‘Liberaltarians’: The new political activists; In bed with Ron Paul and Barack Obama | Eastern North Carolina Now

    A growing number of the American youth is bridging the gap between American liberalism and Libertarianism as if it were the most natural thing in the world. And by ‘youth’, I’m sadly enough referring to a certain class of people under the age of 40; specifically the ones who still frequent bars and get the bulk of their news from The Daily Show on Comedy Central.

    It’s as if they don’t realize, or care, that the economic components to American liberalism and Libertarianism are as far apart on the ideological spectrum as Communist Russia and the Netherlands. Once upon a time, they said they were Democrats because they wanted the federal government to take care of the poor and to regulate the free market. Now, they say they are Libertarians, because they don’t trust the federal government to take care of the people and the invisible hand needs to be left alone to work properly. To top it off, many of them still voted for Obama, arguably the most liberal Democrat in history, while still wearing their new Ron Paul T-shirts. (At this point, I’m already suspicious that they have been using these valid and empathetic, but very different, arguments to camouflage the real reason for their allegiance to both liberalism and Libertarianism.)

    To figure out how this glaring contradiction in faiths came to be (I mean, this is the future of America), I’ve spent countless hours in conversation with certain of these Democrat/Libertarians, attempting to have them take me from one end of their thread of thought to the other. I tell you, it cannot be done. Their only defense is to go into a fit of rage where they start talking about all the injustices in the world and the corruption in government. Reasoning with them, or even giving them the chance to reason within themselves, is pointless and exasperating.

    The only consistencies that seem to make it across one platform to the other are their defense of legalized prostitution (including pornography), legalized gambling, gay marriage, legalized drugs; their desire to remove anything that resembles a recognition of God from the public eye; their readiness to blame the government for the fact that they can’t pay a mortgage or get a great job; and, very often, their pity for Palestine and their disdain for Israel. By and large, these are people who love to use the words ‘freedom’ and ‘tolerance’, but only as long as we are protecting their favorite sin and sweeping reminders of morality under the rug. They can’t quite grasp the concept that some people appreciate the freedom to drive down the street without seeing a pornographic billboard, just as much as they appreciate the freedom of being able to drive down the highway without seeing a cross. They think they’re so cool as they rant about how much they hate authority, but they don’t realize that the way of life they’re trying to impose on society would not only oppress a very large portion of the population, but be morally reprehensible as well. It’s as if they took hold of Democratic social liberalism, threw away the bit about fiscal liberalism, and rode the wave over to Libertarianism, which promises to legalize every vice under the sun.

    I have no choice but to see these people for what they are: purely selfish opportunists. In fact, most of them are actually also self-proclaimed atheists, or the ever-elusive agnostics. This fact scares me more than anything; not because I believe that everyone has to believe in God to be a decent person, but simply because I have no idea what exactly would govern the actions of an atheistic Libertarian. Wouldn't people without a strong sense of morality need man-made laws even more? Are we really supposed to trust that these people, who aren’t capable of holding a cogent thought and who exploit the idea of ‘freedom’ for their own momentary satisfaction, rather than the common good, to be humanists, like they say?

    Someone needs to tell these Liberaltarians that just because they uncontextually quote the founding fathers of America or great philosophers on their Facebook pages that it doesn’t automatically make them some American hero, some brave revolutionary. A Liberaltarian favorite:

"Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all." -- — Adam Smith

    Ok, great. But real heroes try to pay their own debts, so one day they will have decent enough credit to buy property; and they don’t blame the government for the fact they can’t manage to save enough money for a down payment on a home, while they’re living with their mother, with no bills, and spending every last penny on alcohol, pot, pornography and poker.

    Someone needs to enlighten these Liberaltarians to the fact that if they were ever successful in creating a state of moral anarchy based on selfish drives such as this, the result wouldn’t be ‘ordered chaos’, it would be Hell on Earth. For authentic Libertarianism to ever be successful, developing a strong moral code among most members of society would be crucial. Many real Libertarians understand this fact and admit that America is very far away from being able to make this utopia a reality, thanks especially to these Liberalitarians, for whom freedom is a license to destroy rather than an inspiration to create.