America Needs a Liberal Party

 

America needs a new political party, one opposed to isolationism, protectionism, nativism, authoritarianism, and ecologism, and which supports free enterprise, Constitutional government, human equality, liberty, and dignity, and the defensive alliance of all nations committed to such ideals.

Some might call such a party “conservative,” and indeed, many of those who call themselves conservatives today would find themselves in agreement with its tenets. But these are the ideas of classical liberalism; they are the ideas that made the free world free, in as much as it is free. They have been misbranded by their “progressive” opponents as “conservative,” — a word associated with “servility” and the service of privilege — in order to make them seem reactionary. It’s time for the true defenders of real liberalism to take their proud title back.

America needs a new Liberal Party because both major parties have abandoned liberalism. Neither adequately supports international free trade or the defense of the West — the two pillars of the liberal world order since 1945. Both lack commitment to constitutionally limited government, separation of powers, free enterprise, and human equality and liberty under law. Each supports its own Malthusian antihuman collectivist ideology: for Democrats, it is ecologism, for Republicans, it is nativism.

Ecologism — the advocacy of state-administered collective sacrifice for the putative benefit of nature — is so obviously antiliberal, reactionary, and indeed, antihuman, that I will leave it to the would-be liberals of the left to figure out how they ever got roped into adopting it as part of their core ideology. As a result, the party that once proudly proclaimed itself the defender of the poor now centers its program on ultra-regressive sales taxes of fuel and electricity, while boasting of its ability to throw entire industries and their workers on the scrap heap. Furthermore ecologism serves as a justification for the expansion of the powers of the state to intrude into every aspect of public, commercial, and private life, reinforcing monopolies, impairing initiative, and destroying opportunities at every turn.

Nativism, on the other hand, is the ideology that brought the Trumpist Trojan horse into the conservative citadel. A mirror image of the Democrats environmental Malthusianism, it asserts that rather than natural resources, it is human opportunities that are in limited supply. It is not a conservative ideology, because it is anti free enterprise and anti Judeo-Christian. Our nation’s founding creed is that of inalienable rights granted to men created equal by God. How can a movement which explicitly denies that faith be considered conservative, or even traditionally American? In fact it isn’t conservative at all. It is Alt-Right. But what is the Alt-Right really?

In his classic 1944 work, The Road to Serfdom, Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek, then living in exile in England, shocked readers with his diagnosis of Nazism. National socialism, he argued, was not the opposite of social democracy — many of whose adherents could be found fighting in the ranks of the Allies — but its evolutionary extension. All Hitler had done, said Hayek, was to grasp that racism is required for socialism, because to mobilize the passion necessary to achieve the full collectivist agenda, it is necessary to invoke the tribal instinct. Thus, contrary to Marx, the ultimate development of socialism is not stateless international brotherhood, but various forms of rabid tribal nationalism. Similarly, tribalism leads to socialism.

Not to put too fine a point on the matter, tribalism, or “identarianism” if you will, is not a conservative ideology; it is collectivist ideology. It is the oldest, most powerful, lethal, and most degrading collectivist ideology, because it is based on primeval animal instinct. By using xenophobic agitation to mobilize mob support for a program of socialistic policy, unlimited government, and strongman rule, the international Alt-Right has embraced a political methodology clearly identified seven decades ago in The Road to Serfdom.

Running up taxes on fuel, electricity, and fuel for the putative purpose of stopping climate change is an alternative version of human sacrifice for weather control. Excluding immigrants for the putative purpose of making jobs available is merely an alternative version of the counterfactual case for population control — to wit that we supposedly would all be better off if there were fewer people. (In fact, we weren’t.) Neither is a liberal, moral, rational, or practical position. On the contrary, increasing human numbers, freedoms, and living standards accelerates the rate of invention, and thus humanity’s ability to deal with any problem. That’s the liberal, moral, rational, and practical program for advancing the human condition. It’s also the winning political answer to both the brown and green antihumanists. Immigrants and free enterprise, together, are what made America great — and they both need each other.

To see clearly what the Liberal Party needs to oppose, it is useful to examine what freedom’s most dedicated enemies are for. Aleksandr Dugin is one of the principle philosophical theoreticians of totalitarianism internationally, and his publications are regularly featured in such American identarian outlets as Radix (Dugin’s English language translator is the wife of American Alt-Right leader and Radix publisher Richard Spencer). While he greatly admires Nazism, Dugin’s “Fourth Political Theory” seeks to transcend traditional Nordic racism’s self-limited market appeal by proposing multi-centered tribal fascism, and allying it with other antiliberal ideologies including communism, and ecologism in a new synthesis to counter to the liberal ideas of individualism, intrinsic rights, and universal human dignity. It is the raising of “blood and soil” over “all men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights;” of animal instinct over human reason; of the id over the superego; of greed and lust over justice and love. This is the metaphysics of tyranny.

