> politicians don't admit they were wrong. It just looks weak.

True. They could have decently spun it, though. But I definitely understand your point.

> Slashing spending and taxation will only slow the rate at which the deficit grows. How would you expect to pay it off? Also, what do you plan on slashing? Our infrastructure is crumbling, who's going to rebuild it? Got a lot of people on various social welfare programs, turn 'em loose into a state of nature?

Please note that I speak solely on behalf of WaitDontGo, and NOT as an affiliate of the Johnson campaign. I am a totally insane and extremist idiot compared to him, and my words should be understood with that lens. For more info on his policies visit his website.

Trust me, I wish we were morally ready as a nation for a total state of nature. I would love to wake up one morning and live in a world of voluntary governments. Unfortunately, we've got a couple hundred more years to go. But to answer your question, I don't think anyone has a plan that eliminates the deficit soon. I think the objective needs to be A) stop adding to it, and B) get to point where we can start paying it off.

The deficit is freaking huge, and it's not as easy as just cutting programs or raising/lowering taxes. It's gonna be a really long process no matter what. A lot of these (admittedly small) changes will hurt (possibly badly) in the short run, but are wiser choices for the long haul. With all that said, there are a few things I can say with confidence that I would cut drastically or eliminate. This is not a comprehensive list by any means, because it's 1AM and these are issues to which I still don't have perfect answers (and anyone who claims to have such wisdom is a liar and a jerk).

• Social Security: this program is such a shit-show for a variety of reasons. I shy away from the ol' Republican cries of "PRIVATIZE!" because those cats love crony capitalism and their plans reek of that. At very least, we need to adjust the scale from being based on average wage growth to being based on inflation. This will be huge once major changes to the Fed are made (like ending it), and practices like QE don't keep rocketing inflation to sky high rates.
  
  
• Subsidies: end the lot of 'em. Oil subsidies are the biggest freaking joke. Farm subsidies may seem like the right decision, but we're hurting working families at home and only making hunger problems abroad even worse with stupid-high prices. Yes, I care about the hungry and stuff. Not all libertarian/capitalist types are evil! :).
  
  
• Healthcare stuffs: Not the biggest fan of the ACA, as you probably suspected, so I'd toss that. I'd give states greater freedom in determining what system would work best for their citizens who benefit from Medicare and Medicaid. Giving states the freedom to try out new solutions may also be hugely beneficial to other states, who could mimic things that worked elsewhere.
  
  
• Defense/surveillance and shit: HULK SLASH WASTEFUL SPENDING. Shit we don't need to keep funding includes: fighter jets that suffocate pilots like the F-22 Raptor, (really slow and expensive to research) laser weapons on battleships, bases all over the damn world, motherfucking drones with weapons on them, etc. The Security State has gotten out of hand, and there is no reason to be spending what we spend on NSA spying programs.
  
  
• War on Drugs: eliminate federal sentences for possession of controlled substances. Set some money aside for grants to treatment centers. This worked super well in Portugal, and they saw addiction rates and just about every crime indicator plummet. I'd also immediately release those serving time for non-violent marijuana or hallucinogen offenders. What a total waste of dough.
  
  
• Dept of Education: Our schools were objectively stronger before it was created. Sure there are tons of confounding variables, but nearly every state and municipality that has tried voucher or other privatization methods has seen huge benefits for their students. Making schools compete will breed better schools. And our current method, where poor students get shitty schools almost universally, is really classist and racist. Really, really racist. You might be surprised, actually, to learn that public schools were established as truly racist institutions. More on that in a really great book.
  
  
• Most industry regulations: I'm not talking about basic safety concerns (although those would totally be phased out were I Supreme Dictator for Life or something.) I'm talking about the millions of pages of arcane rules that do nothing but ensure powerful oligarchies of established corporations and create higher degrees of collusion between government and private industry, all while screwing the entrepreneur and the consumer. A lot of these need to go.
  
  
• Foreign Aid: Again, totally miniscule drops in a massive bucket, but the way this shit is run now is totally asinine. Not to be the stereotypical libertarian, but private NPOs do such a better job (as they do with hunger, unemployment, housing, and healthcare solutions), because if they can't prove success, no one funds them. But the kleptocracies we give aid to still starve their people and buy Lambos with the money they make selling anything we give them. We also prop up a lot of terrible people. We should stop doing that.
  
  
• Fair Tax: I also like the Fair Tax model, because I feel like it's the closest we can safely get to zero taxation as possible. I'd be eliminating a bunch of tariffs, taxes, and penalties, too. Should I be more detailed? You bet! And I could be but the internet draiiiiins meeeeee.
  
  You probably didn't want a novel, so Imma stop there. Point is, no one knows how to fully pay it off any time soon. Stuff like this would help. I could really scare you and start talking about competitive currency and private justice systems, but that's not what you bargained for at all.
  
  > (summarized) The GOP spends just about as much as the Dems.
  
  True dat, man. What do you expect, with a guy like Reagan as their supposed hero?
  
  > How do you feel like Johnson being on the Libertarian ticket is going to play out in key swing states? Like I said before I like Johnson but I feel like his presence has more of a potential to divide liberals than it does conservatives.
  
  To be honest, I've seen pretty much the opposite. If anyone is staunchly in one camp this season, it's the liberals. Sure, POTUS will struggle without the youth and Hispanic voting rates we saw in 2008, but it's not us that's taking that away. The young folks are discouraged and burnt out, and voter intimidation practices across the nation are making Chicano/Latino/Hispanic voters really weary about turning out to the polls. That and POTUS's severely broken promises about immigration reform, which I could write a whole book about. But in general, Democrats and other kinds of liberals feel they have something they must defend and fight for. Sure, the President may not have been everything they had hoped for, but now isn't the time to play with notions like third parties or not voting.
  
  No, I see people come to us from the right more than the left. This is why the GOP is challenging our ballot access in almost every single state (we're still winning almost universally, don't worry). A lot of conservatives are scared about one thing and one thing only: monetary collapse. Romney's a big-government conservative who doesn't oppose practices like QE and stimulus packages. Ryan's a huge spender, and his budget might balance things in thirty-something years. Might. Tons of conservatives won't stand for the pandering; they want someone they can count on to be a true champion of small government. Believe it or not, a huge number of Republican voters couldn't care less about social issues right now. These folks are flocking to our campaign like crazy.
  
