Growing Pains

 Some of you know my political backstory – I’ve written about it a time or two.  In 1994, disgusted by the GOP’s capitulation to Clinton on the 1994 Crime Bill along with George HW Bush’s reversal on taxes, I left the Republican Party and joined the Libertarians. 

Over the course of four years, I did what most libertarians do; thought big thoughts about liberty.  I also ran for office under the Big “L” banner – and did better than I thought I would.

But it was mostly thinking big thoughts.  Libertarians were big on debating principles, and even bigger on deriding those who, by their calculus, didn’t – or at least those whose principles weren’t drawn in as big, stark letters as their own seemed to be, to them and each other. 

I left the Big “L” after about four years.  I had – and have – principles. 

  • One of them is “don’t screw up the country, and try to prevent other people from screwing it up too bad”. 
  • Another?  A slight modification of Buckley’s Eleventh Commandment:  “Vote for the most acceptable candidate, from a fiscal, security and liberty perspective, that can win
  • One last one?  “Perfect is the enemy of good enough”.  If I eschew imperfect candidates – say, candidate who champion my principles 51%-85% of the time – then I’m doing my little bit to make sure someone who agrees with me even less, as in “0-15% of the time” (that’s the current, extremist version of the DFL’s track record) is actually running things.  Raising taxes.  Vacuuming my personal info into “MNCare”.  The whole nine yards.

 And I figured there was a better chance of doing my part toward that end, and actually having some effect in the great scheme of things, by working within an actual party that had a chance of doing something useful than via endless navel-gazing in the Libertarian echo chamber. 

And so I left the Libertarian Party – partly because the party line on foreign policy and national security is (I’ll be charitable) simplistic, but mostly because the Big “L” Party is never, ever, going to have anything to do with passing actual policy into law; the most it can ever hope for is to serve as a spoiler, taking liberty voters’ votes away from the other parties, mostly the GOP.

And in 15 years of varying involvement – from observer to amateur pundit to even-more-amateur activist – the party has come a long way.  In 1998, Arne Carlson’s legacy loomed large in the party; today, it’s virtually gone, and good riddance.  It’s been largely squeezed out (everywhere but in the media’s consciousness) by an uneasy, sometimes fractious assembly of business conservatives (who may or may not care about social issues or liberty), Tea Partiers (who focus on the “limited government” aspects of “liberty”) and, over the past couple years, “Liberty Republicans”. 

These last came to the party in 2012 as an organizational juggernaut that acted about as “libertarian” as a North Korean synchronized dance team – at least in terms of taking control of party functions and sending people to Tampa.  The best of them – the ones in CD4 were among ’em – brought with them the pragmatism that led to a couple of really promising campaigns.  The worst of them – I’m not naming names – left us a display of nihilistic principles-over-pragmatism that bordered on onanistic

None quite as dismal, thankfully, as the recent resignation by a group of libertarian Maine Republicans, who resigned in protest over…

…convention rules?

Walter Hudson has an excellent piece over at Fightin’ Words on this whole deeply dumb incident.  And I think there are lessons for both of the “sides” of the debate in the GOP – especially the “Liberty” clicque’s penchant for walking away from it all when the “establishment” doesn’t carry them up to the front of the room on their shoulders:

The critical failure which informs this move manifests from activists’ perception of the party as a servant which ought to work on their behalf, rather than a vehicle which must be actively steered in a desired direction. If I had a nickel for every time I heard an activist whine about the party not treating them well, as if that were its purpose, I’d be set for life…This common sentiment from libertarian activists completely absolves them of any responsibility for changing the party. Instead, they proceed from the rather absurd notion that Republicans ought to advocate views they do not agree with in order to earn libertarian support. That’s not how politics works.

Or, in many cases, endless prate and gabble about how stupid – racist, homophobic, war-mongering – Republicans are for not folding like a Wal-Mart end table. 

And then there’s this line’s first cousin – the “Under Thirty” crowd.  The GOP, we’re told, must embrace the Ron Paul Agenda in whole because so many under-thirty conservatives and Republicans are so very libertarian.   More on this next week.    

Libertarian Republicans need to dispense with the notion that their “individual integrity” is defined by the party’s compliance to a libertarian agenda. Holding the reigns of power in a party office does not mean you “support” every little thing anyone in the party says or does. If resignation remains the default response to any deficiency within the party, it only enhances the victory of those who remain.

Yep. 

Principles – or at least saying you have them, as opposed to having to defend them against a lifetime of real-world experience – are easy.  Convincing other people about them is not.