Madison said “If men were angels, government would be unnecessary.” The corollary to this is that if men were beasts, freedom would be unacceptable. Dugin understands this. So like Circe, he seeks to use the sorceries of tribal and ecologic antihumanism not merely to weaken and break up the Western alliance, but to turn men into unreasoning beasts, the better to end the specter of liberty everywhere.

This is the enemy we now face. Encouraged, supported, and in some cases directed by the Kremlin, the green, red, and brown rainbow alliance of tyranny is on the march across much of the globe. In Europe, the socialists and environmentalists mismanaging the European Union are discrediting the dream of a united Europe, providing the opening for Moscow-backed tribalist parties to break up and take over the continent. This effort is being further helped by a concerted campaign of economic sabotage by the green and red parties whose antifracking initiatives are making sure that Europe remains dangerously dependent on Russian natural gas, and by the armed forces of Russia and its Iranian and Syrian allies, whose ethnic cleansing campaigns are stampeding millions of refugees into Europe to rapidly accelerate the rise to power of the Kremlin’s brown fifth column.

America should be opposing this offensive against the free world with might and main, but under the misleadership of the partisan careerists who dominate both major parties, it is not doing so. On the contrary, with the near unanimous support of the Democrats in Congress, the Obama administration helped to fund Iran’s brutal offensive in Syria to the tune of a hundred billion dollars released in accord with the terms of its nuclear deal, and failed to effectively assist Syrian rebel forces fighting the Iran-Assad-Russia alliance on the ground. Not only that, the Obama administration opened the door to overt aggression by failing to honor America’s treaty commitment to defend the territorial integrity of Ukraine, and by reducing US Army troop strength in Europe to 30,000 men, an amount less than one-tenth that of its late Cold War strength and smaller than the NY City Police Department.

Until recently the Republicans chose to criticize the Democrats for their foreign policy weakness, but the new Trump administration promises to be even worse. While the Obama administration offered only feeble help for the Syrian rebels, Trump has said he supports the Assad-Iran-Russia war effort. While Obama limited the US response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine to ineffective economic sanctions, Trump has offered justification for Putin’s attack. Furthermore, notwithstanding his UN ambassador Nikki Haley’s Samantha Power-like grand verbal denunciations of Putin’s aggression, Trump has dismissed criticisms of the Russian strongman’s murderous regime across the board. While Obama cut American military power in Europe to mere tripwire levels, Trump has offered to render even that symbolic level of support to Europe’s defense moot by stating that he sees no reason to be bound by the NATO treaty’s requirement to come to member state’s aid should it come under attack.

Under such circumstances, it is hardly surprising that the Kremlin chose to interfere in the American election with both covert and overt actions to assist the rise of Donald Trump. What is disheartening, however, is the degree to which the Republican Party has rallied to deny or dismiss this intervention in America’s internal affairs, an outrage which verges on an act of war against the United States homeland itself. And while the Democrats are currently making much of Trump’s Putinophilia, an honest recollection of their own behavior prior to the Trump candidacy makes it difficult to take their newfound ardor in the defense of the West seriously. That said, we now have a President whose self-interest apparently requires him to suppress or silence the nation’s intelligence agencies which have brought to light the enemy conspiracy on his behalf, and a majority party – in as much as it remains a party-bound to support him in this endeavor.

This is a five-alarm fire. America needs a new party, one that will, in the present emergency, bravely rise to the defense the republic and the grand alliance of free nations which it leads. It needs a party of economic sanity, which will not destroy the basis of our livelihood through either a combination of trade war and immigration restriction or top-down suppression of business. It needs a party of humanity, which rejects tribalism, not only for the harm it inflicts upon its targets but for the moral and intellectual degradation it infests within the minds and hearts of its converts. It needs a party of liberty, one which will defend not only the borders of freedom, but the ideas and institutions that make freedom possible.

In short, America needs a Liberal Party. Scattered, the forces of liberalism are weak. Together, we may yet prevail.

