In case anyone is interested, I've written my take on the midterm elections for CounterPunch. A formatted version can be found on the Antiwar League site here. The AWL, by the way, is trying to construct a Left-Middle-Right coalition to oppose war. It's a far cry from the free-Mumia, hail-Marx movement against war from the doctrinaire Left.

I'm afraid the prospects are not rosy for libertarian Democrats, regardless of which party triumphs. That's true not only considering the leading Democrats' tepid and qualified questioning of the Iraq War but also their stance on domestic issues. I don't see any clear-cut cases of rejecting No Child Left Behind or federal intrusiveness into our daily lives. It's more a matter of quibbling about dollar amounts and how best to administer Leviathan. I suspect that the populist-libertarian personas of candidates like Webb and Tester have more to do with personality than ideology.

Meanwhile, the party faithful are working themselves into a frenzy over Obama with the help of the Establishment media. He strikes me as just another smooth DLC operator. Lots of hype, little substance. And, sad to say, I think a lot enthusiasm comes from unintential racism. Obama is not an "angry black" with the baggage of slavery and he is "articulate" (an unconscious code word for blacks who have assimilated into white upper-class culture).

I hope Democrats win control of both houses of Congress but I don't expect major changes during the next two years. Hopefully the growth rate of bad policy will be slowed.

Thank you, Logan, for your review of my book. I'd like to think that TJ continues to have something to say to us about freedom and democracy.

I'm both a libertarian and a populist. Sometimes those roles clash but usually they don't. I'm not a doctrinaire libertarian who worships at the altar of the Invisible Hand of the marketplace. I don't glorify greed because I recognize it as a sin. I don't care whether greed produces efficiency or "success," it's still something to be avoided. Jefferson believed in free enterprise but he objected to monopoly, whether private or public. Some libertarians of our day speak as though wealth is an end in itself and freedom is just a means toward that ultimate goal. They gush about the private sector and in their minds unfettered business always knows best. That may coincide with the views of Ayn Rand, but it contradicts the teachings of Jesus and was not the philosophy of Jefferson. Life is not found in an abundance of possessions and liberty goes beyond the ability to accumulate dollars. It's significant that Jefferson changed Locke's trinity from "life, liberty, and property" to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Jefferson, of course, lived a comfortable life with abundant possessions (including slaves, to his discredit). He was not against private property but he knew that there were deeper and more important aspects to life.

Laissez-faire is not synonymous with capitalism. You can have the one without the other. Arguably, the strongest capitalist states have been those of the fascist variety in which government power and business power are openly joined in partnership (i.e., state capitalism). Such examples are obviously not libertarian or laissez-faire. Jefferson objected to incipient capitalism with its government charters and aristocracy of paper. It was founded on special privilege from the get-go, and the classical western tradition, both pagan and Christian, rejected usury.

At the same time, neither Jefferson nor his philosophical heir William Jennings Bryan believed in state socialism. Their type of liberalism was not the welfare state, big brother liberalism of the New Deal and beyond. Bryan cited Adam Smith in defense of a graduated income tax: "Is there any rule by which we can determine in what proportion people should pay taxes? Adam Smith suggested a rule a century ago but it is so just that it must have been thought of long before he was born. The rule is that citizens should contribute to the support of their government in exact proportion to the benefits received by them from their government." Bryan believed in private property and individual initiative. He also believed in justice and commonwealth.

Bryan addressed the tendency that eventually flourished as state socialism under Lenin and his heirs, and also as statism under FDR and his heirs, and he was not favorably disposed toward government by centralized bureaucracy. In 1906, he wrote, “Probably the nearest approach that we have to the socialistic state to-day is to be found in the civil service. If the civil service develops more unselfishness and more altruistic devotion to the general welfare than private employment does, the fact is yet to be discovered....A life position in the government service, which separates one from the lot of the average producer of wealth, has given no extraordinary stimulus to higher development.” Bryan went on to praise the embattled ideal of individualism, noting, “The trust magnates and the [state] socialists unite in declaring monopoly to be an economic development, the former hoping to retain the fruits of monopoly in private hands, the latter expecting the ultimate appropriation of the benefits of monopoly by the government.”

As I was rushing to return the final manuscript to the copy editor, I added some last-minute words about modern Jeffersonians and their view of the interplay between politics and economics:

"Speaking of economic justice, it should be noted that most Jeffersonians seek fairness when it comes to economics--not government-mandated economic equality. Opponents of monopoly and special privilege, their emphasis is on equal opportunity. They do not want governments dispensing unfair advantage to wealthy individuals and corporations seeking to purchase political influence. Free enterprise is an enemy of monopoly capitalism because the latter relies on government favor, eliminates competition, and reduces consumer choice. Historically, Jeffersonians do not support 'class legislation' or redistribution of wealth. These are big-government ideas (state socialism and state capitalism). Instead of statism and artificial economic leveling through coercion, Jeffersonians tend to support equal opportunity through government neutrality in the marketplace, with occasional use of anti-trust, pro-competition action to prevent monopoly. They do not worship a golden calf of economic theory, hold corporate 'persons' above real persons, or serve Mammon instead of God. At the same time, they are not welfare statists, social engineers, or devotees of paternalistic governance. Neither materialists who coldly follow economic abstractions and embrace consumerism run amok, nor sentimentalists who naively look to government for benevolence from cradle to grave, most Jeffersonians try to practice spirituality and humanism in the best sense of the words." (chapter 11, Where Did the Party Go?)

