Are Libertarians Fascist Apologists?

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I don't think Tea Party supporters are any more ill-informed than any other political movement. According to some poll that I'm blanking on the name of(but I'm sure you heard this before) Tea Party supporters were generally wealthier and more educated than the general public. Maybe that just reflects poorly on everyone else but I don't know how you can say with a straight face that they're some particularly dangerous group. Maybe it's just the part of the country I live in but I'm a lot more scarred of the so called labor movement that threatens violence on the regular, seems a lot more angry and belligerent to me.

They are definitely more active than other politically uninformed people, though. Besides which, other groups may not know as much about politics, but the Tea Partiers are actively wrong on so many issues.

And studies have been done on the subject of how well-informed people are based on their preferred news source. Fox viewers are more misinformed than anyone else.


Wealth and education do not necessarily make them better informed on the issues. Again... every conservative I have met in person (or online, for that matter) is grotesquely misinformed on questions of basic fact. The Tea Party sympathizers far more so. Even otherwise intelligent people who happen to be conservative, when asked about their political views, give completely nonsensical answers that show a profound disconnect from reality.


You're kidding? Look around the country at the policies that are already being enacted because of these lunatics. They are dismantling so much of the infrastructure of American society that helped make us a great nation. Kasich, Walker, Scott, Perry, and many others are systematically destroying everything that has ever been functional in state governments. On the national level the Tea Party was willing to virtually destroy the country and plunge the entire planet into economic chaos just to score cheap partisan points. These are not reasonable or responsible people. They are dangerous, and that is just in their present form. They are not (yet, at least) truly a tool of any legitimately fascist demagogue, but the general unrest they represent is the kind of thing that demagogues thrive on, and even as they stand now they are too dangerous to be let near government.


At least the labor movement knows who its enemies are. The Tea Party is shooting at ghosts. And you are undoubtedly exaggerating the "threat" of the labor movement. They do not threaten violence nearly as often as the Tea Party.

This is true of any blind follower of a particular political ideology. I cannot think of any single political party that I would trust to implement their entire catalogue of policy. I have serious issues with the policies of Republicans and Democrats so I see no reason to single out the Tea Party as being especially dangerous. There are aspects of all three I can sympathize with, all have policies I would endorse but I would trust none to exist without political opposition.



This is true of the republicans under Bush, especially during his first term and it is also true of the Democrats under Clinton when he broke down the last vestiges of US banking regulation.

Citation please. Back that assertion with some evidence.

ruveyn

The Tea Party are more of a concern than the Democrats or than normal Republicans for several reasons.
1) Their agenda is crazier. Letting Democrats or "moderate" Republicans run the country entirely unopposed would create plenty of problems, but nothing on the scale of what the Tea Party wants to do. The mainstream of American political discourse was until recently filled with people who were basically reasonable and would give in to pragmatic concerns.
2) They are succeeding in implementing/influencing policy on a scale far out of proportion to their numbers. This is because the Tea Partiers in government are highly disciplined and willing to be excessively aggressive in pushing their agenda.
3) They demonize their enemies to a greater extent than other political movements. Democrats and pre-Tea Party Republicans actively sought after bipartisanship. The Tea Party refuses all compromise, even in cases where they have already achieved total victory.
4) The Tea Party is not afraid to do serious damage to the country to get their way. See the debt ceiling issue, and every single tax proposal any Tea Partier has ever made.

@Orwell

Those reasons are highly subjective.

1. Discounting the republican and democrat hard liners is not a possibility they are a part of the political process also. One could make the same claim about the tea party if ine discounted the crazies within their ranks. The only reason to arbitrarily discount one and not the other is because you seem them as other. Frankly the tea party is no more terrifying to me than the mistakes of the first term of GWB and the tea party is not likely to have such an operunity to be unrestrained. The tea party may make terrible choices but it's pretty had not to sympathize with their sense of disconten.

2. So do urban upper middle class liberal white men. So did the abolitionists.

3. Conservatives demonize liberals just respond with dismissive condescension. It's six of one half a dozen of the other.

4. The republicans shut down congress during the Clinton era, many Democrats were prepared to accept the partition of the US at one point. American politics is played for keeps.

You seem to disagree with them, so the story gets written from there. It's fine to be against their ideas, but they are not illegitimate or unprecedented. They may be wrong but they are free to be so, democrats just need to win the argument rather than act in a dismissive way. I think the idea of cutting off US spending and not lifting the debt ceiling is as stupid as you do but I don't deny their right to think otherwise.

It's completely futile to argue with them though because they somehow think their "free-market" radicalism and desire turn the clock back to the 19th century actually makes sense. The problem is there is no equivalent movement in any other developed country in the world. It's only in the US that such an extreme sentiment exists. That alone is enough to show me that something is amiss.

The reason there is a Tea Party is because of right wing AM radio.
Yes the 19th century was the good old days.

The reason for the tea party (originally) is the unconstitutional operation of the United States government.

ruveyn

So I guess it is unconstitutional to vote if you don't own property.

Those laws were repealed under the Jackson Administration. I big mistake I think but non- the less the States set the qualifications for voting.

ruveyn

I must say that the Tea Party does seem worse than the moderate Money Parties for the reasons that Orwell stated. Especially the point about where were they when Bush was in the White House AND when he was signing the PATRIOT Act, waterboarding people and establishing the Department of Homeland Security; Obama has not done much good, but has not done much bad either. And their willingness to destroy huge amounts of infrastructure in order to get their way; basically it is economic terrorism.

@ruveyn: I do not understand why property owners should be the only ones to vote; what does the ability to accumulate wealth have to do to any reasonable degree with the virtue of good governance?

What infrastructure has been destroyed?

The have the most stake in the economic health of the country. Those voters who feed at the government teat only worry about their "entitlements". With property owners voting and welfare bums not voting there would be few if any "entitlements" and the country would not be in the financial fix it is in now.

It is the property owners who are carrying the welfare recipients on their backs.

ruveyn

Eh, that's enough to show that there are cultural variables at play. The US tends to have a more free-market mentality than other nations though, so libertarians are basically what we have instead of socialist parties, Marxists, etc. So, the real issue is just a shifted mean/median in our statististical ideological distribution, nothing more.

Also, another major issue is also the intellectual history of the Austrian school. The major Austrian school teachers left Austria to mostly take on students in the US, and these US students have mostly contributed to US political schemes. I mean, a lot of these extremists are very inspired, directly or indirectly by people inspired by the Austrians.

The thing is, populist "libertarianism" isn't about "free-markets". It's about resentful hate filled scapegoating BS. Witness...