I Was a Card-Carrying Libertarian: Confessions of a Black Sheep Republican
capital L:
I don’t embrace the gold standard stuff either – but you do realize, of course, that a metals-based or metals-backed currency was a human universal for hundreds of years, and our experiment with being off the gold standard dates only to Nixon’s time?
Did every President before Nixon have economic policies that were not to be taken seriously? Were they all clowns? Every last one of them, from Washington through Johnson?
And to all the people who want a conquering, Trotskyite libertarianism that exports liberty to all reaches of the globe: the reason we don’t want that is because it’s been tried. The French tried to export their revolution, and that ended in Bonapartism. We tried to export our revolution after 9/11, and it ended up with Bushism. You simply won’t be able to maintain momentum in an aggressive, conquering war as a democracy without demonizing your domestic opponents as traitors, without massive secrecy to cover up your conquering military’s little “mistakes” like Abu Ghraib, without kicking in doors in occupied territories to track down people who don’t believe in your crusade, and without torture chambers to extract confessions from nationalist types that won’t accept freedom if it requires national subjugation. The Bush Presidency is not an accident; it’s the inevitable result of his policy of pre-emption.
Opportunities to lead noble wars of liberation are historically rare. The circumstances of WWII aren’t always going to be around. When you try to force the issue, you throw away the principles you’re supposedly trying to spread.