No one has ever “learned their lesson” from an activist resigning in protest. The concept ignores political reality and smacks of a narcissistic valuation of one’s political worth. “Oh, you resigned?! Well then, let me completely realign my entire worldview in order to get you back,” said no party officer or elected official ever.

And the corollary of that truth, as I’ve been saying for years; political parties don’t “learn lessons”.  They respond to the will of those who show up. 

Which is why I, and my impure mutt’s-breakfast of conservative and libertarian and pragmatic beliefs keep showing up.

Read Walter’s entire article, if you would please.

54 thoughts on “Growing Pains

  1. Good piece, Mitch. And Walter’s piece is good, too, as usual.

    I was LP for a time in my youth, but it never went anywhere for the reasons you’ve described. I’m about 85-90% on board with the things our libertarian friends believe, but the certitude and the snark that I get from discussing issues with them drives me absolutely nuts. I think the best thing a lot of libertarians could do would be to pick up two things the next time they are shopping in the Great Marketplace of Ideas, to wit:

    • a copy of Eric Hoffer’s seminal work “The True Believer”; and
    • a mirror

  2. Republicans are the party of old white people, and are going quietly into extinction, while happily lying to themselves, and each other.

    Meanwhile the rest of the world, centrist and left, just shake their heads and wait them out.

  3. FACT CHECK: A recent Gallup Poll showed that a strong majority of Americans actually strongly approve of conservative policies…

    …until they hear the “Republican” label applied to them.

    The problem isn’t that the country isn’t conservative. It is. The problem is that between its own missteps and a concerted two-generation-long media effort, the “R” word is polluted.

    DG, you seem to live in a world of your very own, where “sloganeering” is counted as “fact”.

  4. DG: Also – huh?

    Seriously – what does your little outburst have to do with the topic at hand?

    You don’t allow these sorts of deflections on “your” blog, do you?

  5. Capital-L Libertarians are not conservatives. Their agenda is as radically anti-human as a Marxist’s.

  6. Say, isn’t Dog Gone an old white person?

    if by the standards of the left being: white , entitled, over 30, a kulak possessed of excessive wealth, a class traitor, and ideologically skewed toward Stalin rather than than Trotsky, then yes DG is all those noxious things.

  7. Sad to see that this comment sections own resident racist, Miss Anne, also known as “Dog Gone”, comes by drop a racist turd on the 50th Anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” Speech.
    Sorry Dr King, we still have a long way to go before we rid this country of bigots like Miss Anne who judge others strictly by the color of their skin instead of the content of their character.

  8. The Libertarian agenda is anti-human? Care to provide a little support for that assertion?

  9. Those aren’t growing pains in the GOP, they’re a heart attack.

    The two parties are two heads on the same dragon, and all the fire-breathing from each merely provides a cloud of smoke, behind which the heads are winking at each other. Perhaps I’m a foolish dreamer, doomed to have no effect, though I could argue that those who have stayed in the cast iron belly of the beast have just as little to show for their efforts, judging by TARP, the NSA and billion dollar stadia. I was happy to be redistricted from Betty McCollum to John Kline, until I realized that their voting records were identical on the issues important to me.

    I didn’t, however, stamp my foot 20 years ago and leave in a huff with any illusion that it would make a difference or even be noticed. I did my two and half years back in the early 90s, serving in the BPOUs, as a state delegate, managing a campaign, lit-dropping and phone-banking and I knew full well when I stepped to the curb that the dragon parade was going on without missing a beat – while leaving metric tonnes of crap behind it.

    If one of the heads of the dragon gets schlerotic and withers, fine. The “brand” is hopelessly stained and torpedoed; it can only look “good” again in comparison to how poorly the other side mucks things up, but it doesn’t offer any hope for doing things any better. The public – ignorant and “low-information” as it may be – knows this. Every year, every election, the number of “insiders” operating the two-headed beast gets smaller, even as the money involved grows astronomically. They spend like mad, hoping to overcome the apathy, dangling raw meat and delivering only Cool Whip. The only real meat is the little ones inside getting ground into hamburger while being promised that some day they’ll get to hold the spatula if only they’ll just go along for now.

    Oh well, time for a shower.

  10. Mongrel cur reserves its hate for white men, but when it comes to babies, it’s an equal opportunity misanthrope. Kermit Gosnell loves it.

