Meet the "Liberaltarian"

While I won't pay for the TNR subscription just to give you a fuller description of Brink Lindsey's essay called "Liberaltarian," I will try to expound on that self-descriptive, fused word and I will (obviously) pimp for a magazine that I otherwise wouldn't because I like the word so much.

Speaking of fusion, that word is used in Lindsey's essay to describe the clusterfuck that is the Republican Party, or rather to describe what they had, and the following blockquote does a good job of summing up what Kos hesitantly, carefully coined as an emerging new Democrat, the "Libertarian Democrat," as in New Deal Democrat meets Harm Reduction Policy (drug policy) Democrat (i.e. me):

The conservative movement--and, with it, the GOP--is in disarray. Specifically, the movement's "fusionist" alliance between traditionalists and libertarians appears, at long last, to be falling apart. To understand what's happening, look at the Democratic gains made in previously Republican strongholds on Election Day. In "Live Free or Die" New Hampshire, both House seats--as well as control of both houses of the state legislature--flipped from the GOP to the Democratic column. Out in the interior West, Jon Tester squeaked past Conrad Burns in the Montana Senate race, while other Democrats picked up a House seat in Colorado (along with the governorship) and two more in Arizona.

That is music to my ears.  That is what I, in the great Southern US of A, have been working for my entire adult life to bring about:  to convince my old hippy friends who have suffered lifelong Republican propaganda that Republicans burn the candle at both ends.

In the case of the slow genocide/ apartheid of the drug war (Israel, you ain't got nothing on us), the top-level drug dealers are and/or would be Republicans who want it illegal: it's the profits stupid ... while at the same time, it's the religious fundamentalists, the modern-day Prohibitionists, who burn the candle at the other end.

I obsessed and annoyed to no end my college professors about Harm Reduction Policies, policies aimed at reducing the harm to society of both the neo-fascist drug warriors as well as the rebellious, reactionary druggies.

My motto then:  "Just do the hippy drugs."  That means stay away from the crank, the crack, the coke, the heroin, the meth, and ladies especially on this one, the ecstasy (causes holes in the brains of women (only) with heavy use, and heavy is not as heavy as you would think).

My motto now:  No motto, just give us our freedom and kids, realize that COPD sucks ass... I might have it, so don't smoke... especially cigarettes.

Anyhow, I digress.  

This WaPo article is what turned me on to this awesome concept, a concept we need to very carefully understand if we want to expand on the 2006 election victory.  

Here's Sebastian Mallaby's take on that TNR article:

You can see this possibility in "Liberaltarians," an essay in the New Republic by Brink Lindsey, the director of research at the libertarian Cato Institute. Lindsey is not merely joining the large crowd of disenchanted conservatives who believe that the Republican Party has betrayed its principles -- spraying money at farmers, building bridges to nowhere and presiding over the fastest ramp-up in federal spending since Lyndon Johnson. Rather, Lindsey is taking a step further, arguing that libertarians should ditch the Republican Party in favor of the Democrats.

[Link]

YES!  Yes yes YES!  Did I mention YES?

Mallaby thinks that the long-awaited Republican split may indeed have arrived (oh please dear God!)... if so, our planet has a slight chance to stall or stop the nightmarish global-warming-inducing-the-next-ice-age scenario we the human race face.

If their juggernaut holds together and we can't decide to appeal to these former Republicans, to create a super-coalition to get some friggin work done, we should all hang our heads in shame and just give our kids guns to play with... because the result is the same for them (or their children at best):  death and destruction.

Not to start another anti-South tirade, but let me leave you with this ironic tidbit:

It's not just the values of the South that pose a problem. It is the region's appetite for government. The most solidly red states in the nation tend also to be the most reliant on federal handouts -- farm subsidies, water projects and sundry other earmarks. It's hard to be the party of small government when you represent the communities that benefit most from big government. George W. Bush tried to straddle this divide by pleasing libertarians with tax cuts and traditionalists with spending. The result is a huge deficit.

Same WaPo article, linked above.

Ah sweat irony.  The religious fundamentalists like government handouts. Whoda thunk?  The Republican welfare recipients.  I would kinda like to hang that albatross around those folks heads... how about you?

What was that you were saying about earmarks Tom Coburn?