Peeling the Political Onion
If we’ve learned nothing else from the 2016 presidential election circus it’s that politicians can’t be judged on the basis of their current political party labels.
A candidate doesn’t have to be a Republican to run as a Republican. Trump was a Reagan Republican, switched to the Reform Party, then became a Democrat, then a Republican, then an Independent and is now a Republican President.
A candidate doesn’t have to be a Democrat to run as a Democrat. As a University of Chicago student Bernie Sanders joined the Young People’s Socialist League (the youth affiliate of the Socialist Party of America), later joined the Liberty Union Party, then became Independent, then a Democrat, identified as a socialist while mayor of Burlington, Vermont in the 1980s and again during his 2016 bid as a Democratic Party presidential nominee.
Even Hillary was a Republican once. Hillary Rodham canvassed for Richard Nixon at age 13 and later campaigned for Barry Goldwater. At Wellesly College she was president of the Young Republicans and supported various Republican candidates before eventually leaving the Republicans to become a Democrat and a Clinton. Since 1968 she was, as claimed by the Washington Times, “Long considered a moderate Democrat” while the Huffington Post declared in a screaming May 2016 headline, possibly more as clickbait than as fact, “Hillary Clinton Is A Progressive Democrat, Despite What You May Have Heard.”
A candidate doesn’t have to be a Greenie to run as a Green Party Candidate. Jill Stein was a usetabe Democrat before turning Green in 1998. But she was also the Green-Rainbow Party candidate for governor of Massachusetts and other state offices before running for President on the Green Party ticket in 2012 and 2016.
And it’s even true that a candidate doesn’t have to be a libertarian to run as a Libertarian. Both the Presidential and VP Libertarian Party candidates were Republicans before claiming to be Libertarians. Gary Johnson was the twice-elected Governor of New Mexico before running as a Republican nominee for President in 2012. He then switched to the LP as its Prez candidate in 2012 and again in 2016. VP William Weld likewise was a twice-elected Governor, of Massachusetts, before quickly switching to the LP to become Johnson’s running mate.
Even Ron Paul was a Republican before he ran for President on the LP ticket in 1988 and then returned to the GOP where he tried twice to become the Republican Party candidate for President.
Instead of the Porcupine logo maybe the LP should be using the chameleon as its animal symbol.
Political Lampoonery and Parody
Over at The Libertarian Republic Josh Guckert wrote a cheeky tongue-in-cheek article that exposed what an evil statist hypocrite Libertarian Party VP candidate William Weld proved himself to be. He once offered to pay the dinner tab for the Gary Johnson campaign staff at a restaurant. But instead of using Silver Certificates, gold coins, gold dust, bouillon, Bitcoin or similar digital money like steem or crypto-currency like Blackcoin, Weld reached into his wallet and… Gasp! …pulled out statist-corporatist-bankster fiat US dollar bills derisively known as Federal Reserve Notes!
As Guckert put it, “the former Massachusetts governor committed an unforgivable sin, totally violating the non-aggression principle.” And it was further rumored that the disgraced candidate may have committed the ultimate of all anti-libertarian scandals by driving on a government road when he left the restaurant that night!
That article, filed under a “political comedy” topic tag, was intended to be a mockingly brutal satire aimed not at libertarians but at all those tiny-minded non-libertarians famous for creating flimsy little anti-libertarian strawmen specifically for the purpose of napalming them with flamethrowers as a safe alternative to talking about real libertarian ideas.
If nothing else it does prove that some libertarians can actually live up to the concept of “Fun&Freedom” by actually laughing at themselves even as others take themselves and their ideological posturing so godawful seriously they can’t even crack a smile.
By contrast, it wasn’t satire when several sources including The Hill reported that the Great Self-Anointed Champion of American Socialism, Democratic Party Presidential Candidate Bernie Sanders, had taken all the campaign loot he had collected from naïve millennials, quickly resigned from preaching against income inequality and joined the One Percenters he frequently condemned and bought himself a third summer home, this one for $600,000 with four bedrooms and 500 feet of Lake Champlain beachfront in Vermont.
At least that’s the official Weekend at Bernie’s account. The Sanders pass it off by saying they already had three homes; they just sold one so they could buy another. No big deal.