  11. As we have moved from Goldwater through Reagan to Bush and W, the Republican party has moved from a Libertarian party that welcomed Southerners (who disliked Washington liberals pushing their unwelcome views), to a party lead by Southerners eager to push their Southern views on the rest of the country. The Southerners need to return to the goal of being left alone to pursue their own ways, a view which is compatible with Western libertarianism. Half of the Republican coalition disliked Roe vs. Wade because it represented activist jurisprudence, not because they disliked abortion or thought it against God’s will. Only a coalition with the broad goal of being left alone in freedom (low taxes, low regulation, freedom to reform, less Washington, more state control) can recapture an American majority.

  12. a party lead by Southerners eager to push their Southern views on the rest of the country.

    John McCain and Mitt Romney had no comment.

  13. The Republicans have become a lazy party. There is about 30% of the country, we’ll all them the nativists, who like to be told how ‘others’ (race, religion, ethnicity, sex, whatever) are to blame for all that ails us. This has, unfortunately, become the Republican base. There is another 30-40% who dislike the way the Democratic Party operates, and will regularly vote against them. This second group will only vote for Republicans once, though, before switching back, if the Republicans actually have some ideas worth implementing while in office. The Republicans should be pushing reforms, which allow government to do more with less. Low taxes and small government should be the long-term goal, rather than the short-term crusade. Instead, they’re simply the party of budget cuts, which are sold to their base as cuts of benefits to those ‘others’, pleasing the nativists. Well, in California, and increasingly the rest of the country, there are so many ‘others’ that the Republican base is shrinking to nothing. And that middle third that regularly wants to slap down the Democrats increasingly feels that the Republicans are nothing but a way station on the way to a new set of Democrats. The Republicans themselves have little to offer. If the Republicans are stuck in this rut until they can move away from nativism and become a party of ideas for reforming government to make it leaner and smaller, yet still effective.

  14. mnbubba wrote:
    The Libertarian agenda is anti-human? Care to provide a little support for that assertion?
    Libertarians reduce men to rational actors. All things being equal, it is not human to see a person who is suffering from want and not feel an obligation to help them. Not a desire, not a sentimental wish, an obligation, from something outside the self.

  15. As we have moved from Goldwater through Reagan to Bush and W, the Republican party has moved from a Libertarian party that welcomed Southerners (who disliked Washington liberals pushing their unwelcome views), to a party lead by Southerners eager to push their Southern views on the rest of the country.

    This sounds like dorm-room talk, Emery.
    The Democrat party changed, radically, in the late 1960’s. It changed its rules to allow delegates to have a much greater say in shaping its platform and in choosing its candidates. The composition of delegates changed almost immediately from more or less average Americans (with a larger than average number of union reps) to hard-core leftists who felt alienated from the American main stream.
    This is why the party that chose Humphrey in 1968 chose McGovern in ’72. Occasionally the D’s have chosen a more centrist candidate for the presidency in order to win the election, but the hard-core, anti-American left is still choosing the agenda.
    1976 D Carter, R Ford.
    1980 D Carter, R Reagan
    1984 D Mondale, R Reagan
    1988 D Dukakais, R GHW Bush
    1992 D Clinton, R GHW Bush
    1996 D Clinton, R Dole
    2000 D Gore, R GW Bush
    2004 D Kerry, R GW Bush
    2008 D Obama, R McCain
    2012 D Obama, R Romney

    Please use common sense, Emery. The GOP is not in the habit of foisting reactionaries on the American people.

  16. In America’s two party system, the Democratic Party in the 20th century became the party of progressive politics, while the Republicans became the conservatives. There were two branches to that progressivism, the liberals and the socialists. The socialists dominated in the first half of the century, but the liberals came on strong 1960-1980 and achieved sweeping victories in minority and women’s rights as the baby boomers came of age. The socialists made much smaller gains in that period of Democratic dominance, and in the Republican counter-reformation that followed (led by Reagan), the Democrats defended the gains of liberalism successfully, but only by giving ground on the socialist side. For two generations the Democrats have been the party of personal rights and freedoms, and all of the Roosevelt socialists have died off. As a party striving for economic justice, redistributive taxation, and power to the workers, the Democrats totally lost their edge long ago. Blame the baby boomers. Until they no longer hold the keys to power, the Democratic Party will not have an effective political program for social justice. They’ve spent 30 years unsuccessfully trying to pretend that socialism and liberalism are the same things; well, they aren’t and to argue it makes them hypocritical. Meanwhile, the Republicans keep their illiberal base happy by fighting long-lost fights that they can’t win (e.g. abortion, school prayer, the drug war), while using the mantle of ‘economic freedom’ to attract enough of the liberal wing of the Democratic party to defeat any socialist initiative. The Democrats taught America to vote for freedom and rights. Reagan changed the definition of the words. We’re all still voting for freedom, but for the foreseeable future that will mean voting against strong government, higher taxes, and a social safety net.

