The Long March towards Freedom: Will the LP be the vehicle for realizing America's Vision?

The presence of Bob Barr on the National Committee of the Libertarian Party and the means by which this was accomplished are symptoms of the steady drift of the Libertarian Party into, not the Goldwater position on freedom, but into the centrist position defined by those we know as NeoCons. His positions are qualifying him as a fellow traveler, not as even a small 'L' libertarian; the means was devious and divisive. It is therefore disturbing. This is not the fault of Barr, he was asked and accepted in good faith. It is the fault of those who asked him. The drift comes from within, not outside the Libertarian Party.

We need to consider why the LP came into being and take up the question of, “What now?”

The point of founding the LP was to make the words of Thomas Jefferson a political and cultural reality. Sometimes the mission takes time; we are human and products of much we do not control.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, —“

The word men referred to all of humanity. Now that is obvious. It was obvious to many at the time of the Revolution but while human culture changes the process is not rapid. Confronting the contradictions of our own beliefs is never easy.

The inherent rights cited by Jefferson were not open to modification by government. If you remember the laws passed in the immediate wake of ratification those statutes exactly contradicted the intent of the words of Jefferson – and those words, America's Mission Statement, were the offer accepted by people who then put their lives and property on the line, investing greatly in a venture few thought would succeed. Bait and switch is always fraud.

Excuses have been made for over 200 years now; they do not justify the wealth transfer that took place under color of law.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. —“

We all know what was meant. America was to initiate a new form of government whereby the people would govern themselves. It did not happen. Instead, the passage of laws specific to some categories of individuals, women, blacks, and some men, allowed the installation of practices by statute that reformulated our understanding of those inherent rights. That was a mistake that has been perpetuated into the present time.

Libertarianism and the Libertarian Party is specifically and exactly about rebooting the system so that laws that contradict the original Mission Statement are rescinded and government is no longer viewed as the appropriate means for limiting the exercise of our rights; personal, economic, or any other. The limitation is simply that we do no harm.

The fact is that such early Libertarians as David Nolan, Founder, and Murray Rothbard, Mr. Libertarian, saw the LP as a tool for bringing the individualist elements from both Left and Right together as a natural outcome in the battle for freedom. Libertarian Timothy Leary and others marched proudly for the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. Then, the movement understood that freedom means all of us and all our rights.

If you don't 'get' that the “Defense of Marriage Act” is a fascist assertion intended to control the most intimate lives of individuals then you are no friend of freedom. After 200 years there must be standards. Someone should inform Mr. Barr that this is not open for debate.

Freedom is not just a means for optimizing your own privileges while others continue to struggle in the servitude to which they have been delivered through the mistakes of history. Freedom does not exist until it exists for all of us.

One of the systemic problems with the LP has been the tendency to act as if there was an agreed hierarchy of priorities on issues of personal freedom; as if some freedoms for some individuals mattered and other freedoms and individuals did not. This has never been formalized but its presence has, in fact, made the LP a tool for political action that is more about using rhetoric to obtain privilege than it is about the original mission of uniting Right and Left, seeing and enabling all individuals to realize the inherent rights promised but never delivered by the Revolution. [Your individual rights exist, period. They are not "promised" or "delivered," you already have them. It is up to you to not allow others to abridge them. --MJT]

Blacks and women are people, Men under the meaning of the Constitution; they were in 1787 and they are today. No statutes limiting their rights to exercise freedom in the control of their persons and property should ever have existed. In as far as the Founders cooperated with allowing this 'compromise' to take place, they acted in violation of the charge entrusted to them. Ratifying the Constitution was not more important that ensuring that those inherent rights were affirmed. Inherent rights were the value the Constitution was charged to protect, nothing less should have been acceptable.

This brings us to confront the world as it would have been if instead of ratifying while allowing exceptions that preserved economically convenient forms of wealth transfer we had instead accepted that the colonies would each work to exemplify the understanding of the people therein for what freedom meant.

