Is the Libertarian Party Libertarian Enough?

During the 2006 Mississippi U.S. Senate election, I had difficulty choosing between the Republican and Democratic candidates. As I always try to do, I gave the third party candidate--Harold M. Taylor of the Mississippi Libertarian Party--a look. What I discovered was that he was to the right of both candidates on immigration, and at least as far right as either of them were on abortion and lesbian and gay rights. His libertarianism, as it was conveyed to me, was defined mainly by his commitment to state's rights and his vision of a small government. Very much a Ron Paul libertarian.

Ron Paul himself ran for the Libertarian Party's presidential nomination in 1988, and got it. His socially conservative positions on issues like abortion and immigration were not shared by his chief opponent, Russell Means, but they were no obstacle to his candidacy. It has generally been understood that the Libertarian Party's base of support draws to a great extent on Republican demographics--almost exclusively white men concerned primarily about low taxes, state autonomy, and border security. Goldwater Republicans, in other words.

But let's look at the other end of the libertarian spectrum, the movement less often characterized in terms of libertarian-ism and more often characterized by the two words you see at the top of the page: civil liberties. Libertarians who belong to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), whose membership is decidedly more diverse and more left-leaning in the aggregate than that of the Libertarian Party (though there is considerable overlap), tend to be less concerned about small government and low taxes, and more concerned about things like police brutality, the endless bloody wars on "drugs" (i.e., addicts and dealers) and "terror" (i.e., suspected terrorists and terrorist sympathizers), and--yes, my friend--the women affected by abortion laws, and the immigrants affected by anti-immigration laws.

This isn't to say that the Libertarian Party has completely abandoned social libertarianism for fiscal libertarianism, but sometimes the goals conflict. Fiscal libertarianism is based on the idea that if the government stops tinkering with things, they'll work. Social libertarianism is in most cases based on the ideas of equal protection and due process, which demand a certain amount of government intervention to implement, at least under our current system of government. Sometimes this means less intervention than we have now, and sometimes it means more, as long as that intervention is narrowly constructed to serve the goals of social justice and doesn't give the government more control over the lives of the people it allegedly helps. And sometimes this goal of social intervention without social control seems impossible to achieve. As President Gerald Ford said in a 1974 speech, "{i}f the government is big enough to give you everything you want, it is big enough to take away everything you have."