That's a good thing. A successful modern libertarian nation has never existed. Libertarians contend that's because it has never been tried. They've got a point. It is often said that the Tea Partiers and the libertarians wish to repeal the New Deal, and return the country to the system it had before that. Actually that does not go back nearly far enough. Libertarianism will repeal the income taxes first begun to fund the Great War, as well as the trust busting and worker-consumer protections initiated by the first Roosevelt. The national parks date back to the post Civil War era, as do massive government subsidies as per the federal sponsoring of the transcontinental railroad. Come to think of it, that federal effort to prevent the succession of the southern states was against libertarian theory, as was the war against Mexico, the wars on AmerIndians, and the purchases of the Alaska and the LouisianaTerritories. We are talking about going back to 1800 here.
So basically what we are supposed to do is rewind the economic governance of these United States back to what it was before that taxpayer abusing progressive President Jefferson misappropriated the citizens hard earned dollars and bought a lot of land that Napoleon claimed to own. And then hope for the best. Fortunately we can get an idea of whether that's likely to turn out to be a good idea by comparing the performance of the advanced democracies. Those on the right often try to distort the debate by portraying the decision that America must make as a black and white choice between either full blown American free enterprise or wholesale Eurosocialism. The reality is that all 1st world nations have hybrid economies that combine extensive capitalism with considerable socialism there are lots of small businesses and big corporations in Sweden and Denmark -- with American Exceptionalism stemming from its emphasis on capital over socialism even thought the latter involves a few trillion dollars per annum. If the thesis that libertarian economics produce superior results are correct then the most liberty-based example should enjoy the greatest societal success while the progressive countries wallow in chaos and failure. For your convenience I have constructed the Successful Societies Scale, the most comprehensive comparison of socioeconomic conditions in the 1st world to date (http://www.epjournal.net/filestore/EP07398441_c.pdf). The results show that although America performs well in some regards, in most respects the most progressive countries enjoy the best societal conditions in history. One reason for the pattern is that truly universal health care systems (which do not need to be single payer) have proven far most cost effective than free market health care (saving each citizen a quarter of a million over a lifespan) while reducing adult and juvenile mortality below the American level (click here). So the data shows that the progressive mix of approximately equal doses of capitalism and socialism, not the extreme socioeconomic Darwinism of libertarianism, is the way to go.
Which returns us to the practical point of this essay. In their Quixotic attempt to rule the nation libertarians have to get elected to office. And there's their problem. Not only are the bulk of Americans not libertarian, the TP movement is itself divided. A good many are all for the ideology across the board. But another big segment is the social conservatives who favor only the economic side of liberty. So when an ardent libertarian runs for office they are in a bad bind. Libertarians proudly proclaim themselves to be people of principle who disdain pragmatists who carefully adjust their views to suite the popular mood. So they should openly and proudly proclaim their libertarianism when they up for election. But they know if they do that they are electoral dead meat in nearly all the country. Outright libertarianism is not a barrier to office only in parts of the west, New Hampshire and Maine where the locals are conservative but tolerant of cultural free choice. That's a few percent of the national population, not nearly enough to take over the country. Even in most conservative districts the social conservatives will nail them. So they usually have to be stealth candidates, revealing only enough of their economic libertarianism to attract the conservative base, hoping the voters do not catch on to the rest of their agenda before the vote is tallied. When cornered they often try to avoid directly answering by posing "interesting" intellectual points, such as if liberals really think restaurateurs must by law accommodate all comers regardless of race and so forth don't they have to allow law abiding patrons to carry firearms, followed by a denouncement of bigotry, while not acknowledging that of course such laws violate individual liberty, duh. That is exactly what Rand Paul was hoping to pull off until Rachael Maddow launched her spread of verbal torpedoes and scored a direct hit.
So the mission for those opposed to the liberts and the TPs is to Maddow them. To expose them by asking the pertinent questions. One reason the right has been as successful as they have been since Obama took over is because of a failure of the mainstream press, and of liberal commentators, to better reveal what these good folks actually think. So ask the strategic questions and do the expository investigations. Make sure that the Tea Partiers know that the libertarian candidate they are supporting is pro-choice, favors access to contraceptives, the right to be a prostitute and use hard drugs, thinks networks should have the liberty to broadcast profanity and show people having sex and the like. That should peel off some of his TP and other conservative base. Also let the mainstream electorate know that the libertarian thinks Yosemite should be turned over the private interests, that there should be no minimum wage, that the part of the Civil Rights Act pertaining to private businesses ought to be repealed, that Wall Street needs to be free to do whatever they want and his access to the centrist vote is degraded. If the libertarian candidate openly admits to the more peculiar side of his beliefs then he shoots himself in the electoral foot. If he obfuscates like Paul did then he shoots himself in the other foot because he is now exposed as more calculating than principled, yet does not entirely manage to deny the oddity of his views. It's a lose-lose situation for the Tea Party crowd.
The Republican elite is smart enough to comprehend that the TP movement is a double-edged sword that for all its short term positives has the potential to do the party a lot of long term harm. That's why they did all they could to defeat Rand Paul and are diving for cover as the nation begins to learn more about his deep libertarianism. But it's too late, matters have gotten so out of hand that the GOP elite has actually lost control of their organization. It used to be said that FoxNews was an organ of the Republican Party but this has never been precisely accurate, and in the search for ratings based revenue the libertarian Murdoch's cable network and talk radio are setting the agenda for the Republican Party by persistently egging the GOP base further to the right, leaving the party's leaders increasingly lacking control. And it is hard to see how they can control back. Forced to resort to damage control, Republican pols and pundits are urgently trying to portray Tea Partiers as nothing more than run-of-the-mill patriots who merely desire smaller government and elimination of the deficits and their constitutional right to proudly bear their automatic weapons in coffee shops. The left has a golden opportunity to exploit this right wing weakness by merely informing everyone how wild, wacky and radical many of the views of a movement that has the support of about a fifth of the country and is largely limited to older folk really are.
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