For the past ten years, I have been a hard core libertarian. My bookshelves sagged with heavy tomes and booklets that described the libertarian agenda. I read book after book that repeated the same basic mantra: that government is bad, that government is illegal, that government is an oppressor, and that government could not do anything good even if all the people in government really really wanted with all their heart to do nothing but good. The way of government, the refrain always went, was to always end up doing something bad.
But events of the past year have removed the scales and blinders from my eyes and I can see again. I am a Libertarian no more and am proudly re-registering as a Democrat.
How did I make the transition? Well, it started as a series of little cracks that began to show up in my libertarian beliefs. First of all, after reading in the 100th book for the 100,000th time that government was intrinsically bad and could never be good, I began to slowly wonder what life without government would be like. The implication in libertarian books is that the way to utopia is to get rid of government. So, is that true, I wondered? Can it be that simple? For Heaven on earth to be realized and for man to enter into a natural paradisaical state, we only have to get rid of government?
It was around that time that I watched on DVD the HBO series Deadwood. Deadwood is a series about a real town in South Dakota in a real time. The characters are historical, real people as well. The series attempted to show what life was like in Deadwood. And as I watched the series, I realized I was watching a little lab test of my inquiry. When Deadwood formed, it was outside of the jurisdiction of the US Government. There was no state government yet. And it wasn't ruled over by any of the nearby Indian tribes. Deadwood was an example of a town without a government.
So, did paradise result? Not hardly. Women had no rights whatsoever. And how was the town run? It was controlled by a man who established his position by being willing to be more violent than others. If someone threatened his position or even had the potential to threaten him, that person would end up dead.
I realized that we form governments to protect us against men like the central power broker in Deadwood. Getting rid of government does not get rid of the violent. They're still there, wreaking havoc, making people's lives miserable.
But I turned again to my heavy libertarian tomes, thinking I was not being fair, using a historical fictionalization as my counterexample.
So I began looking for another example and quickly realized the obvious. We had just toppled a government in Iraq and for a time there was a government vacuum. Did the people of Iraq come out and celebrate, shouting to the Heavens, exclaiming the libertarian song, "Finally, we are free of government! We are in paradise! Let's not blow this. Let's maintain this wonderful utopian state of government-free anarchy that has so blissfully fallen into our laps!"
No, that didn't happen. The same thing happened in Iraq as was shown in Deadwood. The thugs, the violent, the power crazed, those willing to use violence to get what they wanted, without any inhibition of decency or conscience, came out in full force, terrorizing normal decent people who just wanted to live their lives. Rapes escalated, thugs took control of neighborhoods. Decent people were murdered for even faintly appearing they might object to the thugs.
And then I realized the core problem that undermines libertarianism. You are never going to get rid of the violent drive for power. It's always going to be there, in a small set of the population. Yes, it will show up in government, more in some systems (authoritarian dictatorships) of government and less in others (republics and democracies). But getting rid of government doesn't get rid of that small but pervasive group of people who are always ready to assert violent power over others. They're still there. And they will tyrannize people as they seek control. That fact alone throws the Libertarian argument completely out the window. Getting rid of government does not get rid of what they are complaining about when it comes to government: one group oppressing another.
That was my first major breakthrough in cracking the hard core logic of libertarianism. But the behavior of Republicans, who claim to be the most libertarian of the two major parties, proved to be the sledge hammer that really broke things wide open.
Libertarians traditionally question whether they should vote for the Libertarian party, or for the Republican, the supposed lesser of two evils. Enormous amounts of thought go into dissecting and worrying over this question. Well, for me, the behavior of the Republicans over the past eight years pretty much took that inner debate off the radar. Republicans may do a little bs lip service to being libertarian, but their actions clearly show who they are. They are reckless big government wasters in a way that a Democrat would never dream. And the mockery that a true Libertarian like Ron Paul got in his Republican party also absolutely proves there is nothing at all libertarian about the Republicans. They are absolute failures when it comes to the government, and for a BRILLIANT analysis of this, please read Thomas Frank's brilliant and very readable book, The Wrecking Crew (can't praise it enough and in my mind Frank is now one of our best political writers/critics/analysts.)
So that led me to consider what had previously been unthinkable. What would happen if I voted Democratic? I had for so long been so immersed in the meme that Democrats were just low life thieves that at first the thought of voting Democratic was as appealing as dining on a smelly sock found at the bottom of a gym locker. But I still cautiously probed the idea, like putting a little toe in the water to see if it was to cold to get in.
I opened my mind little by little and realized that, indeed, there WERE many libertarian principles in the Democratic party. Democrats are always supporters of the right to your own mind (you can read and think what you want) and your body. The Republicans, which is now the party of religious fundamentalists, gets a failing grade in both of those.
I realized that even though Democrats and Libertarians will never agree on the role of government in our lives, they are strong brothers and sisters in the defense of personal, individual freedom, far far more than the Republicans. And personal freedom, the right to your mind and body, is a big deal. For me, it was the trump card. If I was a Libertarian and was debating whether to vote Libertarian or the "lesser of two evils", the Democratic vote would clearly be the better choice than the Republicans.
Okay, for a Libertarian, I was doing some pretty scary, borderline pornographic thinking here. But I decided to think further, push further.
One thing I was reminded of this summer (through a little mental experiment I performed) was how dearly I love people. I would never want to be without them, or to not be surrounded by them. The crowds of cities provide me with my most cherished and joyful life experiences.
So I began to think, if Democrats are going to not just allow, but vigorously defend the freedoms I most want, then what's the harm in voting Democratic? What's the deal breaker?
I realized that the deal breaker for Libertarians and Republicans is something I could never accept. Those two seem most to equate freedom with the right to keep their money and do with it what they want. Okay, I understand the logic of that.
But here's the deal. If I am allowed to live the kind of life I want, to think the way I want and to be the kind of sexual being I want (assuming consent and legal age limits), how is it that my life has all turned to Hell simply because a small amount of money was extracted from me (as a member of the national community) so that a child suffering with a brain tumor, say, can get some medical relief? How does helping that child (even if I didn't want to) just so ruin the society for me that I want to overturn all of it, just get rid of it and return to barbaric wilderness? All because some of my money is going to help a sick child.
And then came the big ticker. I realized that at their core, Libertarians and Republicans both are being dishonest. They live in a community, they are part of a community, they are enriched by that community, they benefit greatly from that community, but they conveniently do not acknowledge that. They act as if they are true, pure, stand alone individuals. They enjoy the comforts and protections offered by community while attributing all those benefits solely to themselves.
And finally I realized that the traditional Democratic vision is about as perfect as we are going to get on this imperfect earth. We get to live as free individuals, we get to start businesses and create wealth, read what we want and grow and expand how we want.
But we also acknowledge how enriched we are by the community we live in; we are enriched by being a member of the greater human race. And we have a debt to that community. We have a debt to each other because we all enrich each other.
The presence of others benefits each of us individually. And taking care of others, putting some of our money into the pot so that those who encounter misfortune can be helped and go on to live a good life is a way we pay back our debt to each other. I love the vision that includes both individualism as well as a recognition of how great the human community is and can be when we work together for a common cause. That, for me, is the essence of the Democratic vision. And that's why I'm a Democrat.