  I wouldn't be working on this campaign if I didn't believe in it 100%. If we can get Governor Johnson on the national debates, I believe we can win the election. That said, if we are just a spoiler campaign, it's the GOP we're screwing, not the Democrats.
  
  > Are you on the road with Johnson?
  
  I'm mostly in one place, but come October I'll be moving around the Midwest a bit, and definitely making a couple stops in Michigan (can't reveal where yet, obviously). I'll definitely let you know what the details are once I can be public with them. I'd love to have a real-life discussion with you about this stuff!

If I was going to provide someone with a list of books that best expressed my current thinking on the Political Economy these would be my top ones:

1. The Law - While over a century old this books stands as the perfect intro to the ideas of Classical Liberalism. When you understand the core message of this book you understand why people oppose so many aspects of government action.
   
2. Seeing Like A State - The idea that society can be rebuilt from the top down is well demolished in this dense but important read. The concept of Legibility was a game changer for my brain.
   
3. Stubborn Attachments - This books presents a compelling philosophical argument for the importance of economic growth. It's hard to overstate how important getting the balance of economic growth vs other considerations actually is.
   
4. The Breakdown of Nations - A classic text on why the trend toward "bigger" isn't a good thing. While various nits can be picked with this book I think its general thesis is holding up well in our increasingly bifurcated age.
   
5. The Joy of Freedom - Lots of books, many objectively better, could have gone here but this book was my personal pivot point which sent me away from Socialism and towards capitalism. This introduction to "Libertarian Capitalism" is a bit dated now but it was powerful.
   
   There are, of course many more books that could go on this list. But the above list is a good sampling of my personal philosophy of political economy. It is not meant as a list of books to change your mind but simply as a list of books that are descriptive of my current belief that we should be orientated towards high (sustainable) economic growth & more decentralization.
   
   Some honorable mentions:
   
   As a self proclaimed "Libertarian Crunchy Con" I have to add The Quest for Community & Crunchy Cons
   
   The book The Fourth Economy fundamentally changed my professional direction in life.
   
   Anti-Fragile was another book full of mind blowing ideas and shifted my approach to many things.
   
   The End of Jobs is a great combination of The Fourth Economy & Anti-Fragile (among other concepts) into a more real-world useful set of ideas.
   
   Markets Not Capitalism is a powerful reminder that it is not Capitalism per se that is important but the transformational power of markets that need be unleashed.
   
   You will note that I left out pure economic books, this was on purpose. There are tons of good intro to econ type books and any non-trained economist should read a bunch from a bunch of different perspectives. With that said I am currently working my way through the book Choice and if it stays as good as it has started that will probably get added to my core list.
   
   So many more I could I list like The Left, The Right, & The State or The Problem of Political Authority and on it goes...
   I am still looking for a "manifesto" of sorts for the broad movement towards decentralization (I have a few possibilities on my 'to read list') so if you know of any that might fit that description let me know.

So cleaning out my downloads folder today, I found I had a PDF copy of Irving Kristol's The Neoconservative Persuasion tucked away in a little cobwebbed corner of the hard drive, and I have no idea how it got there. Either I'm having serious memory loss, or the CIA has put four hundred pages of wonderful malware on my computer.

In any case, after having perused it for a short while, I can confirm that Mr. Kristol is a brilliant writer:

>Finally, for a great power, the “national interest” is not a geographical
term, except for fairly prosaic matters like trade and environmental regulation.
A smaller nation might appropriately feel that its national interest begins
and ends at its borders, so that its foreign policy is almost always in a
defensive mode. A larger nation has more extensive interests. And large nations
whose identity is ideological, like the Soviet Union of yesteryear and
the United States of today, inevitably have ideological interests in addition to
more material concerns. Barring extraordinary events, the United States will
always feel obliged to defend, if possible, a democratic nation under attack
from nondemocratic forces, external or internal. That is why it was in our
national interest to come to the defense of France and Britain in World War
II. That is why we feel it necessary to defend Israel today, when its survival
is threatened. No complicated geopolitical calculations of national interest
are necessary.

But I'm also finding that the views Our Glorious Founder, perhaps more than expected, don't necessarily align with those of this sub and a lot of modern Neoconservatism, at least from what I've read so far. From the same essay (emphasis added):

> And then, of course, there is foreign policy, the area of American politics
where neoconservatism has recently been the focus of media attention. This is
surprising since there is no set of neoconservative beliefs concerning foreign
policy, only a set of attitudes derived from historical experience. (The favorite
neoconservative text on foreign affairs, thanks to Professors Leo Strauss of
Chicago and Donald Kagan of Yale, is Thucydides on the Peloponnesian War.)
These attitudes can be summarized in the following “theses” (as a Marxist
would say). First, patriotism is a natural and healthy sentiment and should be
encouraged by both private and public institutions. Precisely because we are a
nation of immigrants, this is a powerful American sentiment. Second, world
government is a terrible idea since it can lead to world tyranny. International institutions that point to an ultimate world government should be regarded
with the deepest suspicion. Third, statesmen should, above all, have the ability
to distinguish friends from enemies. This is not as easy as it sounds, as the
history of the Cold War revealed. The number of intelligent men who could
not count the Soviet Union as an enemy, even though this was its own selfdefinition,
was absolutely astonishing.

I get the feeling that many of the lines that jumped out at me as rather strange utterances from the Godfather of Neoconservatism are merely instances of miscommunication; Kristol had a very specific way of putting things -- supposedly "not having beliefs" on foreign policy is really, if you read further, a statement on the practicality and the importance of the lesson of history regarding that policy -- but the break between Kristol's philosophy of Neoconservatism and the modern persuasion -- for it remains, I'll agree with him, a "persuasion" and not a philosophy or a doctrine -- is very real and much more easily spotted than I'd previously assumed. As he says in this essay, however, our roots are in the American-led rules-based world order, not necessarily in the precise words of various moral justifications for it. Regardless of Kristol's particular suspicions of policies or institutions we might hold dear, he did a mighty fine job of defining this here ideology's place within American conservatism.

