Sarah Palin, libertarian

UPDATE: I’m not the only one thinking about this.

I’ve been thinking about the surprise announcement of Sarah Palin yesterday. It has stimulated a huge amount of speculation on both left and right. Both left and right wing blogs have long comment sections on posts about her announcement. Why did she do it ? There are a number of speculations. Certainly, she has been subject to an unbelievable amount of abuse, much of it obscene and/or delusional. Andrew Sullivan, for example, has ended whatever credibility he had remaining on the right by his fascination with the birth of Trig Palin. The David Letterman slur was obscene but that is not the worst of the harassment. She has been deluged with frivolous ethics complaints, none of which has been upheld but she and her husband have $500,000 in legal bills to pay. Even mainstream Democrats have been frothing at the mouth.

Some of the speculation is that the harassment has convinced her to quit politics. I would not blame her if that were true. There is another possibility, however. The other phenomenon of this spring has been the Tea Parties. They have also been an object of derision by the left. The left has called them “teabagging parties,” a reference to homosexual jokes about oral sex. At first, participants used the terms interchangeably being unaware of homosexual jokes. The political left is far more familiar with homosexual terminology, especially when it is scatological.

Though supported by Republican think tanks, it is a grass-roots movement comprised of independents, conservatives, and libertarians, many say. Few attending these events have protested before, says Donalsonville, Ga., organizer Becky Worsham, adding, “A common joke at our first one was, ‘Gosh, I’ve never protested anything in my life, and this feels pretty good.’ ”

The protesters’ concern, she says, is that Washington “will really bring our country down to where we’ll no longer be a superpower.”

The April 15 protests

As many as half a million people attended the April 15 protests, according to the conservative Pajamas TV network. Events ranged from amateurish to professional: One in Atlanta featured massive TV screens and professional bands, while another in Lake City, Wash., drew only two dozen protesters.

The significance of this movement is still not established but it could be important.

Many Republicans, including this one, are tired of the weakness of our candidates who, once elected, choose the same big spending, big government pathway to electoral success. This occurs even at the local level and the Bush Administration did little to rein in the big spending Republican Congress. The result was an inability to distinguish the two parties on the issue of big government and the loss of the majority in 2006. Now, there is a level of despair in Republican circles I haven’t seen before. The closest thing to it is the aftermath of the Nixon resignation.

There are many, many – many – Americans who are no longer impressed with the qualities even the smartest political pundits consider essential in our politicians. We’ve had all the politicians who do everything the way they are supposed to – and their record is inexpressibly unimpressive. Many people have reached the point of saying, Don’t tell me only a politician who follows your set of rules is good for me. The rule-followers are the ones who have given us a national deficit so colossal we almost certainly can’t recover from it without severe economic dislocation – and an anomic, irresponsible, ignorant, and yet irrationally arrogant electoral demographic that voted Barack Obama into office, and threatens to make sure that government of, by, and for the people shall, if they have anything to do with it, perish from the earth, by next Thursday – and covered in a “Townhall” by ABC.

What we are enduring today is the America that the politics-as-usual rule-followers have delivered for us. It is far from unreasonable to recognize that having a comfortably conventional political profile, one that pleases Charles Krauthammer and Rick Brookhiser, is no indicator that a politician will guard constitutionalism, limitations on government, and individual liberty.

I wonder if the next trend is one of libertarian revision, either within the party or as a third party. I also wonder if Sarah Palin sees this, as well. She really governed Alaska as a libertarian, given the level of federal control of the state’s economy. For example, she vetoed a bill that would have banned benefits for gay partners. Although that source grumbles that she was reluctant, that is just left wing politics.

In 1856, the Whig Party, which had been formed to support business interests and the development of new territory (by building roads and canals), collapsed because the members could not resolve the issue of slavery. There were southern slave owning members, as well as northern abolitionist members. The Compromise of 1850 had postponed the issue but by 1856 the party was over. From the shell of the Whigs came the abolitionist Republican Party than won the presidency in 1860. Might we be seeing something like this happening to the Republicans now ?

Dennis Hastert is largely responsible for the failure of George W Bush to veto spending bills as deficits piled up. Hastert convinced him that the key to continued Republican control of Congress was spending and improved relations with lobbyists, the so-called “K Street Project.” Unfortunately for this theory, Democrats are the natural allies of lobbyists and will always outbid Republicans in spending. Hastert’s own seat in Congress was lost to a Democrat in 2008, partly because of local scandals about Hastert’s family connections.

Might there be a libertarian future for the Republican Party ? They have to do better than the British Conservative Party which seems unable to represent traditional values voters in their concerns about the decline in patriotism and family values. Even feminists who might be considered opposed to Sarah’s positions, may rebell at the abuse she has received. We’ll see how that works out.

At the end of the Thatcher years Britain was transformed. Europe’s sickest economy had become its strongest. The recipe had been low taxes. Simple taxes. Effective regulation. Privatisation. Free trade. Reform of the trade union movement. Intolerance of inflation.
They were necessary things to have done and I don’t say that lightly. They saved Britain from terminal economic decline.?? But somehow they didn’t create a nation that was quite at ease with itself. Margaret Thatcher knew that herself and used her memoirs to regret that she hadn’t been able to initiate ‘Social Thatcherism’.

We know how that feels. We still have a greater pool of traditional values in the population than Britain, which has suffered from years of Labour progressive education. Here, education is still local although George Bush and Ted Kennedy tried to make it national. What we have now is the financial quagmire that has engulfed Britain and is engulfing us. What we need is libertarian reform, either within the Republican party or without it. Maybe Sarah Palin sees this, too.

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