    In supporting and winning the many battles for personal freedom (civil rights, women’s rights, abortion, gay rights, etc.) the Democratic Party created a mindset, which makes it very difficult to wage class warfare. Those fights for personal freedom made Americans very wary of an intrusive government, including the tax collector. An American who has grown up with tales of ‘the man’ trying to take ‘his rights’ finds it very easy to transfer those libertarian attitudes to resenting governments that regulate and redistribute wealth.
    Many Americans will oppose activist government on principle alone, even if it is against their economic interest. They learned to value individual freedom to pursue individual gratification from, you guessed it, the liberal left and the Democratic Party. This was the key political insight of Ronald Reagan. He turned the Republicans into the party of economic freedom, which appealed to many Democrats who reveled in their new personal freedoms. The Democrats have yet to work out how to be the party of individual freedom and rights while supporting stronger government, higher taxes, shared sacrifice and common benefits. Americans see that as hypocrisy. Many European socialist parties have been much more ambivalent about personal freedom (Britain’s Labor party, for instance) which in turn generates less dissonance.

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  18. Powhatan Mingo wrote:
    “Libertarians reduce men to rational actors. All things being equal, it is not human to see a person who is suffering from want and not feel an obligation to help them. Not a desire, not a sentimental wish, an obligation, from something outside the self.”
    So, is it your assertion that rationality is not human, or is it that an obligation to relieve suffering is not rational?

  19. mnbubba-

    Accepting no mystic “duties” or unchosen obligations, he [the disciple of causation] is the man who honors scrupulously the obligations which he chooses. The obligation to keep one’s promises is one of the most important elements in proper human relationships, the element that leads to mutual confidence and makes cooperation possible among men.

    Ayn Rand, “Philosophy, Who Needs It?”
    I hope you don’t need philosophy, ‘cuz instead you’re getting neo-Nietzschean claptrap.

  20. Mingo wrote:

    “Occasionally the D’s have chosen a more centrist candidate for the presidency in order to win the election, but the hard-core, anti-American left is still choosing the agenda.”

    Looking back, you have to go back to 1968 and Hubert Humphrey to find a Democrat Presidential nominee who wasn’t completely Looney-Tunes-Leftie.

    Humphrey would be a moderate Republican today, which makes the blood pressure of most lefties I know spray out their ears.

  21. Emery, almost everything you’ve written regarding the democrats is wrong.
    The split wasn’t between the ‘socialists’ and ‘liberals’, but the Old and the New Left, and the crisis year (in the US and Europe) was 1968. The Old Left was oriented towards the rights of labor, the new left towards marginalized social groups.
    This is basic history and poli-sci. It’s actually quantifiable.

  22. but the liberals came on strong 1960-1980 and achieved sweeping victories in minority and women’s rights as the baby boomers came of age.

    EmeryTheUSAHater, you lying sack of flaming poo. You think you can mask your lies by pretty umpteen hundred word screeds? Or are you that ignorant of historical facts and only get your marching orders from Marxists?

    the truth is that the 1964 Civil Rights Act saw strong Republican support. In fact, of the total number of Republicans then serving in Congress support never dipped below 70% on any of the final vote counts. The original House version got 80% GOP support, the Senate version got 82% and the final vote in the House was 82% of Republicans in support. On the other hand, Congressional Democrats never saw higher than 69% of its membership in support of civil rights for blacks.

    And who one of the leading voices in favor of passage? It was Illinois Senator Edward Dirksen, a Republican. Who was a leading voice opposing civil rights? Senator Robert Byrd, Democrat from West Virginia

  23. Colonel_Flagg-
    It should not be forgotten that Ted Kennedy — an alcoholic who deserted the military and who was expelled from Harvard for cheating, was a serious contender for the D presidential nomination (over incumbent Carter) in 1980. And, oh yeah, he killed a women.

  24. Powhatan Mingo:
    Again; are you asserting that rationality is not human, or that an obligation to alleviate suffering is not rational? Trotting out Ayn Rand is not going to help you – she is merely “a” Libertarian. I didn’t get the memo that requires me to view her as defining the program for everyone else.