Southern colonies would probably have continued the practice of slavery without the convenient rhetoric of freedom and without being able to lean on states who did not approve the practice for help in enforcing a gross violation of individual rights.

Northern colonies would have faced the same kinds of hard choices. The rhetoric disguised the reality.

Never tell a tyrant he acts justly; he is far too likely to believe you.

The acceptance of compromise resulted in generations that were forced to work for the exercise of the inherent rights that should have been validated as a matter of course; All of this in the interest of a Federal government that has no proper rights at all. Government is a simple human organizing tool. Nothing more.

The issue that is at the core of all our problems today, the view that government has a right to convert our rights into privileges through their legislated grant of privilege and their control of every aspect of our lives, lies in the history that allowed them to control women. That is why women's issues should be at the heart of the debate, and not a side issue, ignored and demeaned.

Libertarians bought into a lie that perpetuated the NeoCon agenda. It is time to examine how that happened and why those lies have made forward progress for liberty impossible.

Wording of the Equal Rights Amendment
Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.

This is the Alice Paul Amendment, written by the same woman whose leadership and passion finally gained women the right to vote with the 19th Amendment. Notice it does not mention the private sector, just government and grants no privileges, merely affirms that women will not be treated differently, mirroring the words of a Libertarian who confessed his immediate and unthinking hostility to 'feminism.'. “I have never objected to women having the freedoms all Americans rightfully claim, and I expect my wife and daughters to enjoy their full rights as well as any other citizen.”

The man's wife and daughters are not affirmed in those rights today. Wives, sisters, mothers, daughters, exercise privileges granted by legislation; those can be withdrawn at the drop of a vote. That is where we are today over 200 years after the bloody revolution fought to affirm the inherent rights of all human beings.

But our rights preexist government. Therefore the Founders had committed themselves to a war fought to protect those rights, asking for support in that endeavor. This was given. That war was carried out with the capital and blood of individuals who believed those words. Women, especially in New England, believed that afterwards their own rights would be affirmed.

In New England the idea of freedom as a relationship with God through whom the right to personal and spiritual autonomy preexisted human institutions had long standing. In fact, the Revolution was carried out by men who left their businesses and farms to the management of wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters. Women were the supply lines that kept the war going and expected to benefit thereby. Many families remember this still today. Freedom for all did not happen. In the wake of the signing of the Constitution women were excluded except in New Jersey, where they were allowed to vote for a number of years.

You will hear arguments from people, many Libertarians, claiming various causes for relegating women to a perpetual infancy. None of these advance a justification that is not grounded in a cultural desire to view women as a form of property, transferring their wealth to others.

Legislatures began passing laws that contradicted what had been the practices of many people, including the descendants of Puritans. Women were less free after the Revolution than they had been before, despite their sacrifices.

Women immediately began organizing. Over the next half century women formed associations, working on the issue of their own rights, the issue of emancipation for blacks, and to alleviate conditions in their own communities that were causing intense suffering. They had little money under their own control but they worked hard.

Education was one of the first issues they took up. Schools that admitted women were few and far apart. They started schools, increasing literacy rapidly.

My own great-great-grandmother born in 1809, was a teacher. With her husband they eventually would run the first High School in their part of New Hampshire. As was common with such families, they were also involved in the Abolitionist Movement. Their homestead in New Hampshire was a stop on the Underground Railroad. Their daughters attended Mount Holyoke as their sons attended Harvard and Dartmouth.

Education was a priority because of what it made possible.

It was through education that women began the long, hard, unimaginable trek to their own emancipation that continues today.

By the 1830s the opening of the Western lands, granted to many Revolutionary soldiers as compensation, were developing towns. Teachers were needed and there were not enough men willing to work for the low wages and under such uncomfortable conditions. But the schools in the original colonies, mostly run by women, had been turning out new teachers. The churches and culture at large decided that they would be happy to have women teaching as long as they worked for 1/3rd to ½ the wages earned by a man doing the same work. Women took those jobs gratefully and within two decades education was in the hands of women.

