In a comment on Booman’s questioning article regarding the recent intersection of heretofore separated political positions like those of Julian Assange, Ron and Rand Paul and Matt Drudge (Serious Questions), I posted the opinion that opposition to military meddling in foreign affairs would be the glue that cements a libertarian-based coalition of disaffected DemRats and RatPubs that could change the whole face of American politics as early as 2016. Booman poster centerfielddj replied:
There are major barriers that make this extraordinarily unlikely:
* Both types are greatly resistant to being led, even within their own types. Who is the leader or organization who could bring the two types together behind Federal candidates? Make your proposals. In order to have the impact in upcoming elections you wish for us to “bet on”, someone will have to bring them together. Movements need organization.
* The Occupy movement demands government action to increase regulation and decrease income inequality. The small-government movement is viscerally repelled by these proposals; in fact, they’re viscerally repelled by Occupiers. I’m wholly unconvinced that “foreign affairs” would bind their movements.
I started to answer this and my answer grew.
Here it is.
I got yer “Influential Libertarian.” Right here!!!
Recognize him?
It’s Jeff Bezos, new owner of the Washingtoon Post, on the cover of the Fortune 500’s pop biblemag Forbes.
He is…and has been for years…an avowed “libertarian,” although as has been the case with just about everything else in his life he has been very, very close-mouthed about it.
Consider the following complaint column…in the Washingtoon Post, I might add…from an old-line financial industry neolib regarding where Bezos stands politically.
A plea to learn about Bezos’s personal politics
By Allan Sloan, Published: August 15
When I first heard that Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com, was a libertarian, I laughed out loud, because I thought it was a joke. Bezos’s company, after all, is based on the Internet, which was created during the Cold War by a military research-and-development arm of the federal government, the Advanced Research Projects Agency. No Arpanet, no Internet. No Internet, no Amazon, no $25 billion personal fortune for Jeff Bezos.
Why am I writing about Bezos now? For exactly the reason you might suspect: because of his pending purchase of The Washington Post. Call me naive, if you like, but I think that if you’re going to own a high-class journalistic enterprise like The Post, whose job is to call powerful forces to account, you should expect to be called to account yourself.
But good luck trying to get that done when it comes to Bezos.
When I exposed the thesis of this column to Amazon, I couldn’t even get a response, much less an interview.
When Peter Elkind, a colleague of mine at Fortune magazine who spent months working on a must-read cover story called “Amazon’s (Not So Secret) War on Taxes” (June 2013 issue), tried to talk to Bezos about his business and personal philosophies, he was stonewalled. That, of course, was before Bezos’s deal to buy The Post surfaced.
If you check the numerous articles about Bezos — including Fortune’s 2012 businessperson-of-the-year story and the interviews that he’s done — you see that he ducks and weaves when he’s asked about libertarianism. But consider this anecdote, courtesy of Sheldon Kaphan, formerly Amazon’s chief technology officer, and Bezos’s first hire at the firm.
Kaphan says he once heard Bezos say, “If the government hadn’t invented the Internet, private enterprise would have done it.”
—snip—
Finally, I can’t forget what happened after Rupert Murdoch bought the then-upscale New York Post from its liberal owner, Dorothy Schiff, in 1976. Murdoch assured the paper’s staff that he’d retain the Post’s essential character as a serious newspaper. And we all know how that turned out.
Disclosure: I am a retiree of and own stock in The Washington Post Co., and The Post pays Fortune for the right to run my work.
Sloan is Fortune magazine’s senior editor at large.
Now consider this:
If Bezos steers the Post in a “libertarian” direction…probably with a Democratic Party lean (It can be done…watch.)…then D.C. will have not one but two powerful newspapers with libertarian leanings. The Washington Times will work on stirring up the Republicans and the Post will lean on the Democrats.
Or…consider this survey of “libertarianism” from The Atlantic:
America’s Libertarian Moment
Molly Ball
Libertarianism is on the march. From the rapid rise to prominence of first-term Senator Rand Paul to the state-level movements to legalize gay marriage and marijuana, the philosophy of fiscal conservatism, social liberalism, and restrained foreign policy seems to be gaining currency in American politics. But it’s nothing new, of course. (New York Times Magazine, 1971: “The New Right Credo: Libertarianism.”) A lonely band of libertarian thinkers have been propounding this philosophy since the 1960s, when the late thinker Murray Rothbard published his first book, Reason magazine was founded, and, in 1974, Rothbard teamed up with Charles Koch and Ed Crane to found the Cato Institute, one of Washington’s most influential think tanks.
