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lib•er•tar•ian
n. 1. a person who believes in the doctrine of the freedom of the will
n. 1. a person who believes in the doctrine of the freedom of the will
2. a person who believes in full individual freedom of thought, expression and action
3. a freewheeling rebel who hates wiretaps, loves Ron Paul and is redirecting politics
(Headline appearing in The Washington Post, Sunday, Nov. 25, 2007)
Read an interesting article in today's The Washington Post about about the surprisingly strong following Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul continues to generate. Here are a few paragraphs from the article that offer as good an explanation as any I've seen:
So Paul's challenge represents a not-so-lonely GOP revival of unabashed libertarianism. All his major Republican competitors want to double down on Bush's wars; none is stressing any limited-government themes, apart from half-hearted promises to prune pork and tinker on the margins of Social Security.
College kids (a key bloc of Paul's support) have seen no recent evidence that the GOP has anything to do with libertarianism. Yet there's no reason to believe that Democrats will do anything useful about the government intrusion that so many young people abhor: the drug war, federal bans on same-sex marriage, online poker prohibitions, open-ended deployments in Iraq.
This is the mile-wide gap in the Maginot line of "serious" Washington politics. Undergrads aren't the only ones weary of war and moralizing, and more interested in exploring new frontiers of technology and culture than in heeding the stale noise coming from inside the Beltway.
More than at any other time over the past two decades, Americans are hungering for the politics and freewheeling fun of libertarianism. And with the dreary prospect of a Giuliani vs. Clinton death match in 2008, that hunger is likely to grow even faster than the size of the federal government or the casualty toll in Iraq. Ron Paul may lose next year's battle -- though not without a memorable fight -- but the laissez-faire agitators he has helped energize will find themselves at the leading edge of American politics and culture for years to come.
Here's the link to the full article:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/23/AR2007112301299.html?nav=hcmodule
