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What Kind of Political Animal am I, Anyway?

It's a doggy-dog world out there
I got into a great discussion over on Slashdot today regarding personal freedoms and wiretapping laws. In it, I pointed out I was a right-leaning libertarian.
I think I might as well said "beeble-book, boot-de-boo-boo" for all it mattered. I think the words had little significance.
So what kind of political animal am I? Would I vote for Pee Wee Herman? Would I support repealing the 42nd Amendment? Do I believe in the Robert A. Heinlein's system of suffrage? Would I support busing Inuit into the ghetto for elementary school? Do I like children and old people?
Libertarians, contrary to most other political animals, do not have to be members of the Libertarian Party. If you're a Democrat, say, you're a member of the Democrat Party. If you're a Republican, you're a member of the Republican Party. Over time, these parties might change what they believe in. Most of the time, if you're a member of that party, you follow right along with the rest of the bunch.
The Libertarian Party is a true party based on beliefs, not a group of folks out for political gain. So they've got all kinds of people in there. In fact, the Libertarian Party can be thought of as the "catch-all" party for independents who don't fit in the other places. I'm a registered independent, so I'm not a Libertarian (big L), but I am a libertarian (little l) Polls say between 10 and 20 percent of the population have libertarian beliefs. We tend to be a big part of the middle ground where most elections are fought.
Libertarianism is a political philosophy maintaining that all persons are the absolute owners of their own lives, and should be free to do whatever they wish with their persons or property, provided they allow others the same liberty. Broadly speaking, there are two types of libertarians: consequentialists and rights theorists. Rights theorists hold that it is morally imperative that all human interaction, including government interaction with private individuals, should be voluntary and consensual. They maintain that the initiation of force by any person or government, against another person or their property — with "force" meaning the use of physical force, the threat of it, or the commission of fraud against someone — who has not initiated physical force, threat, or fraud, is a violation of that principle. This form of libertarianism is associated with Objectivists, as well as with individualist anarchists who believe opposition to the State (i.e, government in general) is consistent with this principle.
Consequentialist libertarians do not have a moral prohibition against "initiation of force," but believe that allowing a very large scope of political and economic liberty results in the maximum well-being or efficiency for a society - even if protecting this liberty involves some initiation of force by government. However, such governmental actions are limited in the free society consequentialists envision. This type of libertarianism is associated with Milton Friedman, Ludwig von Mises, and Friedrich Hayek. Some writers who have been called libertarians have also been referred to as classical liberals, by others or themselves. Also, some use the phrase "the freedom philosophy" to refer to libertarianism, classical liberalism, or both.

Salma Hayek, who has nothing to do with this discussion
Hey -- would you rather see her or Friedrich Hayek?
So I'm a Consequential libertarian. Those Rights guys are a little on the wacko side (snicker)
Why am I a libertarian? Because of Natural Law, which I also hold strongly.
Natural law or the law of nature (Latin: lex naturalis) is an ethical theory that posits the existence of a law whose content is set by nature and that therefore has validity everywhere. The phrase natural law is sometimes opposed to the positive law of a given political community, society, or nation-state, and can thus function as a standard by which to criticize that law. In natural law jurisprudence, on the other hand, the content of positive law cannot be known without some reference to the natural law (or something like it); natural law, used in this sense, can be evoked to criticize decisions about the statutes, but less so to criticize the law itself. Natural law can be used synonymously with natural justice or natural right (Latin ius naturale), although most contemporary political and legal theorists separate the two.
Natural law theories have exercised a profound influence on the development of English common law, and have featured greatly in the philosophies of Thomas Aquinas, Francisco Suárez, Richard Hooker, Thomas Hobbes, Hugo Grotius, Samuel von Pufendorf, and John Locke. Because of the intersection between natural law and natural rights, it has been cited as a component in United States Declaration of Independence.
Just like libertarian thought, Natural Law split out into a bunch of different fields. I like to think the theory has evolved into the form I hold the closest:
Liberal natural law grew out of the medieval Christian natural law theories and out of Hobbes' revision of natural law, sometimes in an uneasy balance of the two.Hugo Grotius based his philosophy of international law on natural law. In particular, his writings on freedom of the seas and just war theory directly appealed to natural law. About natural law itself, he wrote that "even the will of an omnipotent being cannot change or abrogate" natural law, which "would maintain its objective validity even if we should assume the impossible, that there is no God or that he does not care for human affairs." (De iure belli ac pacis, Prolegomeni XI). This is the famous argument etiamsi daremus (non esse Deum), that made natural law no longer dependent on theology.