Women were legally categorized with children and idiots. They could not give testimony. In marriage they ceased to exist legally.

Women's rights to control their own property, their persons, and have custody of their children did not exist. The whole period of the 1800s was a battle to do what should have happened when the Constitution was ratified. The women who spent their entire lives writing, talking, lobbying, organizing, raising money, and demanding that their inherent rights be recognized died of old age still fighting. If you look over a list of the champions for freedom generated by Libertarians you will not see their names. Susan B.Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucrezia Mott, Lucy Stone. The list goes on. What should astonish us is their patience. Anthony was arrested for daring to cast a ballot for president. She stood trial, was found guilty and fined. But she never gave up. Her last advice to the tens of thousands of women who continued the struggle when she died was, “failure is impossible.” They never gave up. They were heroes for freedom.

Imagine yourself for a moment facing what they faced. What if as a married man you could not own property, cash a check, know your wages were yours to keep? What if your wife, who had all the control, took your property, left to you by your parents and sold it and spent the money on rum? What if you could be battered with impunity? What if she then abandoned you and you started a business cooking or sewing to keep you and your children from starving. What if you became prosperous? What if she then returned, sold all that you had, and again left you and your children destitute? That was the reality women faced.

Today our daughters have a different future not because of anything Classical Liberals did or our movement accomplished. That future exists because of the people Libertarians characterize as liberal feminists.

When you are denied any access to a means for repairing what is broken you use the tools available. If you see problems, for instance the great number of men who drank up the money that should have fed their families, you take action using the scant tools available to you. Denied the exercise of their own rights women focused on the foreground. If they could not control their own money they would stop the drinking that lead to abuse. We know that treating the symptoms does not work. But what choice did they have?

By the 1870s women had begun establishing their own colleges, some of these were medical; women physicians usually focused on the health issues of women and their children for obvious reasons. My great-grandmother, Dr. Harriet Foster Pillsbury, graduated from the Women's infirmary of NY in 1880. She and her family went to California where she started a practice for women, doing clinic days in areas where poor women had no access to care or information on birth control. The families, like hers, dedicated to female emancipation ignored the law. Dr. Harriet had married a man who agreed with her. His father and mother had been that stop on the Underground Railroad.

Dr. Harriet was the one who made the financial decisions; she controlled the wealth left to her by her father in defiance of the law. Her husband recognized her inherent rights despite what government did or said. The couple took the first two microscopes to California.

They ignored the law in issues of property and marriage because the law ignored the inherent rights of women. They were well educated. The reality Dr. Harriet faced was very different than the one that confronted most women then.

The Movement continued. In the second decade of the Twentieth Century a young woman named Alice Paul began organizing to get women the vote. She and other women picketed the White House during the First World War. She was incarcerated. She refused to stop. The strategies for civil disobedience she set became the example credited by Mohandas K. Gandhi in his own autobiography. If you look to see her cited for this you will find she is ignored, except by Gandhi himself.

Women had the right to vote; although they were not affirmed in their inherent rights they began to believe they were. When you believe things happen.

The organization Paul began converted into the League of Women Voters after the vote was secured. Two other organizations started what would become activist focuses for women for two generations. Those were Business and Professional Women and the National Federation of Republican Women. You may not have known it but their history is about freedom.

Women flooded into the world of business in the twenties, continuing to be the backbone for the dead end jobs that were according them by business and the culture at large. They worked hard. The vote had given them some influence but most were not alive to the ramifications of the fact that they were not free to exercise their inherent rights. In fact, they were controlled by statutes.

Through the Depression women did the work that was available at whatever wage they could get, as did most Americans. Survival was tough. Women lost jobs because preference was given to men, who were assumed to be supporting families. All too often this burden was falling on women abandoned by their husbands.