On just this, he opens:

> What exactly is neoconservatism? Journalists, and now even presidential candidates,
speak with an enviable confidence on who or what is “neoconservative,”
and seem to assume the meaning is fully revealed in the name. Those of
us who are designated as “neocons” are amused, flattered, or dismissive, depending
on the context. It is reasonable to wonder: is there any “there” there?
Even I, frequently referred to as the “godfather” of all those neocons, have had
my moments of wonderment.

And soon concludes, after mulling a bit on the subject of just where his "persuasion" should be in the world:

> Neoconservatism is the first variant of American conservatism in the past
century that is in the “American grain.” It is hopeful, not lugubrious; forwardlooking,
not nostalgic; and its general tone is cheerful, not grim or dyspeptic. Its
twentieth-century heroes tend to be TR, FDR, and Ronald Reagan. Such Republican
and conservative worthies as Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Dwight
Eisenhower, and Barry Goldwater are politely overlooked. Of course, those worthies
are in no way overlooked by a large, probably the largest, segment of the Republican
Party, with the result that most Republican politicians know nothing
and could not care less about neoconservatism. Nevertheless, they cannot be
blind to the fact that neoconservative policies, reaching out beyond the traditional
political and financial base, have helped make the very idea of political
conservatism more acceptable to a majority of American voters. Nor has it passed
official notice that it is the neoconservative public policies, not the traditional Republican
ones, which result in popular Republican presidencies.

---------------------

Tl;Dr

I'm glad I downloaded this, even if I don't remember it. I think I'm in for a wild ride.

Lovecraft's racial attitudes were much more cultural than biological. He showed sympathy to those who were peaceably assimilated into Western culture. He married a Russian Jew who he viewed as "well assimilated," and was good friends with Samuel Loveman who was Jewish even though he had written distasteful things about the Russians and the Jews in the past":

On the Russians:

>The most alarming tendency observable in this age is a growing disregard for the established forces of law and order. Whether or not stimulated by the noxious example of the almost sub-human Russian rabble, the less intelligent element throughout the world seems animated by a singular viciousness, and exhibits symptoms like those of a herd on the verge of stampeding. Whilst long-winded politicians preach universal peace, long haired anarchists are preaching a social upheaval which means nothing more or less than a reversion to savagery or mediaeval barbarism. Even in this traditionally orderly nation the number of Bolsheviki, both open and veiled, is considerable enough to require remedial measures. The repeated and unreasonable strikes of important workers, seemingly with the object of indiscriminate extortion rather than rational wage increase, constitute a menace which should be checked.

On the Jews:

>A Jew is capable of infinite nastiness when he seeks revenge, & I believe I shall have ample grounds for making [Isaacson] the hero of a spirited Dunciad. I can almost predict his line of attack. He will call me superficial, crude, barbaric in thought, imperfect in education, offensively arrogant & bigoted, filled with venomous prejudice, wanting in good taste, &c. &c. &c. But what I can and will say in reply is also violent & comprehensive. He will ask why I am an advocate of war, yet am not at this moment in the British army. I shall not stoop to explain that I am an invalid who would certainly be fighting under the Union Jack if able, but shall have plenty to say about the decadent cowardice responsible for the propagation of peace ideas. Peace is the ideal of a dying nation; a broken race. Isaacson belongs to a stock wholly broken & emasculated by two thousand years of cringing at the feet of Aryan masters. But I, thank the Gods, am an Aryan, & can rejoice in the glorious victory of T. Flavius Vespasianus, under whose legions the Jewish race & their capital were trodden out of national existence! I am an anti-Semitic by nature, but thought I had concealed my prejudice in my remarks concerning Isaacson.

In "Cool Air," the narrator degrades the poor Hispanics of his neighbourhood, but he respects the aristocratic Dr. Muñoz.

>Dr. Muñoz, most certainly, was a man of birth, cultivation, and discrimination.

There are numerous other quotes to support my original claim:

>Only an ignorant dolt would attempt to call a Chinese gentleman—heir to one of the greatest artistic & philosophical traditions in the world—an “inferior” of any sort….& yet there are potent reasons, based on wide physical, mental, & cultural differences, why great numbers of the Chinese ought not to mix into the Caucasian fabric, or vice versa. It is not that one race is any better than any other, but that their whole respective heritages are so antipodal as to make harmonious adjustment impossible. Members of one race can fit into another only through the complete eradication of their own background-influences–& even then the adjustment will always remain uneasy & imperfect if the newcomer’s physical aspect forms a constant reminder of his outside origin. Therefore it is wise to discourage all mixtures of sharply differentiated races—though the colour-line does not need to be drawn as strictly as in the case of the negro, since we know that a dash or two of Mongolian or Indian or Hindoo or some such blood will not actually injure a white stock biologically. . .

****

>With the high-grade alien races we can adopt a policy of flexible common-sense—discouraging mixture whenever we can, but not clamping down the bars so ruthlessly against every individual of slightly mixed ancestry. As a matter of fact, most of the psychological race differences which strike us so prominently are cultural rather than biological.


Considering the fact that he viewed cultured foreigners and those well-assimilated into Western culture positively, I think he would very much enjoy seeing people of colour celebrating Western history.

If you'd like more insight into Lovecraft's views, I recommend reading his letters, or perhaps even the journal he published, [The Conservative.*](https://www.amazon.com/Conservative-H-P-Lovecraft/dp/1907166300) Keep in mind though that Lovecraft's brand of Conservatism was widely different than what we see today and was more cultural than political.

I would also suggest S.T. Joshi's biography.

While I agree that third parties have almost no chance of being elected president (it has only happened once, the Republican party) that does not mean that voting for a third party candidate is a complete waste.

When a third party candidate gets enough votes to be noticeable, let's say 5% of the popular vote or more, it forces the two major party candidates to try to change their platforms in order to accommodate the third party constituency.

Look at the effect of Ross Perot's campaign in 1992. He got almost 19% of the popular vote which is the best any third party candidate has done since good ol' TR. As a result of this the Republican party under Newt Gingrich came out with the Contract with America which helped them to take the house in '94.

Even though Dole lost to Clinton in '96 (Perot got 8% this time, not too shabby) the Republican party had changed and put an increased emphasis on balancing the federal budget which was one of Perot's main platforms.