John Locke incorporated natural law into many of his theories and philosophy, especially in Two Treatises of Government. There is considerable debate about whether his conception of natural law was more akin to that of Aquinas (filtered through Richard Hooker) or Hobbes' radical reinterpretation, though the effect of Locke's understanding is usually phrased in terms of a revision of Hobbes upon Hobbesean constractualist grounds. Locke turned Hobbes' prescription around, saying that if the ruler went against natural law and failed to protect "life, liberty, and property," people could justifiably overthrow the existing state and create a new one.
While Locke spoke in the language of natural law, the content of this law was by and large protective of natural rights, and it was this language that later liberal thinkers preferred. Thomas Jefferson, echoing Locke, appealed to unalienable rights in the Declaration of Independence, "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."
I'm a right-leaning libertarian, a classical liberal, which means I hold something in common with conservatives, oddly enough. I believe that we should make exceptions to private freedoms only in extremis and in ways that seemed to have worked in the past. Left-leaning libertarians feel we should make exceptions in new ways and in response to new social problems and issues -- it's a new world and we need new tools to work in it -- which I find very hard to reconcile with any of the general libertarian ideas above.
The reason I am a right-leaning libertarian is because I hold dearly another philosophical tenet, pragmatism. Right-leaning liberalism seems to work the best. When I have problems with an issue, looking at natural law and political theory, I give up ephemeral ideas and cut to the chase with good old Classical American Pragmatism to keep my utilitarian morals happy. The reason I believe in all of those other high-sounding concepts is that they have proved to me to make the most people happy. Pragmatism is:
a philosophic school that originated in the late nineteenth century with Charles Sanders Peirce, who first stated the pragmatic maxim. It came to fruition in the early twentieth-century philosophies of William James and John Dewey. Most of the thinkers who describe themselves as pragmatists consider practical consequences or real effects to be vital components of both meaning and truth. Other important aspects of pragmatism include anti-Cartesianism, radical empiricism, instrumentalism, anti-realism, verificationism, conceptual relativity, a denial of the fact-value distinction, a high regard for science and evolution, and fallibilism.Pragmatism began enjoying renewed attention from the 1950s on because of a new school of philosophers who put forth a revised pragmatism that criticized the logical positivism that had dominated philosophy in the United States and Britain since the 1930s, notably in the work of analytic philosophers like W.V.O. Quine and Wilfrid Sellars. Their naturalized epistemology was further developed and widely publicized by Richard Rorty, whose later work grew closer to continental philosophy and is often considered relativistic. Contemporary pragmatism is still divided between those thinkers who work strictly within the analytic tradition, a more relativistic strand in the wake of Rorty and lastly neoclassical pragmatists like Susan Haack who stay closer to the work of Peirce, James and Dewey.
I'm a big Peirce, James, and Dewey fan. Peirce, especially, is the man.
I went through all of that because it's important to know where you are coming from. If, for instance, you are a libertarian making a huge argument about the wiretapping of American citizens calling overseas, are you left or right? A right-leaning libertarian would say that we have traditionally done such monitoring, it seems appropriate in wartime, and tradition dictates that it works (the pragmatist argument). A left libertarian would say that perhaps such draconian means worked in the past, but we've grown beyond them. Now, perhaps, we have social problems like Global Warming or hate crimes that require us to limit freedoms in ways we would otherwise find anathema.
Of course, if you are a "true" conservative, you'd just say something like "that's the way it's supposed to work, kid. Worked that way for hundreds of years". If you're a "true" liberal (in the modern sense, which seems very leftist) you might say something like "in what way does this improve people? Instead of punishing our people and our enemies, we should seek to more closely interact with our enemies and reward them for being good" [insert long foreign policy discussion here] Liberals believe in the perfectibility of the human spirit. Conservatives view people are permanently broken, and a higher power being a requirement to keep order. ( I exaggerate for the point)
Any more, the sands are shifting. The Democrats of twenty years ago look nothing like the Democrats today, and the Republicans are vastly different as well. The Libertarian Party is still a muddled and confused lot, with the rights guys and the consequentialist guys at constant war with each other. I don't think the Libertarian Party is going anywhere, so I'm happy remaining an independent.
So you do you know what you are? And why you are happy being that way? So many people were told by parents, church, or college professors that one way or the other is the "right" way. If I could give one thing to my grandkids, I'd tell them to spend some time with books or audio tapes learning about political theory. There have been really smart people all throughout history that have wondered how we should treat each other. Instead of making your political views just a random function of whomever you happen to be exposed to, why not take ownership of your beliefs and do a little research for yourself?
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