Women continued to volunteer and provide relief, which had become traditional for them as a group. They also extended their political activism. The Republican Party had championed the vote for women so that was the party that had the loyalty of the most women. But they wanted more. They confronted the glass ceiling and classified ads that grouped jobs into categories of WOMEN and MEN, taking no account of qualifications. A woman who had earned a Ph.D in business would not be allowed to apply for jobs a man could get. The problems they encountered with controlling property they had earned and wages continued. Married women did not control their own pay checks in California, for instance, until the early 1950s. Marital rape would not become actionable until the 1980s. In each case these changes happened on a state by state basis through legislation. Women obtained privileges, not rights, and began to confuse the two. But these reflected what should have been their inherent rights to control their persons and property.

The State should never have limited their right to contract – and marriage and each of these other issues is a matter of the right to control, as Jefferson said, Life, Liberty, and Happiness.

Ideas are always tested against the reality of how well they work. The ideas that had sustained them through the 1800s and into the 1900s began to be questioned and the questions continued.

The feminists of the Women's Movement of the 1800s had been firmly invested in the ideas of natural rights. But with the opening of the Twentieth Century Progressivism and a centralist approach to government displaced that philosophy. This did not start from the Democratic Party. The first Progressive President was Teddy Roosevelt, who took the seminal book of Progressivism, “The Promise of American Life,” by Herbert Croly, with him on a trip to Africa. Progressives and socialists had given up on the ideas of Classical Liberalism because those ideas seemed helpless to address the problems of social injustice in the years following the Civil War. Bellamy ran the first national media campaign in 1892 to persuade Americans to substitute the curriculum in schools that mandated that students study the founding documents, including the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and Bill of Rights, for the Pledge of Allegiance.

As women were finally achieving the right to vote US government was reformulating itself into a far more rigid top down system. In 1913 they passed the Income Tax, anointed the American Medical Association to control the health of Americans, handed our monetary system over to the Federal Reserve, a private corporation, thus setting the ground for corporations to assert themselves as an arm of government. Political parties began to function as power bases through which corporations could use government as an arm of their corporate policy.

One of the first acts of the AMA was to force the closure of women's medical schools. The number of women physicians began to decline since male controlled medical schools still refused to admit them, despite their qualifications.

Through the 20s and into the 50s the ideas of socialism, communism, and Progressivism were tried on. The government continued to legislate, asserting control through statute that had not previously existed. Lifting programs from fraternal orders such as the Redmen, they introduced Social Security and other programs, arguing that putting these on a tax base was inherently fairer. This system of enticements would produce generations of people raised to believe that government existed to ensure their security, something the Founders never intended. Today the 'benefits' are being withdrawn and limited while the taxation continues, a classic bait and switch.

The end of the Second World War forced women out of colleges and jobs as returning veterans were given preference. It mattered not that women had provided the labor that made the war effort possible at home they were told to find a man and marry.

Women were still hungry for freedom. But in the face of changing ideas they no longer were sure how that might be achieved.

The Rise of Corporatism

At the same time corporations, especially oil companies, had become accustomed to using government as an arm of their corporate policy for over a generation. They had begun to use political operatives to disrupt other governments and as a natural corollary. Within the US corporations begun to disrupt movements that threatened control of their markets through the 1950s.

Pressure began for the recognition of Israel by the United Nations. On November 29, 1947 with a partition of Palestine that disenfranchised many Palestinians, this took place. At midnight, May 14, 1948, the existence of a State of Israel, a Palestinian State and an international zone around Jerusalem became fact. The next year, May 11, 1949, Israel was admitted to the United Nations.

Bringing the State of Israel into existence had been a long time goal by Zionists who were supported by oil corporations. After Israel was established the UN reacted to violence by Israel with resolutions that established the lines that exist today. Having fulfilled that function the UN was now a threat to corporatism. A campaign to vilify the UN was launched that has become an unquestioned truism for most of us in the freedom movement. Ayn Rand said that we should question our premises but she failed to question her own.