All I'm trying to say here is that if you decide to vote for a third party and enough people join you, you will be noticed by the major parties and you will have a chance to at least moderately change the way they do things.

Source: Three's A Crowd.

TLDR: Your vote isn't necessarily wasted, vote for who you want to.

>You guys have to realize that Bob Barr was a plant. He was tasked with infiltrating the Libertarian establishment in order to gain the nomination and effectively kill the the electoral efforts of the party. He has done an excellent job of that. Fortunately, Ron Paul is still out there, and his supporters are still hanging in there too.

[sigh]

Let me give you a much more plausible explanation, and we can see what you think. Note that I don't know much about Barr and so some of this is speculation as to his motives.

In 2003, due to a redistricting change, the Libertarian Party saw an opportunity to unseat Barr for his views on the War on Drugs. It ran an ad campaign against him, and got him kicked out of office.

Even a couple of years ago, it was pretty clear that the cold-war coalition of social conservative/hawks and right-libertarians was going to start unraveling without the common concern of communism.

I wouldn't be terribly surprised if Barr, faced with the very clear example of the costs of his opposition to libertarian ideals, decided that maybe this was a worthwhile wave to ride. It'd be a pragmatic decision -- getting into an organization that's growing in influence gives a better shot at getting a good position, and, sure enough, Barr came in as a Presidential nominee.

However, toward the end, Barr was probably hoping for several factors to come together to at least help make him a significant factor in the elections; among these would have been an exclusive nomination from Ron Paul. He had a number of reasons to expect this; unfortunately for him, he didn't wind up getting it, as Paul wound up advocating a collection of people to try to advance anti-war and third-party goals. Barr wasn't particularly gracious at having a very important pillar that he was hoping for vanish.

Now, you can decide whether this was a conspiracy to infiltrate the Libertarian Party and block it being a spoiler, or whether it's just a self-interested politician acting rather rudely as a major source of political support that he was planning on leveraging disappeared.

The long game of the European New Right

In 2007, Canadian political theorist Tamir Bar-On wrote a book with a provocative title: Where have all the fascists gone? In 2017, Bar-On’s question may seem to many readers no longer that perplexing.

Beginning with the GFC, the last decade has seen the most dramatic rise of far Right political forces in the Western world since the interwar years.

2009 was the breakthrough year for UKIP (the UK Independence Party) in European elections. It also saw notable gains for Rightwing parties from Norway, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Finland, Denmark, Holland, Austria, and Italy.

In 2010, Jobbik, “The Movement for a Better Hungary” whose supporters wear paramilitary uniforms and rail against immigrants, the Roma people and “Jewish financial capital”, became Hungary’s third largest Party.

Last year, the world knows, Donald Trump’s brand of “America First” populism won over first the GOP and then the White House. Britain, led by UKIP, voted to leave the EU.

This year, Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party in the Netherlands failed to win the Dutch elections. Yet his Party increased its representation from 15 to around 20 seats, confirming Wilders’ as Holland’s second political Party.

All of these New Right Parties deny the tag of fascism, indelibly tarnished by the revelations after 1944 of the heinous atrocities of Hitler’s NSDAP.

Yet each of them, to different degrees, challenges established post-war divisions of Left and Right, just as the interwar fascists and “national socialists”. Each calls into question the basic legitimacy of parliamentary market regimes, as the interwar fascists did. Each hones in upon anti-immigration and anti-Islamic fears. Each plays up opposition to treacherous domestic “elites” as a key point of electoral appeal.

Each proposes the reclaiming of “sovereignty” in a sweeping national rebirth: an idea once more close to the very heart of interwar forms of fascism.

​

Today’s rise to mainstream political legitimacy of these parties, as well as the commonalities between them, bespeak common ideological inspirations, as well as the changing times.

Bar-On’s 2007 study of the European New Right thus takes on new pertinence in 2017. Where have all the fascists gone?, an almost unique study in the English language, seeks out and analyses in detail the ideological seeds of European anti-liberalism that are increasingly bearing electoral fruit in the second decade of the new millennium.

The book asks several questions that, as things now appear, have been asked far too little in the liberal West. Just how did the ideas of the European Far Right develop after the “zero hour” of 1945, in the transformed post-fascist world?

Was it reasonable to suppose that military defeat in 1944-45 would forever discredit the ideas of the Far Right that had commanded mass support in Germany, Italy, Spain, Romania and elsewhere?

Wasn’t it, on the contrary, always more likely that these ideas would go underground and bide their time, cultivating esoteric modes of expression whilst waiting for their moment to bid for renewed political power?

A New New Right

In Australia as in the US until recently, the term “New Right” described political supporters of the suite of policies known as “neoliberalism” or “economic rationalism”.

New Righters on this AngloAmerican model believe in the fundamental beneficence and efficiency of free market exchange. They oppose, at least in theory, any nation-State that would intervene in these markets. They oppose, in theory and practice, the organisation of workers in unions, progressive forms of income taxation, and automatic state provision of welfare and other forms of social insurance.

Instead, these “dries” espouse the selling of public assets and the removal of tariffs and other barriers to free trade. Their theorists envisage a world of open borders. Capital from any which “where” should be free to move from country to country, choosing local conditions most propitious for banking profits.



At the height of the 1990s’ euphoria about “globalisation”, thinkers of this New Right were forecasting the end of the nation state in a borderless utopia of “24-7” trade.

The European New Right (ENR) has different ideas and other sources.

Indeed, when its spokespeople are not viscerally anti-American—as almost all were, until 2016—they are deeply opposed to “liberalism” in any forms. They are thus deeply hostile to the kinds of economic cosmopolitanism espoused by Messrs Hayek, Friedman and their admirers, however much they share some political foes.

For the thinkers of the ENR, free markets are not the objects of celebration and faith, but of profound suspicion.

It is not the invariant tendency of these markets to produce growing material inequalities that troubles them. What the ENR thinkers contest is how unregulated free markets operate in almost complete indifference, or active hostility to local traditions, religions, communities, nations, and (in some cases) nature herself.

The AngloAmerican New Right have long proposed that markets inculcate in subjects a hardy independence of spirit and canny self-reliance, through the ongoing demands of competitive survival.

