Libertarianism & the Founders - Part Two

As noted in the previous article, there are essentially three aspects of libertarian thought: 1) free markets with little to no federal role in oversight or regulation, 2) isolationism, and 3) individual rights. Each aspect of libertarian thought finds support (or has, in the past, enjoyed support) from both major political parties.

From the Industrial Revolution to today, the Republican Party has long advocated a generally free market economic system with limited interference from the government, especially at the federal level. Following World War I and prior to World War II, the Grand Old Party was also the home for most isolationist sentiment in America. The GOP played a key role in dashing Democrat Woodrow Wilson’s hopes for a League of Nations. With the rising tensions of the Cold War, the Republicans essentially reversed themselves and, by the Reagan years, were calling for an activist foreign policy, designed to undermine the Soviet Empire.

The Democratic Party, traditionally an institutional champion of the lower classes, never embraced the libertarian call for limited government in the economic realm. But, beginning with the 1960s, the Democratic Party began to embrace a more libertarian vision of America in terms of civic and personal morality. Influenced and driven by the cultural upheavals of the 1960s, it has largely been the Democratic Party that has fought for reproductive rights (including abortion), a high wall between church and state, protection of controversial “speech” and expression, gay rights, and more. And it’s been Democrats who have, for the most part, stood behind the socially liberal causes of groups such as the highly controversial American Civil Liberties Union.

It was with this in mind that Republican presidential candidate George H.W. Bush castigated Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis in 1988 as a “card-carrying member of the ACLU.” The charge resonated with voters at that time, and such hot-button issues helped torpedo Dukakis’s troubled campaign. Still smarting from this attack, social libertarians in Hollywood went so far as to write a defense against this charge into the script for “The American President,” a mid-1990s movie starring Michael Douglas as an earnest liberal President besieged by a rabble-rousing conservative out for political red meat.

The ACLU is, however, far from alone in its battles in the social arena. The consistently libertarian CATO Institute remains well to the left of the Republican Party on social issues, even though it leads the fight against government regulations and champions greater economic freedom for individuals and corporations.

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