This assumption was one of those that we should examine carefully. I mention it because the action with Israel and the UN sets in motion the strategies that would eventually carry Bush Senior and Junior into the White House as agents for oil companies, an extension of the strategy that began in the second decade of the Twentieth Century when the oil companies looked into the future and decided that as long as they had oil to sell they must ensure there were customers.

The United Nations

The United Nations began as an attempt to create a meeting ground where nations could talk out their problems instead of taking immediate recourse to war. Many problems are larger than any nation. Standards for national bodies who seek to avoid issues of pollution and the use of limited resources clearly needed a forum.

By 1968 an agreement on the environment had been hammered out by the United States that inspired agreement nationally and by other nations. By the next year it had been displaced. The United Nations had been moving towards standards to ensure that conflict due to misuse or over usage not erupt in violence; the vast majority of Americans agreed that clean air, water, and land were essential to the health and well being of all.

Consciousness of the system complexities environmental issues presented brought Americans together along lines that were not political up until the early 70s. But then attacks on environmentalists began to reformulate these issues as 'crazy,' and leftist. This characterization began to surface in the media and in publications, mostly with a NeoCon orientation. No one had yet heard of NeoConservativism but it's cadre of proponents were actively changing how Americans thought.

The First Generation of Political Operatives.

Three men were recruited to carry out a series of disinformation campaigns directed at the United Nations, women, and the environmental movement. All are still alive and active today. They are George H. W. Bush, O. R. Anderson, and Maurice Strong. Bush Senior was appointed Ambassador to the UN in 1971, perfect positioning. Googling the names of these individuals show how they have managed to position themselves. Bush Senior got himself elected president after a lackluster career as a political operative for the same people who had employed his father and grandfather. Maurice Strong, a high school drop out from Canada, managed to position himself as a major player in the UN who is now following a career as a conman in China. O. R. Anderson worked his way into a position in big oil.

In fact, petroleum was a bad choice as a mainstream source of power both for electric energy and for transportation. It could have been displaced many times in the last century with a combination of alternatives and more efficient application.

What you see in this period is a steady campaign to divide Americans along lines that include race, gender, social justice issues, and the environment and to assert centralized control through statute. Dividing people so that they fight instead of cooperating is one of the most effective ways to ensure that forward progress does not take place. “Why don't you two fight?” is a familiar playground strategy for sneaky wimps; it also works for megacorporations through think tanks. Spreading rumors, sensational stories and other forms of disinformation also disrupts communications and effective action. Passing laws that limit the exercise of inherent freedoms converts free individuals into serfs.

The Libertarian Party

Now we get to the history of our own movement and the cultural forces that turned, despite the expectations of Founder David Nolan and Murray Rothbard, the LP and the movement into a cul de sac that made coalition with left libertarians impossible.

In the Movement the term, “Liberal Feminist,” is a pejorative term. It elicits an immediate, visceral and emotional reaction from many activists. Ask yourself why that is. Why are the leaders in the Women's Movement from 1800 until today ignored by Libertarians? Women have been fighting for simple justice with a courage and persistence that is astounding. If the LP is about freedom and justice why would this be? The answer is manipulation using disinformation and rhetoric.

When the Equal Rights Amendment was sent from Congress for ratification by the states in 1972 women, right and left were delighted. The Amendment had been part of the Republican platform from 1940 until it was removed in 1964. It was restored by Republican women in 1972. The ERA was taken out by Ronald Reagan in 1980, not because he disagreed with it but so his campaign could receive large donations from Coors. That act signaled an exit of many long time activist women from the Republican Party. They were replaced by a plan already in motion laid out by the members of a College Republican group that included Ralph Reed, Pat Robertson, Karl Rove and Jack Abramoff.