David Boaz, Cato’s executive vice president, has been with the organization since 1981, giving him a good perch to put the current libertarian vogue in perspective. In an interview this week, we talked about the political currents propelling libertarianism into the political mainstream, the Supreme Court’s libertarian turn, whether Paul will be our next president, and much more. This is an edited transcript of our conversation.
Is there a libertarian moment happening in America?
Libertarian ideas — and I’m never using a capital L [i.e., referring to the Libertarian Party] when I say that; in this case I don’t even mean consciously libertarian, so not just the people who read Reason magazine and Murray Rothbard and call themselves libertarians — libertarian ideas are very deeply rooted in America. Skepticism about power and about government, individualism, the idea that we’re all equal under the law, free enterprise, getting ahead in the world through your own hard work — all of those ideas are very fundamentally American. Obviously, from a libertarian point of view, America nonetheless has done a whole lot of things, from slavery to Obamacare, that offend some number of those libertarian values, but the core libertarian attitude is still there. And a lot of times when the government suddenly surges in size, scope, or power, those libertarian attitudes come back to the fore.
I think that’s what you’re seeing. I think you’re seeing a growth of self-conscious libertarianism. The end of the Bush years and the beginning of the Obama years really lit a fire under the always-simmering small-government attitudes in America. The TARP, the bailouts, the stimulus, Obamacare, all of that sort of inspired the Tea Party. Meanwhile, you’ve simultaneously got libertarian movements going on in regard to gay marriage and marijuana. And I’ll tell you something else that I think is always there. The national media were convinced that we would be getting a gun-control bill this year, that surely the Newtown shooting would overcome the general American belief in the Second Amendment right to bear arms. And then they pushed on the string and it didn’t go anywhere. Support for gun control is lower today than it was 10 or 15 years ago. I think that’s another sign of America’s innate libertarianism.
This year you have a whole series of scandals that at least call into question the efficacy, competence, and trustworthiness of government. The IRS, maybe the Benghazi cover-up, and the revelations about surveillance. All of those things together, I think, have lit a fire to the smoldering libertarianism of the American electorate.
None of which necessarily means that there’s a libertarian majority that will sweep Rand Paul to the White House or anything like that. But there are a lot of people who care a lot, and a lot more people who care some, about these things, and a majority of Americans think our taxes are too high, a majority of Americans think the federal government spends too much, a majority of Americans think it was a mistake to get into Iraq. A bare majority of Americans now favor gay marriage, a bare majority favor marijuana legalization, a huge majority think there should be a requirement to balance the federal budget. So if you’re a presidential candidate you don’t call yourself a libertarian and run on Murray Rothbard’s book, you run on those issues. And on those issues, you find a lot that a majority agrees with.
What is the significance of Rand Paul to this discussion?
Rand Paul is clearly the most significant libertarian-leaning American political figure in a long time. There are a couple of issues I disagree with him on, but when you look at issues that cut across left-right boundaries, like his interest in reduced spending, less regulation, reining in our adventurous foreign policy, protecting America’s rights against surveillance — that’s a combination of issues that libertarians have waited a long time to find together in one candidate. I think he can have a lot of appeal. A lot of libertarians, including those who came out of the Ron Paul movement but also others, are very interested in seeing how far his political ambitions might take him.
How does libertarianism figure into the war of ideas that’s going on in the Republican Party? Is the GOP poised to embrace libertarianism?
I think they’re poised to debate it. Rand Paul is going to be in the middle of the people debating the future of the Republican Party. Rand Paul has said he doesn’t call himself a libertarian; he calls himself a libertarian Republican, small L-capital R, and he does sometimes say that the party needs to move in a more libertarian direction to broaden its appeal to young people and independent voters.
One of the things Ron Paul’s campaign showed was that a lot of young people who were not Republicans were interested in these ideas. But [as a Republican politician] you either have to get those people into Republican primaries or you have to get the nomination for that to do you any good.
Rand Paul’s supporters believe as soon as he starts to look like a contender, the establishment is going to see him as a threat and try to destroy him.