The ENR, unafraid to draw on Marxian cultural theories, proposes that the commodification of culture in later capitalism cheapens everything, uproots individuals from their families and solidarity with their fellows, and destroys the differences between local, regional and national ways of life.

In the ENR optic, moreover, the floods of immigrants who have presented themselves at the borders of Western nations in the last decades are a symptom of the “globalist” system. They are the other side of the cheap imported consumer goods that have also flooded the West since the 1980s. To echo Alain de Benoist, one of the fathers of the ENR, he who remains silent about capitalism should also remain silent about the problems of immigration.

We are a long way from the New Right we are familiar with down under.

Crashing the Gates is but one of the books written on the subject.

The point it boils down to is that the regressive party withholds party funding from members who don't toe the line. So you're unlikely to infiltrate very far with any type of internal upset. The dems on the other hand are prime targets for an incremental take over from within. Target the least agreeable candidates in primaries, always support the dem in the general. Yeah you end up with some candidates you don't like, but if you rinse and repeat enough times it changes the structure of the party.

The other bonus is that if you can shift power far enough to the dems so that the regressive party collapses, the dems would shatter within one or two election cycles after words. Giving us a brief shot at having more than a two party system.

I'm still hoping someone more knowledgeable can pop by, but I guess I can mention that J. G. A. Pocock (The Machiavellian Moment), Gordon S. Wood (The Creation of the American Republic) and Bernard Bailyn (The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution) are three of the more well known scholars who have written on republicanism and the US formation.

On republicanism, there's the SEP entry to get you started. Quentin Skinner has written a lot on the subject. We had an interview with him about this, actually. Or, you can watch On the Liberty of Republics or read this 3am interview. Or, simply, immerse yourself.

As far as primary sources goes, Iseult Honohan looks at Aristotle, Cicero, Machiavelli, Harrington, Rousseau, Wollstonecraft, Madison, Arendt and Charles Taylor in her book on civic republicanism. Algernon Sidney is also often mentioned.

As regards modern republicanism, in addition to Charles Taylor and Quentin Skinner, Richard Dagger and Philip Pettit come to mind.

Hopefully, someone can come along and correct this/provide you with some better advice.

Paging /u/giuliocaperchi (whose essay about republican liberty and its relation to Berlin's Two Concepts you can read here). Is this up your alley, /u/genuinepolitician? Or /u/ippolit_belinski? /u/widowdogood? /u/wokeupabug?

Salon? Really? No.

Also everything you just said applies to Obama. You can tell by the way he couldn't care less about average American household wealth. Hint: it's at ~50% of pre-Obama levels. 8 years later and average America household wealth is STILL 50% lower than it was when he took power.

He could've fixed that if he wanted to, but he didn't. He wants other countries to have more, so that we can have less. He think we have enough. That's why Obama has invested in other countries rather than investing in our own. He's used our tax dollars to better the lives of non-Americans. He thinks that makes a safer in the world a better place, but it doesn't. In fact it does just the opposite. The world is a better place when America is strong, secure, and able to influence global events for the better. Obama thinks a weak America will make the world respect us more. This is a fatal miscalculation - because obviously the Russians didn't respect him enough to meddle in our election. It's actually the biggest FU the Russians could have given Obama. As he fell for it hook line and sinker.

But that is Obama's vision of a better America in a "better world" - a more equal playing field for all people. And that means Americans having a lower quality of life.

I can't blame him though he learned it from his dad. Self-avowed and unabashed communist. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

Try reading a real book. You might learn something:

https://www.amazon.com/Obamas-America-Unmaking-American-Dream/dp/1476773351

Since it's mostly Austrian Econ acolytes that repeat the myth that "Corporations are a legal fiction of the State" and that somehow Corporations would not exist in their mythical interpretation of the "Free" Market... I'll let Austrian Econ Patron Saint Murray Rothbard take this one:

>Finally, the question may be raised: Are corporations themselves mere grants of monopoly privilege? Some advocates of the free market were persuaded to accept this view by Walter Lippmann’s The Good Society.
It should be clear from previous discussion, however, that corporations are not at all monopolistic privileges; they are free associations of individuals pooling their capital. On the purely free market, such men would simply announce to their creditors that their liability is limited to the capital specifically invested in the corporation, and that beyond this their personal funds are not liable for debts, as they would be under a partnership arrangement. It then rests with the sellers and lenders to this corporation to decide whether or not they will transact business with it. If they do, then they proceed at their own risk.
Thus, the government does not grant corporations a privilege of limited liability; anything announced and freely contracted for in advance is a right of a free individual, not a special privilege. It is not necessary that governments grant charters to corporations.

• Murray M Rothbard Man, Economy, and State 1970

Oh boy have I got some books for you:

• The Conservatarian Manifesto, Charlie C.W. Cooke --
  The editor of National Review Online argues the path to a better conservatism lies in a marriage with libertarianism.
  
  
• The End is Near and it's Going to be Awesome, Kevin D. Williamson --
  National Review's Roving Correspondent argues that the American government is collapsing under its own weight and that's a good thing.
  
  
• Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. Vance --
  A former marine and Yale-educated lawyer gives a powerful account of his upbringing in a Rust-belt town and his family's connection to Appalachia.
  
  
• The Evolution of Everything, Matt Ridley --
  The Fellow of the Royal Society and member of the House of Lords describes how spontaneous order is behind a great many advancements of the modern age and why centralized "design" is ineffective and prone to failure.
  
  
• The Vanishing American Adult, Ben Sasse --
  The popular freshman senator describes the crisis of America's youth, and how the solutions lay beyond the realm of politics.
  
  
• Our Republican Constitution, Randy E. Barnett --
  One of America's leading constitutional law scholars explains why Americans would benefit from a renewal of our Republican Constitution and how such a renewal can be achieved.
  
  
• A Torch Kept Lit, William F. Buckley, edited by James Rosen --
  A curated collection of Buckley's best eulogies, A Torch Kept Lit provides invaluable insight into both the eminent twentieth century conservative and an unrevised conservative account of the great lives of the twentieth century.
  
  
• Scalia Speaks, Antonin Scalia, edited by Christopher Scalia and Ed Whelan --
  This volume of Justice Scalia's finest speeches provides intimate insight on the justice's perspectives on law, faith, virtue, and private life.