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  1. Joseph Eagar Member
    Joseph Eagar
    @JosephEagar

    Jamie Lockett (View Comment):

    Joseph Eagar (View Comment):
    Good riddance. The global neoliberal elite has proven itself unworthy of power. Half of them are stuck in the dark ages of fixed exchange rates, while the other (American) half spent the last five years speaking in terms that, were we to see in a third-world country, we’d call precursors to ethnic cleansing.

    Huh?

    I’m thinking here of immigration rhetoric.  I know I’m a broken record on this, but the left’s argument–that they were going to use immigration to create a demographic landscape more favorable to them–is anti-democratic and has more than a whiff of ethnic cleansing to it.

    I remember after the election, the New York Times quoted some anonymous rich liberal who said something like, “We thought all we had to do was sit back and wait for demographic change to turn America into a decent country.”  Think about what that means.  Demographic change, i.e. replacement, will turn America into a “decent country.”

    Rather worrisome.

    • #31
  2. Joseph Eagar Member
    Joseph Eagar
    @JosephEagar

    Jamie Lockett (View Comment):

    Joseph Eagar (View Comment):
    Good riddance. The global neoliberal elite has proven itself unworthy of power. Half of them are stuck in the dark ages of fixed exchange rates, while the other (American) half spent the last five years speaking in terms that, were we to see in a third-world country, we’d call precursors to ethnic cleansing.

    Huh?

    For the exchange rate part, I’m thinking of Europe.  Us Friedmanites have been telling Europe (and American libertarian goldbugs) that fixed exchange rate systems are statist instruments of economic control.  And what do the Europeans do? They create an international currency that leads to precisely that result, with the resulting statist power wielded not by individual European governments, but exclusively by Germany, who then floods Europe with refugees.

    I think the neoliberals did a lot of admirable things (the 1997 welfare reform in America, and labor market reforms in some Northern European countries, come to mind), but during the 2000s they became really, really corrupt.

    • #32
  3. Jamie Lockett Member
    Jamie Lockett
    @JamieLockett

    Joseph Eagar (View Comment):

    Jamie Lockett (View Comment):

    Joseph Eagar (View Comment):
    Good riddance. The global neoliberal elite has proven itself unworthy of power. Half of them are stuck in the dark ages of fixed exchange rates, while the other (American) half spent the last five years speaking in terms that, were we to see in a third-world country, we’d call precursors to ethnic cleansing.

    Huh?

    For the exchange rate part, I’m thinking of Europe. Us Friedmanites have been telling Europe (and American libertarian goldbugs) that fixed exchange rate systems are statist instruments of economic control. And what do the Europeans do? They create an international currency that leads to precisely that result, with the resulting statist power wielded not by individual European governments, but exclusively by Germany, who then floods Europe with refugees.

    I think the neoliberals did a lot of admirable things (the 1997 welfare reform in America, and labor market reforms in some Northern European countries, come to mind), but during the 2000s they became really, really corrupt.

    I think you’re confusing the Neo-liberals with the Classical Liberalism that Mr. Zubrin is outlining above.

    • #33
  4. Trinity Waters Member
    Trinity Waters
    @

    Robert Zubrin: America needs a new political party, one opposed to isolationism, protectionism, nativism, authoritarianism, and ecologism, and which supports free enterprise, Constitutional government, human equality, liberty, and dignity, and the defensive alliance of all nations committed to such ideals.

    A lot of positive and negative goals here.  Many of them use loaded words that betray a familiar viewpoint.

    My favorite is dignity.  In what universe could government affect such an internal trait?

    The most revealing is nativism.  If nations that have proud residents are a bad thing, then what’s the point of forming a party is such a cursed place?

    The most dangerous is the emphasis on defense.  Rule out offense?  Even when it’s the most moral choice?

    The only one I like, at first blush anyway, is ecologism.  I hate this new religion posing as righteousness as it sucks all power into its maw.

    • #34
  5. Zafar Member
    Zafar
    @Zafar

    Countries do not make such radical changes (a turn away from tribal nationalism?) until they find themselves at their own Stunde Null.

    The things I keep reading, even from the most gloomy or themost elated, tell me that a lot of illusions remain in place.  Too many for a Stunde Null moment.  Jmho.

    • #35
  6. Matt Singer Inactive
    Matt Singer
    @MatthewSinger

    For years I’ve wanted to start a party.  The Realist party.  Our slogan… “Get Real!”