There are all sorts of Washington establishments who are going to want to take down Rand Paul. The spending establishment is certainly not going to like what he’s talking about. The Republican political establishment doesn’t particularly want to change. And certainly the national security establishment is extremely eager not to debate our policy of global interventionism. They have always sought to rule out of bounds any challenge to it.
They tried it in the Republican primary in Kentucky [in 2010]. The neocons organized one of their emergency committees to stop Rand Paul in the primary. I think they will continue to do that.
And yet some libertarians have started to criticize Rand Paul for going squishy as he tries to appeal more to the GOP mainstream.
If you want a pure libertarian to run for president, you’ve got the Libertarian Party. If you think the Libertarian Party’s candidates aren’t pure enough, you can write in Murray Rothbard. When we talk about a U.S. senator running for president, you are talking about the real world of politics. Nobody is going to be a doctrinaire Ayn Rand libertarian. Rand Paul has rounder edges than his father. He has a number of other advantages over his father: He’s not 77 years old; he’s a not a House member, he’s a senator; and he has rounder edges in the way he presents libertarian ideas. There may even be issues on which they actually disagree, though I’m not sure I can think of one.
Well, Rand Paul says he would audit the Federal Reserve, not end it as his father promised to do.
Does he, in his heart, believe in ending the Fed? I believe he does. But the next president is not going to get rid of the Fed. If we can audit the Fed — and, more important to me, we can rein in the incredible powers the Fed seized in 2008 and put some governor in control of the creation of new money — we will have accomplished a lot.
Rand Paul is also strongly against abortion rights, which many libertarians disagree with. What is the libertarian position on abortion?
I don’t think there is a libertarian position on abortion. There was a study done by a graduate student at UCLA that found that about two-thirds of people you would identify as libertarian are pro-choice. From a philosophical perspective, libertarians generally believe the appropriate role of government is to protect life, liberty, and property. The question is, is forbidding abortion a way of protecting life, or should it be viewed as a restriction of liberty? There’s a plausible libertarian case on both sides. People who are consciously libertarian are more respectful of the other position on abortion, in my experience, than most pro-lifers and pro-choicers. I do not think there is an official position.
—snip—
Is this part of the attraction of young people to libertarianism — that it seems to stand outside partisanship, in a pure, consistent way?
I think that’s true. I think having a consistent principle that organizes all these issues was very helpful for Marxism, and I think it’s also an attraction of libertarianism. It may also be that on a gut level, there are a lot of people who like not being a Democrat or a Republican. Millions of Americans — 59 percent, according to one poll — would tell you they are fiscally conservative and socially liberal, and that’s a real loose definition of libertarian. We consider those people to be a large constituency that libertarians should be able to access. Especially for young people, saying, “Nobody tells me what to say, I’m not a partisan Democrat or Republican,” is attractive. To see Ron Paul, in the Republican primary debates, clearly challenging the things the rest of the Republicans were saying, but also clearly not a Democrat.
—snip—
Can someone like Rand Paul win a national election? Won’t he get painted as weak on national defense by his political opponents?
It’s not clear that a strongly libertarian, noninterventionist program could command a majority. But I think a mildly noninterventionist retrenchment, and [proposing to] do a better job of protecting people’s privacy, could be a viable political alternative. I do think the reaction to the NSA spying and Americans’ weariness with the wars in the Mideast is changing that game.
—snip—
I keep hearing about libertarian Democrats out West, like [Senator Jon] Tester and [former Governor Brian] Schweitzer in Montana — they’re good on privacy issues and gun rights. [Oregon Senator] Ron Wyden is doing a great job on privacy even though I disagree with him about other things. [Texas Rep.] Beto O’Rourke spoke at a conference of ours on drug policy in Latin America. I assume on other issues he’s a standard big-government Democrat, but he does want to change the drug war. [Colorado Rep.] Jared Polis is a guy who I think is very interested in personal freedom and civil liberties issues.
—snip—
Think on all of this.
You be bettah off.
Or of course…continue your kneejerking responses as dictated by the already way-behind-the-curve PermaGov media.
Your choice.
Sort of.
Genetics will always out, though. If the majority of Americans are genetically set up to clomp-clomp-clomp through life in service to the PermaGov media then that’s what’s going to happen. I do not believe that this is true, however.
We shall see.
Soon enough.
2016 will begin telling the tale.
2020? That’s when the eyesight will clear up.
Or not.
As you will.
Or of course, as you were or as you are.
Your choice.
WTFU.
Over and out.
AG
