Every time I see another poll showing former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani ahead in the race for the Republican presidential nomination, I ask myself what Republican will end up surging ahead to knock him out and win the nomination. After all, how could this pro-gay rights, pro-choice, pro-gun control mayor of one of the bluest cities of America win the nomination of the Republican Party? The problem is that I keep acting rationally and expecting social conservatives in the Republican grassroots to support a candidate with a social conservative record. The reality is that Republican primary voters are looking for a "strict father" figure. And Rudy Giuliani fits that perfectly.
As a libertarian Democrat, I had watched with some fascination the rise of Rudy Giuliani in the Republican nomination. At first glance, his socially liberal record may indicate that he's a liberal or moderate Republican. However, using a handful of social issues as a litmus test for moderation ignores his authoritarian political record. I was pleased to see that a quote by Rudy Giuliani on freedom started circulating on libertarian mailing lists displaying his authoritarian leanings:
Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do.
That is a scary view that I don't want the next President of the United States to hold. The media is lazily describing Rudy Giuliani as a liberal, moderate, or even libertarian. He is none of them. He is an authoritarian who more accurately reflects the true "Rockefeller Republicans" than the idea that it means some type of moderate Republican. Although appearing to be socially liberal on issues like reproductive rights, Rockefeller was a draconian supporter of the War on Drugs. Rudy is cut out of the same "law and order" cloth.
On one mailing list, a Rudy supporter claimed that the above quote was a hoax. A simple use of Lexis Nexis reveals that this is not the case, the quote is taken from forum discussion of crime and civil liberties attended by Rudy in 1994. Here's the full context of the quote, with emphasis added:
We constantly present the false impression that government can solve problems that government in America was designed not to solve. Families are significantly less important in the development of children today than they were 30 or 40 years ago. Religion has less influence than it did 30 or 40 years ago. Communities don't mean what they meant 30 or 40 years ago.
As Americans, we're not sure we share values. We're sometimes even afraid to use the word values. We talk about teaching ethics in schools -- people say, "What ethics? Whose ethics? Maybe we can't." And they confuse that with teaching of religion. And we are afraid to reaffirm the basics upon which a lawful and a decent society are based. We're almost embarrassed by it.
We look upon authority too often and focus over and over again, for 30 or 40 or 50 years, as if there is something wrong with authority. We see only the oppressive side of authority. Maybe it comes out of our history and our background. What we don't see is that freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be. Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do.
[Interruption by someone in the audience.]
You have free speech so I can be heard.
[Another interruption.]
At the core the struggle is philosophical. There are many, many things that can be done in law enforcement to protect us better. There are many things that can done to create a government that is more responsive and more helpful. The fact is that we're fooling people if we suggest to them the solutions to these very, very deep-seated problems are going to be found in government. . . .
The solutions are going to be found when we figure out as a society what our families are going to be like in the next century, and how maybe they are going to be different. They are going to have to be just as solid and just as strong in teaching every single youngster their responsibility for citizenship. We're going to find the answer when schools once again train citizens. Schools exist in America and have always existed to train responsible citizens of the United States of America.
If they don't do that, it's very hard to hold us together as a country, because it's shared values that hold us together. We're going to come through this when we realize that it's all about, ultimately, individual responsibility. That in fact the criminal act is about individual responsibility and the building of the respect for the law and ethics is also a matter of individual responsibility.
This is the difference between the authoritarian Rudy and the strict father model and the more nurturing mother model of the left. Rudy and the authoritarians want to "train" children as if they were dogs at obedience schools. That's not how we should be treating children. We need to help them grow, expand their minds, encourage them to question the world around them.