SmartRemarks

Where did we leave off? 

I was writing about the difficulty of finding something meaningful to say in the wake of all the full-time, professional political bloggers out there. Too often I feel like I’m just offering a synthesis of what others have said, rather than any new insight.

Perhaps I’m holding myself to an arbitrarily high standard. Posting seems easier on political discussion forums, where I can just spout off some quick impressions of the issue of the day without necessarily worrying about providing proper background and context for everything, and where the ebb and flow of responses from other posters guides the structure and flow of the discussion, rather than having to organize it entirely on my own. Nonetheless, I ramble on… 

Thus:  I was also writing about the political environment in which the Obama administration operates, and the political pressures that have led the president to make some decisions that are very disappointing in the eyes of civil libertarians, and indeed of concerned citizens in general. Which, in the wake of events this past week relating to the disposition of prisoners at Guantanamo and elsewhere, leads us to the perplexing questions:

Why has Barack Obama backtracked so quickly from so many of the progressive policy expectations of his supporters?

and, moreover,

WHY does the mass media keep treating Dick Cheney as a credible public figure?

One of these questions may seem deeply relevant, the other facile… but the answers are connected at a deep level.

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Tags: blogging, climate, Congress, conservatism, Constitution, Dick Cheney, energy, Guantanamo, health care, international, journalism, libertarianism, media, Obama, Reid, Republicans, torture

The internet has long been known as a hotbed of libertarian thinking—a bunch of rugged individualists sitting in their home offices tapping away at keyboards about their right to live unbounded lives. It has seldom spilled over into modern real-world politics, however, because there’s too much internal disagreement over what libertarianism is really about, and what its proponents’ priorities ought to be.

There are occasional surges of near-relevance—Ron Paul’s dark horse run for the GOP presidential nomination last winter, for instance, which generated much greater enthusiasm from the netroots than from any other demographic—but they always fade away again. (America loves to give lip service to liberty, but starts to squirm when anyone gets serious about the implications.) Thus, the relevance of libertarianism to American politics remains, shall we say, contested.

Most recently, this dispute has been dragged into the open again by the spat between Jacob Weisberg of Slate and Megan McArdle of The Atlantic over the implications of the ongoing financial crisis for libertarianism in America.

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Tags: Ayn Rand, conservatism, financial crisis, internet, libertarianism, Noam Chomsky