more than any other region in the country, has sort of been a petri dish for experimentation in grassroots organization and finding ways to form civil societies and ensure the protection of individual rights and property rights in the absense of any formal, let alone muscular, central government. It stands to reason that there is an affinity in the West for the Libertarian strain of political thought embraced by a Ron Paul that perhaps isn't as fervent east of the Mississippi.
There is an almost utopian aspect to Libertarianism that most modern Libertarians would be reluctant to own up to. Just as there is a utopian aspect to Communalism or pure Anarchism. A belief system that assumes, I would argue, a fundamental goodness with respect to human nature. Over the years it has been corrupted by the development of Capitalism as we now know it, and taken on some free market tenets that were never part of the original political philosophy.
Yet, as that Time magazine points out
the U.S. has been throttled for a century by two parties whose core differences are narrowing. The current general election (2008) has seemed at times a contest about who can crib off the other party's platform more, from McCain's enthusiasm for using government to fight global warming to Obama's hedging on warrantless wiretapping. For an electorate having a harder time distinguishing Coke from Pepsi, there's a thirst for something--anything--new.
I sometimes look at the Libertarian Party, and read posts here on DKos about how we need to get involved within the local Democratic Parties and remake them in our image in order to change them...and I wonder. Might it not be easier to infiltrate a party like the Libertarians, with whom we also share some values even as we differ greatly on others, and find it to be a more malleable political vessel to carry forward our agenda if only because it is smaller and less entrenched?
I don't know.