But still, three homes? For an avowed socialist? Don’t socialists oppose private property ownership? Don’t they live in communes and group homes? Will the homes the Sanders are not currently occupying be available for fellow Marxists to just move right in and camp out since all property is public property anyway, except of course for “personal possessions” like tooth paste, dentures and underwear? Isn’t that how they keep telling us the ideal society is supposed to work?
Or is that not “real socialism” but communism? It’s hard to remember sometimes. Even Good Ol’ Vlad Lenin declared “The goal of socialism is communism” so who ever really knows where “Democratic Socialists” are on that Socialism-to-Communism Sliding Scale at any given moment?
And isn’t it likely that the house the Sanders bought was built by capitalist homebuilders funded by crony capitalist banks constructed with corporatist materials possibly by the hands of “illegal” or “undocumented” immigrant day laborers taking jobs from American Union workers?
The least he could have done was pay for his house in Euros, the monetary lingua franca of those economically distressed Democratic Socialist Republics that are so fantastically successful as long as the US keeps subsidizing the majority of their military defense budgets.
Throw Your Own Party
So what about new parties? The Federalist quotes Chelsea Clinton as saying “who wants to grow up and follow their parents?”
In fact she doesn’t even have to follow her own birthright.
A Millennial doesn’t have to be a Democrat after all, which should pop the political door wide open for her to run for president on her own Free Stuff Millennial Party ticket should the whim strike her. At 38 she’s already legally old enough to occupy the White House.
The Federalist, whether sarcastically or seriously, anointed Chelsea “the perfect representative of her Millennial generation” and further declared “Of all the special and unique snowflakes, Chelsea Clinton is the best.”
Now that’s an endorsement!
Never mind that Chelsea isn’t really a Millennial. Born in 1980 she is actually a Gen-Xer, having missed the Millennial Generation by a mere year (1981-1996). But, hey, if candidates can swap political parties and switch ideological inclinations at will why can’t she change her birthday?
It could launch another Birther Conspiracy but why not? With Obama it was called racist so hers could be labeled as sexist.
Besides that, what’s in a name? Daddy Bill was born William Jefferson Blythe III and only changed his name in his teenage years when he took on his stepdad’s surname. Parties, politics, principles, generations, birth certificates, last names—everything is up for grabs on Planet Politics.
Whether Democrat, socialist or Free Stuff Millennial it’s still all groupthink collectivism. It’s wrong to identify all Millennials as identical interchangeable entities just as it’s wrong to think of all conservatives or all liberals or all libertarians as each of those labels representing one big monolithic single-minded blob of people.
But groupthink doesn’t seem to matter because virtually all politics comes down to groupthink.
So her platform for a landslide election is obvious, at least for the media political pundits: Promise everyone free participation trophies, free college tuition, free healthcare, free iPhones, free living in their parents’ basements until age 56 and guaranteed success for everyone. The fact that the basic premise is absurd, that there is no such thing as “free” or “guaranteed” anything, doesn’t matter. This is politics remember.
Her campaign slogans, patterned after the utterly empty and meaningless but constantly repeated and incredibly effective Barrack Obama 2012 zombie chants of “Hope” and “Change” will be “Slackers Forever” and “Always Be Cool.” That’s a lot of words to deal with so maybe just “Cool Slackers” would be better.
Her core followers will be known as “Slacker Backers” by her opponents but as “Free Stuffers” by her adoring supporters.
Of course she’ll have to be careful. If she doesn’t win the first time out, in 2020 say, she’ll quickly spoil beyond her “Sell By” date and be overwhelmed by the up-and-coming hard-on-her-heels Post Millennial Totally Like Lost Airhead Generation (with Airhead being one of those retro-throwback zeitgeisty words that last only for a single campaign cycle).
But then who knows. Things are changing fast in politics these days. Many Millennials, surveys keep telling us, lean keenly toward the Free Minds and Free Markets of libertarianism which requires individual freedom and personal responsibility.
No room there for today’s Bernie-inspired groupthink Free Stuff Millennials.
Garry Reed writes as The Libertarian Opinionizer at HubPages.com.
