Get your own damn words!

Not content with having made off with the term liberal, the left is now attempting to commandeer the term libertarian.

To paraphrase Captain Picard:

We’ve made too many compromises already, too many retreats. They invade our party, and we fall back. They assimilate entire ideologies, and we fall back. Not again. The line must be drawn here — this far, no farther.

[Tongue slightly in cheek.]

I suppose in a way it’s flattering.

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5 Comments

  1. See Stewart on ‘The Kumars at Nr. 42’?

    He was a right hoot.
    As far as symbols go, they have a tendency to decay over time. Quite a bummer, the existential inability to define anything in an ultimately constant fashion…

  2. Gorgeous flick, that. Watched it many times.

  3. Co-opting the Libertarian ideals and perspective is SOP for both the big parties. Of course, they never take the ideals correctly, always twisting them in some fashion to shoehorn them into thier ideology so that they don’t threaten the basis of that ideology.

  4. Also see … The Libertarian Party’s Statement of Principles … Even before the word was corrupted, Libertarian thinkers were distancing themselves from the term Liberalism.  See how the term Liberal has moved from it’s roots to mean something different while maintaining the same presence and feel?

    My guess is, though I haven’t heard anything about it, is that to capitalize on Libertarian dissent with the Republican party, Democrats are attempting to paint themselves in the camouflage of Libertarianism.

    Libertarianism is the most true current name for the ideology that was the heart of the American revolution (and to a lesser extent the French revolution)… but that’s for another day!

    1. To be fair, both parties (and even the Greens!) periodically try to pass themselves off as the “natural” home of libertarians… especially in election years. Although the Republicans are having a harder and harder time making the case, what with watered-down free market support and their newfound identity as the party of the police state.

      I don’t know if there’s any organized attempt beyond electioneering to woo libertarians to the Democrat side; but there is a tradition of intellectuals trying to reconcile classical liberal ideals with their nanny-state tendencies – Noam Chomsky has called himself a libertarian, if I recall correctly.

      In fact, some “left-libertarians” have some very good points to make, and perhaps provide some needed balance to the party. John Perry Barlow is an example that comes to mind. I think it was the Illuminatus! trilogy in which someone said that the only difference between an anarcho-capitalist and an anarcho-communist is simply that the former thinks that, if left to their own devices, people would form themselves into a market system, whereas the latter thinks they would/should organize on more communalist lines.

      Thanks for your insightful comment. I think we could have some very interesting conversations.

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