I am an author who publishes directly through Amazon using Kindle Direct Publishing and CreateSpace, and Amazon sent an email to me a while ago about this (see below).

I absolutely love Ursula LeGuin's work, but I think she and her colleagues are on the wrong side of history on this issue. Copyright needs to evolve in order to continue to make sense within the context of modern digital publishing technologies and their near-zero marginal costs of production.

There is an important aspect to this story that the NY Times article above does a very poor job of communicating, which is that Hachette is a publishing giant that has already been convicted of colluding with other publishers to fix the prices of eBooks at unjustifiably high levels. Despite near-zero marginal costs, many eBooks from Hachette and its fellow publishers are priced similarly to their corresponding hardcopy versions.

Obviously these high prices translate into addition profit for publishers like Hachette, but in most cases the authors themselves see no additional royalties, since royalties are typically a fixed percentage of the sale price. So eBooks are pure cream for publishers, which comes at the expense of both authors and their readers.

By contrast, for my book Letter to a Conservative Nation the regular pricing is $12.95 for a hardcopy and $6.99 for a Kindle eBook version. Since I publish through Amazon, the percentage royalty I receive is different for hardcopies and digital copies - it is much higher for the latter. And because I had complete control over the pricing of both versions, I chose to structure them so that I receive exactly the same royalty for each.

Publishers certainly don't do anything to merit any additional margins from eBooks because as the email below explains, "with an e-book, there’s no printing, no over-printing, no need to forecast, no returns, no lost sales due to out of stock, no warehousing costs, no transportation costs, and there is no secondary market – e-books cannot be resold as used books." I therefore think authors like LeGuin should be focusing their efforts on renegotiating different royalty schedules for electronic versions of their books rather than simply fighting to preserve inflated prices for eBooks.

Here is the email that Amazon sent me back in early August:

---

Dear KDP Author,

Just ahead of World War II, there was a radical invention that shook the foundations of book publishing. It was the paperback book. This was a time when movie tickets cost 10 or 20 cents, and books cost $2.50. The new paperback cost 25 cents – it was ten times cheaper. Readers loved the paperback and millions of copies were sold in just the first year.

With it being so inexpensive and with so many more people able to afford to buy and read books, you would think the literary establishment of the day would have celebrated the invention of the paperback, yes? Nope. Instead, they dug in and circled the wagons. They believed low cost paperbacks would destroy literary culture and harm the industry (not to mention their own bank accounts). Many bookstores refused to stock them, and the early paperback publishers had to use unconventional methods of distribution – places like newsstands and drugstores. The famous author George Orwell came out publicly and said about the new paperback format, if “publishers had any sense, they would combine against them and suppress them.” Yes, George Orwell was suggesting collusion.

Well… history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

Fast forward to today, and it’s the e-book’s turn to be opposed by the literary establishment. Amazon and Hachette – a big US publisher and part of a $10 billion media conglomerate – are in the middle of a business dispute about e-books. We want lower e-book prices. Hachette does not. Many e-books are being released at $14.99 and even $19.99. That is unjustifiably high for an e-book. With an e-book, there’s no printing, no over-printing, no need to forecast, no returns, no lost sales due to out of stock, no warehousing costs, no transportation costs, and there is no secondary market – e-books cannot be resold as used books. E-books can and should be less expensive.

Perhaps channeling Orwell’s decades old suggestion, Hachette has already been caught illegally colluding with its competitors to raise e-book prices. So far those parties have paid $166 million in penalties and restitution. Colluding with its competitors to raise prices wasn’t only illegal, it was also highly disrespectful to Hachette’s readers.

The fact is many established incumbents in the industry have taken the position that lower e-book prices will “devalue books” and hurt “Arts and Letters.” They’re wrong. Just as paperbacks did not destroy book culture despite being ten times cheaper, neither will e-books. On the contrary, paperbacks ended up rejuvenating the book industry and making it stronger. The same will happen with e-books.

Many inside the echo-chamber of the industry often draw the box too small. They think books only compete against books. But in reality, books compete against mobile games, television, movies, Facebook, blogs, free news sites and more. If we want a healthy reading culture, we have to work hard to be sure books actually are competitive against these other media types, and a big part of that is working hard to make books less expensive.

Moreover, e-books are highly price elastic. This means that when the price goes down, customers buy much more. We've quantified the price elasticity of e-books from repeated measurements across many titles. For every copy an e-book would sell at $14.99, it would sell 1.74 copies if priced at $9.99. So, for example, if customers would buy 100,000 copies of a particular e-book at $14.99, then customers would buy 174,000 copies of that same e-book at $9.99. Total revenue at $14.99 would be $1,499,000. Total revenue at $9.99 is $1,738,000. The important thing to note here is that the lower price is good for all parties involved: the customer is paying 33% less and the author is getting a royalty check 16% larger and being read by an audience that’s 74% larger. The pie is simply bigger.

But when a thing has been done a certain way for a long time, resisting change can be a reflexive instinct, and the powerful interests of the status quo are hard to move. It was never in George Orwell’s interest to suppress paperback books – he was wrong about that.

And despite what some would have you believe, authors are not united on this issue. When the Authors Guild recently wrote on this, they titled their post: “Amazon-Hachette Debate Yields Diverse Opinions Among Authors” (the comments to this post are worth a read). A petition started by another group of authors and aimed at Hachette, titled “Stop Fighting Low Prices and Fair Wages,” garnered over 7,600 signatures. And there are myriad articles and posts, by authors and readers alike, supporting us in our effort to keep prices low and build a healthy reading culture. Author David Gaughran’s recent interview is another piece worth reading.

We recognize that writers reasonably want to be left out of a dispute between large companies. Some have suggested that we “just talk.” We tried that. Hachette spent three months stonewalling and only grudgingly began to even acknowledge our concerns when we took action to reduce sales of their titles in our store. Since then Amazon has made three separate offers to Hachette to take authors out of the middle. We first suggested that we (Amazon and Hachette) jointly make author royalties whole during the term of the dispute. Then we suggested that authors receive 100% of all sales of their titles until this dispute is resolved. Then we suggested that we would return to normal business operations if Amazon and Hachette’s normal share of revenue went to a literacy charity. But Hachette, and their parent company Lagardere, have quickly and repeatedly dismissed these offers even though e-books represent 1% of their revenues and they could easily agree to do so. They believe they get leverage from keeping their authors in the middle.

