this post was submitted on 06 Dec 2023
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I don't know how to feel about this election as an ameribro.
I'm left-libertarian (upper case left, lower case libertarian) on the political compass, which is practically not represented in US politics, so I'll take whatever I can get. Biden is, realistically, the best I can hope for this election cycle. He's not great, there's a lot of big policy issues I diverge with him on pretty sharply (both on left and libertarian), but the other candidates for the DNC are a hot fucking mess. As for the libertarian party, it's actually insane. Gary Johnson got booed for saying he'd want people to have driver's licenses to drive. That's a no go for me. And as far as the conservatives go, they run the gamut from not an instant disaster (I guess) to the loud, proud, and complete end of the republic.
Biden has at least done some things that I kinda like, and doesn't seem keen on destroying the republic. I'd love to get a reformer in and sweep Reaganism out on its wrinkled, swampy ass forevermore, but I don't think that's realistic at this point. Where I start getting worried is that the Biden campaign seems dead set on repeating some frankly terrible HRC '16 strats, which, well, we saw how well that worked for her, but the pro-Biden response is "Trust me bro, Trump is actually unelectable this time". I'm also concerned because, let's face it, Biden's old enough that he could get struck down with a stroke or what have you at any minute.* Every day, the cosmic dice are getting more and more weighted against him. The democrats have done very little to make a case for a possible candidate/president Harris, where the republicans have laid a LOT of groundwork against her. If Biden bites it or gets incapacitated, Harris is going to have a huge uphill climb in front of her.
I guess where I get uneasy is that it feels like the democrats are making a lot of avoidable and predictable mistakes, and they're just banking that it won't blow up in their face this time because, uh, what, that was that time, this is this time? They could do better, but they're just going to choose not to, and be shocked if shit goes sideways.
*I mean, so could Trump, but I'm not hoping that he wins.
I have never heard of a Left-libertarian, what are your libertarian views?
Not OP but gonna explain a bit about it nonetheless:
Other than the US use (generally meaning anarcho-capitalist, selfishly ignorant or both), libertarian is just the opposite pole of the "how much do we let people control us" axis from authoritarian.
So basically a left-libertarian (which is a big spectrum of different political philosophies) is broadly speaking someone who doesn't believe in inherent authority but DOES believe in rules and various degrees of enforcement to defend the powerless from the powerful.
So, kind of a soft government? What about roads and utilities? What really turns me off of libertarian is the belief that people have to pay for their own roads and fireman. The rich will only survive then, kind of like how our healthcare is right now. But if you're saying that the government is ran more like a co-op, then I get it.
I guess you could say that, in the sense that the government (if any. See below)would be much more of a helper and a support for regular people who aren't rich and powerful than a ruler and an enforcer working for those that are.
Paid for and maintained by the people in general, specifics vary wildly across the hundreds of millions of left-libertarians worldwide. Personally, I believe that financing and administrating such thing is quintessential supportive government stuff. An anarchist would disagree with me, opposing all government or at least all except very local government.
Yeah, right-libertarianism is basically "survival of the already most privileged" dressed up (with varying degrees of success) in misleading rhetoric about self-determination..
Ideally, all organisations would be co-ops and the government would be an administrative non-profit co-op of sorts run by and for those of the people with the most aptitude and uncorrupt interest in doing such work.
That's just my personal take, though, there's hundreds if not thousands of left-libertarian ideologies and I don't agree with all of the specifics of any one of them..