     

    • #36
  7. Columbo Inactive
    Columbo
    @Columbo
    America Needs a Liberal Party …

    Like America Needs A Hole In Its Head

    • #37
  8. JLocked Inactive
    JLocked
    @CrazyHorse

    I’ve chartered the Bah-Humbug Party. Our core values center around griping about how irrelevant core values are nowadays and the getting off our lawns,

    • #38
  9. She Member
    She
    @She

    JLocked (View Comment):
    I’ve chartered the Bah-Humbug Party. Our core values center around griping about how irrelevant core values are nowadays and the getting off our lawns,

    You’ll have to get busy if you’re going in that direction.  There are currently ten political parties represented in the UK Parliament, and scores more registered or campaigning, including the Fancy Dress Party, The Sensible Party, The Eccentric Party, the Death, Dungeons and Taxes Party, the Church of the Militant Elvis Party, and the granddaddy of them all:

    The Official Monster Raving Loony Party  (thank you, Screaming Lord Sutch).

    Makes me proud.

    • #39
  10. JLocked Inactive
    JLocked
    @CrazyHorse

    She (View Comment):

    JLocked (View Comment):
    I’ve chartered the Bah-Humbug Party. Our core values center around griping about how irrelevant core values are nowadays and the getting off our lawns,

    You’ll have to get busy if you’re going in that direction. There are currently ten political parties represented in the UK Parliament, and scores more registered or campaigning, including the Fancy Dress Party, The Sensible Party, The Eccentric Party, the Death, Dungeons and Taxes Party, the Church of the Militant Elvis Party, and the granddaddy of them all:

    The Official Monster Raving Loony Party (thank you, Screaming Lord Sutch).

    Makes me proud.

    I would She, but the Bah-Humbuggers are taking their caucus early nap. I’ll try to get a count of hands during Price is Right — but no guarantees on that either.

    • #40
  11. Chuckles Coolidge
    Chuckles
    @Chuckles

    If you want a party with sufficient membership to actually have a chance of success, would it not be best to limit the core principles?  @robertzubrin posits a number of principles, each one of which may effectively reduce the potential supporters of his party.

    Furthermore, core principles need to something you are for, as just being against something is not a program for long term success.  They need to be something that will break through indifference and redirect inertia.  They need to be exciting.  And they need to be something that will unite the voters.

    Free trade and support for the UN/NATO just don’t do it.  To make the free trade thing a core principle eliminates myriad potential supporters.  (Personally, I think to make free trade into your god is just wrong – and pragmatically, it will never sell to the masses.) Similarly, having as a core principle opposition to “nativism” or perhaps “America First” eliminates many from the get-go (like me). I don’t know what percentage of the voters would like to get the US out of the UN, but I’m guessing 20-30% and do you really want to exclude these folk from your base?  Likewise with the environmental issue.  (I like me some environmentalism, just not too much.)  But is there no bedrock principle that would in fact differentiate this new party from the de facto principles of the current two major parties?  I propose there are several:  “Rule of Law” is one, “Liberty for all” is another, and a better or more studied brain than mine could surely come up with much better ones.

    Excitement.  There is a church in Houston that bills itself as “the fellowship of excitement.”  Without entering into a theological discussion of that billing, anybody that wants to come from the back of the pack and pass up the two mainstream political parties better be exciting.  If you can’t gin up some broad-based excitement, then either stay home or else join one of the mainstream parties and work to change it from within.  Think about it:  Trump won the primaries because he generated excitement.  Jeb didn’t.  Cruz (my hero) didn’t.

    Whatever the stated core principles, they need to be core (not outcomes), they need to be exciting, and they need to be differentiating.

    Absent a big tent, you have no hope.  Keep it simple and if you have a principle which stirs men’s hearts you might, just might, have the possibility of creating a movement.

    But I don’t see it here.

    • #41
  12. Ontheleftcoast Inactive
    Ontheleftcoast
    @Ontheleftcoast

    We could be guided by history:

    There was the OWL Party

    Back in the mid-’70s, Thomas “Red” Kelly was the owner of an Olympia, Wash., jazz bar called the Tumwater Conservatory… the OWL Party can be traced back to a joke Kelly made at the bar one night about entering local politics that somehow became a reality. Kelly, an accomplished jazz bassist, convinced a few fellow jazz musicians and friends to run for state office under the OWL Party, which he said was an acronym for “Out With Logic; On With Lunacy…”

    The legislature didn’t see the humor in the joke, and responded by making it harder to run for office. One lawmaker apparently even admitted the regulations had been changed “because the satirical OWL party made Washington State the laughingstock of the nation last fall.”

    And the Straight Talking American Government (STAG) Party.

