Posted on 02/13/2010 12:53:00 PM PST by Cheap_Hessian
One mini-saga of the past decade in American politics has been the flirtation—with talk of a deeper partnership—between progressives and libertarians. These two groups were driven together, in the main, by common hostility to huge chunks of the Bush administration's agenda: endless, pointless wars; assaults on civil liberties; cynical vote-buying with federal dollars; and statist panders to the Christian right.
This cooperation reached its height during the 2006 election, in which, according to a new study by David Kirby and David Boaz, nearly half of libertarian voters supported Democratic congressional candidates—more than doubling the support levels from the previous midterm election in 2002. (As Jonathan Chait noted after the first Kirby/Boaz study of libertarian voting, their definition is overly broad, encompassing 14 percent of the electorate.) At the time, left-wing blogger Markos Moulitsas hailed the influx of "libertarian democrats" into the Democratic coalition. Soon, even the Cato Institute's Brink Lindsey was proposing a permanent alliance of what he called "liberaltarians."
Well, you can say goodbye to all that. The new Kirby/Boaz study reports that libertarian support for Democrats collapsed in 2008, despite many early favorable assessments of Barack Obama by libertarian commentators. Meanwhile, the economic crisis has raised the salience of issues on which libertarians and Dems most disagree. And there's no question that during Obama's first year—with the rise of the Tea Party movement and national debate over bailouts, deficits, and health care—libertarian hostility to the new administration has grown adamant and virtually universal. But what progressives need to understand is that the end of this affair is actually a good thing.
(Excerpt) Read more at tnr.com ...
I think that’s why they left the Republican party in 2006. Testing the waters on the other side of the pool. Found out they didn’t like the Marxism there, either.
Which is probably why you see the Tea Party movement. Too many Kool-Aid drinkers who believed that you’ve got only the Republican/Democrat choice have stopped drinking that Kool-Aid.
probably lost his mind while he dated Cindy Sheehan
post
yup you can look it up
SO TRUE.
IF there was no such thing as ‘party affiliation’, then when we ‘elected’ someone and they turned out to be a mistake, then we could concentrate on solving the problem, instead of just pointing fingers at the other side.
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