We will never give up our fight for reasonable e-book prices. We know making books more affordable is good for book culture. We’d like your help. Please email Hachette and copy us.

Hachette CEO, Michael Pietsch: [EMAIL ADDRESS REDACTED]

Copy us at: [READERS UNITED EMAIL ADDRESS REDACTED]

Please consider including these points:

• We have noted your illegal collusion. Please stop working so hard to overcharge for ebooks. They can and should be less expensive.
  
• Lowering e-book prices will help – not hurt – the reading culture, just like paperbacks did.
  
• Stop using your authors as leverage and accept one of Amazon’s offers to take them out of the middle.
  
• Especially if you’re an author yourself: Remind them that authors are not united on this issue.
  
  Thanks for your support.
  
  The Amazon Books Team
  
  P.S. You can also find this letter at [READERS UNITED WEBSITE REDACTED]

I wouldn't call it "oppression", that sort of hyperbolic language is not my cup of tea. But there are issues, there is discrimination, and it is a problem that psychology as a field has begun recently to self-examine. Jon Haidt is probably the most famous name in that space, as he has delivered a number of talks and papers about the biases that lead to a lack of political diversity in the fields, and also more or less runs the Heterodox Academy your own link mentions. In fact, your own link also describes a very good book on this topic:

>Data assembled in the book “Passing on the Right: Conservative Professors in the Progressive University”, published by Oxford University Press in 2016, offer plenty of anecdotal evidence of conservatives in the academy who have been stigmatized by their colleagues and suffered professionally as a result. But the authors of the study, political science professors Jon Shields and Joshua Dunn, also warn that conservatives looking at the university from the outside “should be careful not to overstate the intolerance inside its walls.”

But in fact, there is evidence of bias being extended to the professional level, so I think these authors shouldn't pull their punches too hard. Inbar and Lammers (2012) find that in their poll of social psychologists:

• 19% of Social Psychologists openly would discriminate against conservatives during peer review for a paper.
  
• 24% would discriminate against conservatives during grant review.
  
• 38% would favor a liberal candidate over a conservative one during a faculty hiring process.
  
  That's discrimination to me, and the authors, who call it just that as well. That 19% may look low, but consider that peer review will usually try to have 3 reviewers ideally, so that means a conservative or conservative-friendly finding has about a 50-50 chance of being torpedoed on every single paper submission. In an academic system that says "publish or perish", that kind of penalty is going to push a lot of conservatives towards perish and out of academia, and convince a lot more not to take that chance in the first place. The authors also write in their conclusion:
  
  >But perhaps even more telling is what we found in our qualitative data. At the end of our surveys, we gave room for comments. [...] One participant described how a colleague was denied tenure because of his political beliefs. Another wrote that if the department “could figure out who was a conservative they would be sure not to hire them.” Various participants described how colleagues silenced them during political discussions because they had voted Republican. One participant wrote that “it causes me great stress to not be able to have an environment where open dialogue is acceptable.
  
  But even if I can't convince you that the discrimination itself is a problem by citing articles that show clear evidence of it, I hope I can give you a reason why you should care about that perception either way. A public that does not trust academia still votes. Climate change really needs to be addressed like yesterday, or rather, 30 years ago, and every single day that passes right now sees the problem grow exponentially. Many more species will go extinct and many more people will die the longer it takes for meaningful action.
  
  If putting away that pride and fixing even the perception of bias in academia can accelerate the acceptance of climate change and lead to a more unified and rapid action, that is so worth it. I blame academia for losing that trust in the first place, but even if you disagree and blame conservatives, the solution is still that academia should make every effort to rebuild the trust if it can, because the consequences of our current path could literally cost us the world.

Yikes. Here's another fun fact. BLM is rooted in the Black Panthers.

David Clarke wrote a good book about it.. He makes a very convincing case. And it doesn't hurt his credibility that he's black himself.

EDIT: Wow, downvoted before the ink is dry. XD

I'm glad we could clear that up. Such civility on Reddit is refreshing :D

If you can ignore the Red-Scare at the end (please do...), Barry Goldwater's book, The Conscience of a Conservative, does a good job of illustrating the problems of our current economic policies w/out devolving into idealism or the abstract.

Perhaps I've landed upon a bandwagon, but Ron Paul's Liberty Defined: 50 Essential Issues That Affect Our Freedom was a key ingredient in my transition from public school default-liberalism, to libertarianism, to minarchism, & then landing solidly at the bottom of the rabbit hole in anarcho-capitalism.

My whole life, I've seen calls for more & more government as the solution to ever-growing problems. The results I've seen have led me to the firm belief that large governments are destined to ultimate failure & smaller governments are destined to benign-mediocrity at best...and malignant hive control at worst. I've not met anyone who has carved out a living for themselves (aka, not tax-funded) who prefers more government as the solution to their personal life problems (regardless their macro statist beliefs).

To me, it seems clear that one's desire to give the state power is an extension of one's desire to control other people, whether "for their own good" or for personal gain. I find it highly immoral to impose one's will over the peaceful will of another individual. I cannot be convinced that a hive society is moral or preferable. I suppose if one didn't trust in the concept of voluntary charity, they could make the argument that every infirm person is every normal person's responsibility...but even in the face of 50%+ real tax rates, charitable contributions in our nation are in the billions.

It's very easy for most to think, "But, what about people in desperate need? WE need to help them." They don't understand that WE aren't of one mind & that it's immoral to take from others w/out their permission. The best way I've seen it stated is this; If someone needs a kidney, are they entitled to one of yours? How would you feel if security staff from the hospital abducted you in the middle of the night, put you under, & you woke w/out a kidney? In essence, that's what taxation is.

Anyhow, if you've read this far, I apologize for the rant.

>Still, people like Dave Rubin cynically use the cause of free speech to fearmonger for their personal monetary gain, and give good PR to people like Lauryn southern and stephan Molyneux, and (insert right wing culture war figure here) and they a get their bills laid paid by the Koch's.

