I saw this humorous graphic on facebook this morning. I actually laughed out loud it was so absurd. Then I went to the LP facbook page (Washington DC) to ensure it came from them, which it did. I guess we could call it LP propaganda? It’s a graphic designed to show us all how AWESOME Libertarians are. They are pretty awesome, except when it comes to graphics like this one.
Now I’m assuming that the stuff in blue is lefty thought, those in red–are for the right, with the Libertarian party (on facebook at least) staking out a solid middle ground between the two, at least in this contrived configuration, and disavowing those issues they declare as legitimate for both sides–as defined by them–that are outside the lines defined for ‘Libertarians believe in.’
But when I look at this I don’t see awesome, all I see is ignorance. Case in point: Libertarians believe that people on the left believe in personal freedom?
Bwahahahahaha!
Leftist have a tolerance of other’s personal choices? For ending corporate welfare? Civil liberties and privacy? Are you kidding me? I Know Libertarians believe that, but people on the left as a whole?
Tell me this graphic is some kind of joke. That The Onion produced this as a gag. Please?
And Separation of Church and state? Where is that in the Constitution? Or has the Libertarian Party (or just their facebook page) decided that it is acceptable to give credibility to the lefts dishonest narratives if it might grow their own ranks?
I guess I have to ask. Are their libertarians who think the left is interested in defending personal freedom when it tells you not to smoke, what to eat, what you can’t drink, what you should drive, how much salt or fat, where you should set your thermostat, if you can have or carry a gun, and why you must sacrifice as much of your labor or wages as they require to regulate anything and everything they feel the need to centrally plan and manage. Where is the personal freedom in that?
Tolerance? The only tolerance the left has is for those who support what the left stands for and even that leash is very short. Calling someone a misogynist, racist, bully, or bigot is more than acceptable when the object of the derision is a political opponent or a party member who wanders off the progressive plantation, but never one of their own in good standing with the party agenda. I hope that is not the kind of tolerance LP is looking to emulate?
As for corporate welfare, newsflash. Corporate socialism and socio-economic elitism are the foundation of the left wing progressive ruling class, built by the aggressive application of corporate welfare and cronyism. A true Leftist could no more end corporate welfare than it could stop being intolerant of violating our personal freedom as a function of its necessary regulatory superstate. In fact, the use of the term corporate welfare by the left is limited almost exclusively for the purpose of its intolerant application against those with the means to threaten them or their statist agenda.
As for the people on the right…
I am a ‘people on the right.’ I do not believe in Nation Building. I do not support taxpayer funding of faith-based charities–though I do support their tax exempt status; nor do I support special treatment for select corporations. The use of “War on Drugs,” I assume, means the massive bureaucratic police state created to engage in oppressive anti-drug policy but I do not accept that this is an idea of the right. It is an idea of government, supported at great expense by progressives on all sides–no less Democrats than Republicans. War as a call to acts of social justice has always been an idea of the left.
Speaking as a conservative, I accept that too much emphasis is applied to the mission of drug enforcement and that it is abused to grow government, but at the same time there are still some drugs that risk adding costs to society that the people should express some interest in limiting to some degree….which brings us to Government regulated morality.
There is no such thing as a law or regulation that does not represent the expression of someones idea of morality. Be it one supported by the left, the right, or the Libertarian, law is morality defined by society. That is entirely the point of law.
Perhaps the author meant religious morality? Here’s another news flash. The left controls a wide range of social justice theologies that actively promote the imposition of religious ideas to advance statist goals. And yet the right is tagged with government-regulated morality and the left gets separation of church and state–which as an idea presumes that the government itself is the only true arbiter of morality, which must then provide for the prescience of the ‘morality’ of relativistic-majority-rule politics and a form of tyranny no different than the oligarchy of factionalized direct-democracy. If that is, in fact, what the author was implying so poorly.
So what is more ridiculous? This graphic or the fact that almost 9500 sheeple have shared it?
Or is it that someone in the libertarian party has swallowed the lefts narratives so completely as to be an active vehicle for advancing their media campaign against the right? Or do they as a party actually believe any of this about the left…or the right?
You know, some of the lower information readers who see this will never think past what they are shown. They will not question the veracity, nor will they consider the layers of incongruity. They may even regurgitate that the right is just a bunch of theocratic neo-con-one-percenters. That all on the left want to ban guns. How tolerant is that given that it is not true?
There are also those who will wrongly believe that all Libertarians actually accept this as how the right and left are divided. That while there are progressives in both parties, not every Democrat wants to ban guns. They are not all in favor of gambling, open drug policy, or even abortion–which I can only assume is part of what is implied by the left and libertarian embrace of personal choice, civil liberties and privacy-even though abortion is nothing other than extinguishing a human heartbeat for being inconvenient. (Sorry for this stick in the eye but those who support abortion, when it comes to terminating the unborn, what happened to the libertarian idea of being responsible for your own actions? You get a waiver on that one?)
Most of the libertarians I know, getting back to the point, will laugh at the very same things about which I’ve observed here. They will agree that this graphic is far too vague to be anything but misleading. And I know that there are Democrats who think this graphic is just as stupid and misleading from their perspective, and in some respects it is. Some will defend it as “just a tool” to give you a general idea…
Well it is a bad tool and it does neither my libertarian friends, nor their ideas justice. It makes them look like tools and fools willing to screw ideas down into meaningless (and misleading) slug lines to add names to the party roster by carving out a disingenuous ideological middle. And I think we will agree that the Libertarian Party Facebook page, whomever that represents, has done a great disservice by posting this.
No, they are not the only ones who do this sort of thing. I’m sure we all do it. But this badly?
So how was it received by the facebook community? There are over 10,000 comments so far. That’s impressive. I’m actually kind of excited that it attracted this kind of attention. But I did not attempt to read more than a few dozen. I hope it has been properly fisked. And sure, there may be more than a few clarifications or mea-culpas hiding in there and some great parsing and analysis; kudos if there are. But I hope we do not see more of the same sort of graphic in the future–not even as a social media tool to attract comments. There is a great service being provided by the LP, and state and local groups like it, particularly in attracting younger people to pro-liberty politics; promoting smaller government and personal liberty, making in-roads on campus and coordinating with other groups on the real right.
And no, I do not see how aiding the progressive left in any way, as this seems to do by claiming favorable ground there, will advance the more important goals of smaller governnment, Federlism–state soverignty, or personal repsonsibility; Libertarians committed to real liberty in our lifetimes need to be careful about how they seek commmon ground with left, not because it does not exist, but because in his example, they are selling progressive narratives about the right while giving the left favorable credit for ideas they are actually intent on destroying.