-- Jeff
see also: http://www.popcorn78.blogspot.com

Thanks, Logan, for publicizing my book on Daily Kos and on Blue Dog Blog (http://www.bluedogdemocrat.org/blog/?q=node/107).

I'm glad you're enjoying Where Did the Party Go?: William Jennings Bryan, Hubert Humphrey, and the Jeffersonian Legacy (Univ. Missouri Press, 2006).

You are surprised that I identify the Bryan stream rather than the Cleveland stream as the true heirs of Jefferson. Grover Cleveland and his allies called themselves "Jeffersonian" but this was not the case in many ways. Bryan and his populist brethren were much closer to Jefferson, and this was even true in terms of libertarianism and decentralization. Bryan led a Jeffersonian revival within the Democratic Party. Woodrow Wilson symbolized a betrayal of Jeffersonianism and he set the stage for Franklin D. Roosevelt, in terms of Hamiltonian domestic and foreign policies.

Bryan gets a bad rap from libertarians who assume he was an advocate of big government because some historians have mistakenly depicted him as a forerunner of FDR and the New Deal. Michael Kazin's new biography, A Godly Hero, helps to perpetuate this error. Unlike Roosevelt, Bryan was not a supporter of the welfare state and centralized bureaucracy. I deal with this in chapter 9 of my book but you can find even more information in the Deleted Scenes of chapter 9 on my website: http://popcorn78.blogspot.com/2006/05/deleted-scenes.html

I have an article scheduled to be published in the October issue of Chronicles. Here's an excerpt from "Don't Blame Bryan":

“Bryan was not an early advocate of the welfare state created by politicians like Franklin Roosevelt, Hubert Humphrey, and Lyndon Johnson. Bryan’s concern for the common people--many of whom were relatively poor--did not include using the federal government to ‘solve’ their poverty problems. He believed in a laissez-faire economy through which industry, thrift, cordiality, and honesty would be naturally rewarded. He objected to governmental favors that artificially interfered with this natural order. This is why he opposed members of ‘the privilege-hunting and favor-seeking class’ who acquired wealth through exploitation and political favoritism.”

Populism is not synonymous with statism or paternalism.

What has happened to the national Democratic Party? Largely founded by Thomas Jefferson on the basis of libertarian, laissez-faire, quasi-pacifist, and republican principles, it has fallen captive to the distinctly un-Jeffersonian--and unpopular--values of statism, government-sponsored capitalism, militarism, and imperialism. My book presents the sobering story of a party’s slide toward Leviathan and Pax [sic] Americana.

I am a libertarian with an appreciation for the non-coercive, anti-statist tradition associated with writers as diverse as Jefferson, Paine, Thoreau, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Tolstoy, Gandhi, Orwell, Dwight Macdonald, Dorothy Day, A.J. Nock, Murray Rothbard, Jacques Ellul, and Lew Rockwell. Congressman Ron Paul (R-TX) is one of my favorite members of the U.S. House. In addition to being a libertarian, I am a populist. Sometimes the basic American values of freedom and democracy clash, but more often than not they are allied. Ironically enough, the modern Democratic Party has generally stood opposed to both. Where Did the Party Go? explains why and surveys the current political landscape in this era of Democratic mushiness and Republican mendacity.

W.J. Bryan was an evangelical Christian who took Scripture and the teachings of Jesus seriously, including a commitment to nonviolence and the drawing of a clear line between Church and State. This is rather different from modern evangelicals who have placed their faith in G.W. Bush (a front man for practitioners of power who seem more committed to Machiavelli or Trotsky than Christ). The conclusion of the book includes a description of how the Bush administration has become a part of the Humphrey legacy through its emphasis on unchecked federal power at home and neoconservative-inspired nation-building abroad.

I know there are some differences among Democrats dissatisfied with the national prospects of the party. There are Jefferson-admiring libertarians. There are socially conservative Dems who admire the FDR-HHH tradition and are somewhat hawkish when it comes to international affairs. And there are socially liberal Dems tired of losing Middle America voters and irritated by the hypocrisy of trust-fund faux populists like Howard Dean. What sort of "conservatism" is advocated? By today's standards, Bryan was conservative in some ways and the same can be said about Cleveland in other ways. In his economic conservatism, Cleveland would fit in well with the DLC. That's not my kind of conservatism, partly because I don't think it's compatible with the ideals of Jefferson and Jackson.

-- Jeff
http://www.popcorn78.blogspot.com