On the flip side, the fearmongering surrounding Dave Rubin, Lauryn Southern & Stephan Molyneux to justify censorship is also worrying. Recently Citation Needed had an interview with P. E. Moskowitz, who wrote "The Case Against Free Speech: The First Amendment, Fascism, and the Future of Dissent" which was pretty interesting.

One of the concepts I'm personally having trouble with, is the argument at 54:30 in the Citation Needed episode. They say conservative speech is being weaponized to Bludgeon others people's speech. How is their speech being weaponized and used to silence others speech, that concept I'm having a hard time wrap my head around.

I think I disagree with your answer, because I understand the OP's question slightly differently, and I'm therefore not quite convinced by the reasons you provide .

As I understand the OP, he asks whether the two-party system makes tribalism (ie. us.vs.them) more salient. Otherwise, the question wouldn't make much sense. Tribalism is probably innate, in the sense of "prepared for certain experiences", since it can be triggered by arbitrary differences.

If so, whoever claimed that a two-party system has a moderating effect didn't think hard enought.

Assuming that in every population people are normally distributed on a conservative-progressive scale, there will always be two parties fighting for the center – at least if they act economically (ie. rationally), and they assume peope vote for the party closest to their own preference.

Suppose an extreme third party manages to survive (in terms of making enought money for its politicians to make a living). Such an extreme party will persuade some voters on the extreme left or right. Let's say left for the sake of the argument. This weakens the left center party, obviously, but will it move to the left to (re-)gain voters?

Probably not, for every step to the left in search for profit (in terms of left voters) will have costs in terms of voters on the center. Given a normal distribution of voter preferences, any step to the left will have high costs (loosing many voters close to the center), while the profits are low (gaining only a few voters close the left extreme).

Of course, that's just a model but it describes the basic current political landscape in Germany.

Concerning whether the two party model in the US makes tribalism more salient: Some research indicates that it does. For examples, see "Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America" by Fiorina et.al.

For instance, according to surveys, the US public is not really divided on the issue of abortion. There's a majority to make abortion on demand legal in the first trimester, and to make it illegal in the third trimester. If I recall correctly, the second trimester is kind of fuzzy but the differences are not that high.

It's only people with extreme views (illegal vs. legal under all circumstances) who make this an on-going political issue in the US. In other words, given only two options, people on the extreme sides have more influence on the center than they otherwise would have.

Note that almost all European countries have mostly settled the issue decades ago.

I really wish someone other than Vox day would, effectively, re-write this book. His name has so much baggage that you can't just hand a copy out to normies.

​

Looking at his related books... (Holy shit, linking these are a nightmare due to Amazon's tracking buillshit in the URLs)

https://smile.amazon.com/So-Youve-Been-Publicly-Shamed-ebook/dp/B00L9B7IRC/

https://smile.amazon.com/How-Trump-SJWs-Alinskys-Radicals-ebook/dp/B01JFOM1LM/

https://smile.amazon.com/Social-Justice-Warrior-Handbook-Millennials-ebook/dp/B074N6968P/

https://smile.amazon.com/Bullies-Culture-Intimidation-Silences-Americans-ebook/dp/B008GULMDK/

https://smile.amazon.com/New-Church-Ladies-Extremely-Uptight-ebook/dp/B06VVHV1DX/

​

Nothing short and to the point, but some good stuff there for normies to read.

This is partly because out current representatives appeal to the extreme left or right to get elected and usually have policy positions that are to the right/left of their constituency. This is largely because that is a way to get elected and because we have not expanded the House of representatives to keep up with changes in population. Some works to consult would be Culture War and Disconnect by Fiorina and Frederick's Congressional Representation & Constituents: The case for increasing the U.S. House of representatives

tl;dr Our districts are too big to get good candidates, so we have to choose between left/right wingnuts instead of moderates.

If "Polarization" is even a thing. There is still some debate on that topic, see Fiorina (http://www.amazon.com/Culture-Myth-Polarized-America-Edition/dp/0205779883). Not to say she is right, merely that there is debate on that topic specifically.

And the point I think was made, that I am more inclined to believe, is that historical events like this are generally culminations of a long process of events. As soon as you say it began with laissez faire Republicans, someone can go back and say that the roots of laissez faire Republicanism are the actual root. But of course, those roots have roots, and back and back we go.

For me, I pick FDR as the "start" of this shift as he was the "class traitor" that really pushed the shift to the left.

Archives for the links in comments:

• By Aurondarklord (en.wikipedia.org): http://archive.fo/mIdlv
  
• By mcantrell (smile.amazon.com): http://archive.fo/onw0b
  
  
• By mcantrell (smile.amazon.com): http://archive.fo/ZMRBw
  
  
• By mcantrell (smile.amazon.com): http://archive.fo/BcccR
  
  
• By mcantrell (smile.amazon.com): http://archive.fo/cBwOc
  
  
• By mcantrell (smile.amazon.com): http://archive.fo/N0Rpx
  
• By Kia-Ca-T_D-bot (123rf.com): http://archive.fo/sVvqT
  
• By interfader (campusreform.org): http://archive.fo/oCKSa
  
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Are you serious?

this book

not that the UN is ever a shining example of freedom or human rights

this opinion in nearly every news site

the news of the week and even though I deeply disagree with nearly every person on this list, I despise their censorship.

Her book is ranked #377 on Amazon. Not bad! I cannot help but notice her tight red dress on the book cover too.

We're not nearly as divided as we sometimes think we are when looking at the wingnuts on both sides. Most people don't hold the extreme opinions on issues like gun control, taxation, or abortion that the fringe always ascribes to society as a whole.

If you haven't you should read this.

http://www.amazon.com/Letter-Conservative-Nation-Adam-Dorr/dp/1469988437

ITS-HAPPENING.PDF

with companion piece: ITS-HAPPENING.AVI

see also: WE_ARE_ALL_GOING_TO_DIE.MP4

Regarding the polarization part, Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America is a good read. He puts the onus on politicians and tactics.

Fiorina and others argue that most Americans really are in the middle and that the notion of polarization is overblown. If centrist voters make "polarized" choices, keeping their beliefs and positions constant, their voting behavior will appear more polarized when the candidates act more extreme left/right.


When these relationships between voters and their candidates change, analysts tend to assign the source of the change to voter attitudes, not as a response to changes in candidate strategy and candidate behavior.