  25. mnbubba:
    I wrote:”Capital-L Libertarians are not conservatives. Their agenda is as radically anti-human as a Marxist’s.”
    “Capital-L Libertarian” is accepted shorthand for Randian Objectivists (Rand invented the term).
    Small-L libertarians are people who believe in small government, or a government confined by natural law.
    I also wrote: “Libertarians reduce men to rational actors.”, by this I mean that, like Marx, Randian Objectivists deny that man has a metaphysical aspect.
    You need metaphysics to explain why it is right to make a sacrifice to help a person with no expectation of future reward.

  26. Y’know, maybe it’s not fair to say that Kennedy killed a women.
    Let’s say, instead, that he was out partying with a woman other than his wife, decided to take her for a ride, drove off a bridge into a pond, and abandoned her to die alone in the sunken car.
    Oh, and the following day he gave a statement to the cops. After he had heard that the body had been recovered.
    What a portrait in courage!

  27. Powhatan Mingo:
    With all due respect, you did not say “Capital ‘L’ Libertarians”; had you said “Randian Objectivists” in the first place, you would likely have saved both of us a bit of aggravation. I get my hackles up a bit because it is so common to see ridiculous strawman characterizations of libertarianism in the bolshie precints of Slate, Salon, TNR, the Atlantic, etc.
    As to your metaphysical argument, I do not think it at all unreasonable to posit a completely rational / evolutionary explanation for altruistic behavior based on expectations of reciprocity.

  28. mnbubba-
    We seem to have had a misunderstanding. I should have made myself clearer; Mitch’s topic was the LP, a Randian, Objectivist outfit to about the same extent that the GOP can be considered Constitutionalist.
    Rand’s 1964 Playboy interview: http://ellensplace.net/ar_pboy.html
    She uses the word ‘charity’ in its moral, especially Christian sense: giving to others with no expectation of reciprocity or of return on investment. Rand doesn’t like that.

  29. “Emery, almost everything you’ve written regarding the democrats is wrong.”

    Then by all means quantify. And please set aside your revisionist history. If you want to be a straight shooter, you need to learn to shoot straight.

  30. Powhatan Mingo:
    We’re good. I haven’t had enough boots on the ground experience with the LP to assert or refute that it’s Randian. For my own part, I have for years scrunched up my eyes, held my nose, and thrown up in my mouth as I (metaphorically) pulled the handle for the Rs.

  31. Right. Textbooks teach revisionist history.
    Look up ‘old left’ and ‘new left’, then talk to me.
    You have odd opinions on a number of topics, Emery. Not odd as in ‘seeing something from a new perspective’, but odd as in ‘half-educated’. For example, you seem to read economic blogs by financiers and academics, but you don’t know the proper terminology for certain things, like the Production Possibilities Frontier (PPF), that represents peak economic production given a set of inputs. You also do not seem to understand that keynesian economics modifies classical economics rather than replaces it, or the impetus and insights that drove Keynes to believe that classical economics must be modified to explain explicitly modern industrial economies.
    Its like reading comments on a scientific blog written by a guy who has read all the Scientific American articles on string theory and the latest multiverse theory, but who hasn’t taken enough basic physics to understand that a parabolic function describing the relationship between a dependent and independent variable implies that one of the variable values involves an acceleration.

  32. mnbubba-
    My favorite response to Libertarians who say that the poor should be looked after by charities and churches, is that I have yet to meet a Libertarian who did volunteer work for a church or gave money to a charity (okay, I’m exaggerating).

  33. That’s a great non-sequitur! Can I try?

    You have to be careful whenever you set yourself rules for automatic feedback control. Because of the limitations of economic statistics, the macroeconomic variables being controlled are of limited accuracy and are available only after a time delay. Changes to currency affect trade statistics in an inverse dynamic response, i.e. a move in the opposite direction followed by a greater move in the primary direction after a sizable time lag. Controlled systems with measurement delays, inverse responses and large response lags require sophisticated and conservative feedback control to avoid oscillatory behavior and loss of control. This would particularly be the case for small countries where the size of external trade shocks is proportionately larger, and thus the required response stronger.

    The state of the art of dynamic control theory was limited in Keynes’s day, and I suspect he knew little of the subject. From the economists I’ve met, it seems that the field relies on steady state equilibrium models rather than dynamic models. Few modern economists seem to know any more about dynamic control theory than Keynes did. While I am fan of economic management by rules whenever possible rather than by conjecture and opinions in smoke-filled back rooms, I would suggest that something a great deal more sophisticated than Keynes’s scheme would be required to try to implement his idea in practice.

