On June 20, the New York Times statistics maven, Nate Silver, pointed out on his FiveThirtyEight blog that a recent CNN poll had shown that the number of libertarian-minded voters in the United States had reached a new high.
The poll had asked two questions, one about whether government is doing too much and the other about whether government should promote certain values.
Silver noted that “in CNN’s latest version of the poll, conducted earlier this month, the libertarian response to both questions reached all-time highs. Some 63 percent of respondents said government was doing too much — up from 61 percent in 2010 and 52 percent in 2008 — while 50 percent said government should not favor any particular set of values, up from 44 percent in 2010 and 41 percent in 2008. (It was the first time that answer won a plurality in CNN’s poll.)”
Silver’s analysis and the CNN poll coincided with the release of a new book that explores even more deeply the idea that the United States is becoming a more libertarian society, both politically and culturally.
The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong with America, by Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch, was published on June 28. On June 30, the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner interviewed Gillespie and Welch after they had spoken at a book forum hosted by the Cato Institute.
‘Unraveling this paradox’
Gillespie, editor of Reason.com and Reason.tv, and Welch, editor-in-chief of Reason magazine, first explained how they came up with the idea for the book.
“It was a combination of looking at how good things were getting in certain aspects of our lives and how awful they were getting in others,” Gillespie said, “and then trying to figure out how could [non-political] things be getting better and better and how could politics be getting worse and worse.”
Welch added that “unraveling this paradox,” as he put it, “dovetailed” with a project to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Reason magazine.
“As that happened, the financial crisis hit, and TARP, and the freak-out” that followed, he said.
In that anniversary issue, scheduled for December 2008, Welch continued, “we were going to herald the 'libertarian moment' [when], suddenly, we have to say, ‘OK, so it’s a libertarian moment when all indicators are the opposite?’ In fact, that forced us to go back and reread our history. This informed the book and actually set up some of the timelines of it.”
‘Darkest of all dark nights’
Welch suggested that “you could make an argument that in 1971 it was the darkest of all dark nights of the American soul -- with wage and price controls and a crook in the White House and” the Vietnam War still raging.
Gillespie interjected: “And the Silent Majority taking over, George Wallace being a serious player.”
Continuing, Welch explained:
“And yet, at the time, if you looked around or you knew where to look, there were actual green shoots happening, like the seeds of revolution, the seeds of great beneficial change were happening in real time right at that moment. So we thought, let’s double down on our bet, that despite this moment, which seems so awful, there’s going to be evidence of a flowering.”
In the book, Gillespie and Welch look at a lot of pop cultural phenomena across the globe, noting that rock music, for instance, played a subversive role in the collapse of the Soviet Empire. The information technology and communications revolution of the past 40 years also loom large in their analysis.
Tea Party: grassroots or top-down?
They also consider the Tea Party movement, which erupted in 2009 and is still affecting American politics. They describe the Tea Party as a genuine, grass-roots phenomenon, which prompted a question about the meme on the Left, namely, that the Tea Party is a top-down movement controlled by philanthropists Charles and David Koch.
Welch and Gillespie scoffed at that notion.
“All you have to do is look at the nose in front of your face,” Welch replied. The assertion of Koch brothers’ control of the Tea Party, he said, “collapsed on any kind of cross-examination. You wouldn’t have any power if it was just that.”
Gillespie added that “the fact is, no set of billionaires can turn hundreds of thousands of people out to the streets.” Instead, he said, what motivates the Tea Party “is that people are upset at runaway government spending and they’re doing something about it.”
Pointing at the other side, Welch said that “there’s a mirror image on the Right, [where people] are always obsessed with George Soros and all the things that he can do. Soros is one of the biggest funders not just of Democrats but of drug legalization. He’s gotten nowhere. If he could just sign a check and get what he wants, we’d all be smoking pot right now freely in the streets, so it doesn’t really work that way. I think people love to find shadowy billionaires to…”
“…explain their failure,” added Gillespie, finishing his writing partner’s sentence.
He concluded: “The Koch brothers aren’t the reason that Obama’s polls are sinking and they’re not the reason that George Bush exited the White House the most hated president in history.”
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