Have libertarians blinded themselves by their own arrogance (and arrogance-created Bush hatred), thus rendering themselves unable to see what is really going on?
It's entirely possible. The Libertarian Party has always been immature, stubbornly flaunting unpopular positions, then insisting they are right and all the millions of people who choose not to vote for them are wrong, finally whining that they deserve more news coverage. This is equivalent in principle to a business organization using branding and packaging practices which consumers detest, then screaming for a subsidy because nobody buys their product.
Like adolescent teenagers, LPers have remained hell-bent on alienating as many as possible in order to egoistically prove their independence, their uniqueness, their "difference" from others ... a pattern of behavior requiring blindness to reality. Thus we constantly see LPers working against their own best interests, such as their willingness to allow the communist-leaning Barack Obama to win the American Presidency. (See Obama's Communist Friend and Guru.)
A third party need not sabotage itself into constant failure. In fact, a third party in today's world can be exceedingly successful by learning that hatred doesn't work, bad-mouthing Democrats and Republicans is a form of self-sabotage, and success is assured by identifying what people really, really, really want (not security of the body, but freedom of the spirit) ... and giving it to them.
If you are so blinded by hatred that all you can say is "Bush is an emperialist and Republicans are war mongers," then you are not offering Republicans freedom. All you are offering them is the imprisonment of the box you have created in your mind and herded them into. Now you have lost their good will ... and of course their votes.
And being a libertarian, you sure as hell aren't going to easily get votes from people who have identified with the Democratic Party who, like Barack Obama, want a bureaucratically-controlled government-forced utopia where nobody is allowed to do anything "unhealthy," where people are spiritually dead because only the well-being of bodies means anything.
A successful third party needs to recognize that people's spirit is more important to them than their bodies, needs to speak to people's spirit by speaking the language of love, and needs to welcome their spirit by not holding them in contempt because of their current political leanings.
Is it too much to ask LPers to let go of their egos and join with everyone else in the world in order to assure success? We don't think so, which is why we offer Course in Political Miracles
But wait a minute. If libertarians are willing to join with others, then they will have given up their hatred and opened their eyes to seeing Republicans with an entirely new perspective. Then why reinvent the wheel? Why struggle with a third party when the Republican Party is ripe for the picking?
Wouldn't it be funny if all it takes for libertarian success is a little love and a little willingness to see things differently?
"Never forget the world the sightless 'see' must be imagined. And what it really looks like is unknown to them. They must infer what could be seen, from evidence forever indirect, and reconstruct their inferences as they stumble and fall because of what they did not recognize, or walk unharmed through open doorways that they thought were closed. And so it is with you. You do not see. Your cues for inference are wrong, and so you stumble and fall down upon the stones you did not recognize."
~ Jesus Christ (A Course in Miracles)
Available free online:
Course in Political Miracles
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Comments
With respect, it isn't. The media blackout Ron Paul experienced was a willful suppression of coverage of a candidate and movement that deserved that coverage on the merits. The LP is claiming only that it likewise deserves appropriate journalistic attention, and that it has been likewise suppressed.
It is the establishment's structural suppression of all alternative political movements (be they inside or outside the major parties) that is the issue. The latest attempt to take over or transform the Republican Party will fail, for the obvious 3 reasons that
1) Unless you are the Son of God, you can't revive a corpse. If the LP has failed electorally for 35 years to reverse the unconstitutional trend, is the answer really to be found in a party that has failed LEGISLATIVELY to reverse things for 70 years??? The GOP is dead, RIP.
2) New political wine and old party wineskins don't go together. There is no historical example of an OLD, established party being transformed from within by insurgent forces (the neocon's dominance in the GOP doesn't count, their supremacy was establishment fostered and approved). But there is a precedent for a third party replacing an old party, when the GOP succeded the Whigs. The GOP WAS a third party, thus proving minor parties can prevail---one must re-invent the wheel, when the old one is broken.
3) ONE MUST HAVE WALKING POWER. Staying in the dead Republican Party no matter what guarantees being co-opted or neutered by that entity, unless one demonstrates the integrity to walk away from it, and make it crawl to get back your support. The insurgent group has NO leverage to compel change if it cannot genuinely threaten to leave it and cost it votes. The leverage shifts to the establishment if it knows the alternative faction is not serious enough about loyalty its own beliefs to choose them over loyalty to a party.
For these reasons, I choose to pursue change through the LP. Maybe we won't win much electorally, but will at least be under no delusions that nearly a century of legislative failure in a 'major party' is somehow superior.