  34. shades of peeve!

    emery said:
    “From the economists I’ve met, “

    a) how many of them were Noble Prize winners and
    b) how many of them are your neighbors down there in south Bloomington along the river? or
    c) did you meet them in an airport?

  35. Emery, All you’ve done is show that you know how servo loops operate. You seem to want to treat economics as an engineering task.
    The problem isn’t that “because of the limitations of economic statistics, the macroeconomic variables being controlled are of limited accuracy and are available only after a time delay”. This is the way an engineer would conceptualize the problem. It doesn’t work, because the feedback to the system is driven by individual human values, and these values are dynamic and cannot be controlled without reducing output to unity or less, at least in the long run.

  36. And Emery? You still haven’t convinced me that you understand basic economics, as in, ‘spending $1.00 to produce something and sell it for $0.97 will never happen because you will will instantaniously be swamped by buyers willing to spend $0.97 to get a dollar in value’. There is even a hoary economics joke about the idea:
    Two economists are taking a walk.
    The first economist says ‘Look! There is a twenty dollar bill someone dropped on the sidewalk!’
    The second economist says ‘There can’t be. If there were, someone would have picked it up already’.

  37. I have no doubt your skills are considerable and are valued within the field of Astrophysics. Although I think you should stick with “pointing telescopes” and try not pretend to be an economist.

  38. Look at the context of that Keynes aphorism, Emery.
    I may be the only conservative apologist for John Maynard Keynes. It is a lonely outpost, but well defended.

  39. I doubt that Emery is PB. It is very difficult, after a certain age, to change your vocabulary and writing style.
    If Emery is PB (what was his last name? Blake? Blaine?) I sincerely congratulate him. Well done, sir! PB always wrote as though English was his second language, and not in a Conrad or Nabakov sort of way.

  40. Born Canadian, I was exposed to both British and American English from an early age. Canadian English tends to fall somewhere in between. I find the notion that any version of English, clearly the most bastardized, polyglot, mixed up and blended language of all is either correct or incorrect is laughable. Just what do you propose to use as a standard to measure dialects against? The English spoken by our (recently German) Queen and her family? The Saxon, Angle, Celt or French Norman derivation? English is in the end empirical. There are at least 3 correct answers to every spelling/grammar/word usage questions, and having many correct answers is little different than having none.

  41. Emery,

    PB was a long-time troll on this site. Actually he’s a guy I’ve known for a solid 25 years, have worked with, and know to be a genuinely very good person and nice guy, face-to-face. He also gets a little exciteable online in a way he actually doesn’t in person – which is a fairly well-studied phenomenon in online human factors. I’ve banned a grand total of maybe ten people from this site in the past ten years – probably 5-6 of them were him.

    Anyway – for a few years there he’d leave rather lengthy and often extremely overheated comments. He’d leave ’em under a variety of pseudonyms – but his written style was pretty easily identifiable. As PM noted, it’s not like yours; if you were him, it’d be pretty amazing.

    “PB” was one of his monikers. It has nothing to do with his actual name. As I’ve pointed out in the past, if people ask to stay pseudonymous, I let them (although I’ll never fight a subpoena).

  42. Emery said:

    “Although I think you should stick with “pointing telescopes” and try not pretend to be an economist.”

    If only we all took our own advice.

  43. “Emery, almost everything you’ve written regarding the democrats is wrong.”
    Then by all means quantify. And please set aside your revisionist history. If you want to be a straight shooter, you need to learn to shoot straight.

    EmeryTheUSAHater, are you implying CRA voting facts I posted where incorrect? Care to debate how KKK came about? Or priovide a list of succesful Soci@list Utopias? Still on working on that, eh? Straight shooter you ain’t.

  44. Emery, it may be that the reason you are unfamiliar with the transition that both the GOP and the Democrats made in the late 60’s-early 70’s is because you were living in Canada at the time, and your school thought it was more important for you to learn to speak French than to learn about US current events.
    Before about 1976 you had GOP=business party, Democrats= labor party.
    After about 1976 you had GOP=working class whites, patriotism, pro-military, pro-religion, and Democrat=minorities, college-educated whites, internationalist in outlook.
    Recall that in 1972 both Nixon and McGovern had records of serving honorably in WW2. Neither made it part of their campaign, it was assumed that the patriotism of any party’s candidate was beyond reproach.
    All of this is so obvious it should not need to be stated, whether your point of view is liberal, conservative, or centrist.
    QED.

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