Karl Rove had come to the attention of Bush Senior in the early 70s for his dirty but effective political style. Rove went to work for the Bush Family, a position he has held, formally and informally, ever since.

If you are going to seize control of a political party you need to know you can elect candidates; you need to deliver the votes to do that. Women were activist oriented but they did not vote mindlessly. The NFRW had continued to be the organization that provided the on the ground volunteers that worked. A normal pattern for local elections was for the NFRW to lease or arrange for the headquarters, provide the workers and phones, do the door belling, handle the registration drives, carry the weight for GOTV and fund raise. All presidential candidates made sure they appeared at the NFRW convention to ask for support.

But the agenda that women were pursuing was one that failed to find favor with the major corporations who were footing the bills for Bush and the growing cadre of NeoCons who slowly coalesced within the Republican Party through the decade of the 70s. So that small cadre of College Republicans decided to displace the women and substitute a reliable voting base created from newly politicized and organized Southern Churches. This coincided with the general move of Southern Democrats to register Republican, and for the same reasons. This is the origin of the Christian Coalition.

While this agenda was advancing the newly fledged Libertarian Party had not escaped the notice of those writing the agenda. The threat of coalition, right and left had to be avoided. The rhetoric of libertarianism was picked up and used during the Reagan campaign in 1980. I noticed this at the time, astonished. But those writing those speeches were neocons who understood the power of the ideas; using the rhetoric worked even though the words Reagan and then of subsequent Republicans used clearly bore no relationship to the meaning we ascribe to the words. This use also deflected the potential for support the LP possessed – although even more significant was the tendency of the LP to adopt a centrist form and culture internally.

The LP also rapidly became an environment hostile to women. Women's issues were denigrated and marginalized. You might argue that women's issues are the same as men's. They are not. Women's issues are those issues that allow women to be marginalized through the use of statute that limits their choices. Such choices should never have been legislated at all. Statutes mandating choice should be rescinded, including all marriage law.

Libertarians have spoken in action their agenda and it does not include those issues that matter to women as women. Those issues are the most compelling and most people work for their most compelling issues, not for someone else's most important issues.

The other major issue , the environment, was handled in a similar fashion. False studies, vilification, and specious assertions of authority, and the careful airing of the nutty edge any movement acquires worked to make the mainstream position for Libertarians hostile to issues of liability for misuse and pollution. “Earth First – We'll pave the other planets later,” was a bumper sticker that carried the flavor of the LP culture. Today that is changing. The present generation of individualists has far more Green, with market attitude people than was the case previously. They take for granted that women are equal while many continue to work for Constitutional affirmation.

Coalitions come about when all see a commitment to doing the right thing.

Many of these ' natural libertarians' simply register Green, put off by what they see on issues of the environment and women's issues. I saw this personally with my children. My son in law, raised Objectivist, and my daughter, raised Libertarian, both left the movement on precisely these issues. Brent, the son-in-law, is a graduate of CalTech who built the engine for Rotary Rockets. He is now involved in sustainable development. Those who walk away from the essential disconnect on individual rights do not tell you why, they just go.

A party that was intended to become a vehicle for coalition that would deliver a real freedom was converted into a medium for inserting propaganda and disinformation. Bogged down with specious arguments about 'anarchists' and 'limited government' we have been shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic for over a generation. Libertarians need to question their premises. The agenda is freedom for all of us. Allowing presence and control to individuals who do not understand the real agenda confuses our direction and muddies the waters that must remain clear if the LP is to become the vehicle for change so needed today.

As was the case in the larger political arena the guilty parties were oil major corporations; their agents were a fairly short list of individuals. Ask yourself who profited from selling the idea that the state has a role through manipulation of the economy or anyone's life. The guilty parties are easy to identify.

If the LP is to realize its original mission as a weapon in the war for establishing once and for all the vision that is America that epiphany must take place within. Change matters and what we must change first is our own organization.