    A party of one: stand-up comedian and Smothers Brothers regular Pat Paulsen. Though it mostly existed to make fun of real electoral politics, STAG appeared on multiple primary ballots, as Paulsen ran for president in 1968, ‘72, ‘80, ‘88, ‘92 and 1996. His website sums things up nicely, saying, “Pat’s campaign was based in comedy and he ran it using outright lies, double talk and unfounded attacks on his challengers. Who would have thought this style would be the method of campaigns in the future?”

    • #42
  13. Percival Thatcher
    Percival
    @Percival

    Ontheleftcoast (View Comment):
    And the Straight Talking American Government (STAG) Party.

    A party of one: stand-up comedian and Smothers Brothers regular Pat Paulsen. Though it mostly existed to make fun of real electoral politics, STAG appeared on multiple primary ballots, as Paulsen ran for president in 1968, ‘72, ‘80, ‘88, ‘92 and 1996. His website sums things up nicely, saying, “Pat’s campaign was based in comedy and he ran it using outright lies, double talk and unfounded attacks on his challengers. Who would have thought this style would be the method of campaigns in the future?”

    Oh, I don’t know … anybody who had read any history on campaigns of the past?

    • #43
  14. JLocked Inactive
    JLocked
    @CrazyHorse

    Prosperity(Safety + Security) = Principled Citizens.

    Nothing else will ever change this.

    • #44
  15. Robert Zubrin Inactive
    Robert Zubrin
    @RobertZubrin

    The Liberal Party is now being started as a Facebook group. If you would like to join, you can do so here.

    https://www.facebook.com/groups/1324847270870071/permalink/1324850057536459/?pnref=story

     

    • #45
  16. Jerry Holisky Inactive
    Jerry Holisky
    @JerryHolisky

    In cocktail party conversation, I refer to myself as a “Classical Liberal”.  I’m not sure that makes it the best name for a new party but throwing it out there can be a good entre into a polite discourse on how modern liberals / progressives are not at all concerned about liberty – other than in the bedroom.  As for Hayek, we all love Road to Serfdom but check out Constitution of Liberty. The lengthy introduction contains the best summary anywhere of classic liberal political and economic philosophy.

    • #46
  17. JLocked Inactive
    JLocked
    @CrazyHorse

    As an American History student and Gilded-Age aesthete — the proliferation of parties gives me tremendous pause. Democracy is like all beautiful but temperamental things we both exalt and take for granted — in that “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it”. While current developments indeed suck, and suck bad, I’ve seen broke via the LA Riots in 1992 when I was 13. I’ve heavily studied the even broker era previous and during Civil War. Fractured factionalism is the enduring catalyst. But that’s just my Brown-ass talkin’.

    • #47
  18. SParker Member
    SParker
    @SParker

    “Liberal” has been rode hard and put away wet so many times in the last couple of centuries that it should probably be taken behind the barn and be given a merciful end.  “Classical liberal” as a conversation starter reminds me of a boss I had that my knock on was: I ask him where the bathroom is and he begins the answer with the history of porcelain.  Hayek objected to being called a conservative because he was in fact a radical utopian idealist,  which probably won’t play well in the US, although the kind of Sanders’ supporter convinced Denmark is a socialist country (i.e., ignorant) might be attracted and stay a good while.  Phrases expressing individual freedom–not that there’s any other kind–sound selfish or debauched (“libertine” originally meant “freedman.”)  “Freedom”  has been run into the ground by ex-colonial countries that somehow made European imperialism look not that shabby in comparison.  Then, there’s the problem that labels tend to attach to their opposite (Progressives are hide-bound, uncaring reactionaries with the self-awareness of a large rock).  And given that the proliferation of parties makes you Italy (which like pork loin in the Bolognese style, tastes great but looks exactly like dog vomit), maybe we should just let the sorting hat continue its work.  Consider the party changes since 1960.  Getting way better on the R side.

    • #48
  19. deovindice556 Inactive
    deovindice556
    @hokiecon

    Joseph Eagar (View Comment):
    America had a liberal party. It started with Ronald Reagan and the GOP in 1980, then took over the Democrats under Bill Clinton in 1992. The Democrat side died in 2010, while the GOP side died last year.

    Good riddance. The global neoliberal elite has proven itself unworthy of power. Half of them are stuck in the dark ages of fixed exchange rates, while the other (American) half spent the last five years speaking in terms that, were we to see in a third-world country, we’d call precursors to ethnic cleansing.

    Trump was the slap in the face the GOP desperately needed. Ignore the base at your peril.

    • #49
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