Who or what are libertarian Democrats? What is Freedom Democrats about? Where are we going? What are we doing? So forth and so on. I have to say I've enjoyed reading this ongoing discussion about Rand, Hayek, and the overarching approach to libertarianism and partisan politics. I think we can all agree that some random stranger that finds his or her way into this blog may be confused at first about what we are all about. It's clear that while there is a context of modern American partisan politics, a lot of the ideological framework such as Libertarian, or Agorist, Class Theory operates outside of what most consider the mainstream.

I would argue that this approach actually fits in well within the historical libertarian tradition in the United States. Someone like H. L. Mencken may have been many things, including a contrarian and pessimist, but that didn't make him isolated from the ongoing political discourse of his day. The source of this contrarianism, at least for me, is a well founded understanding of American history that digs a little deeper than the high school textbook that most pundits seem to operate off of.

For instance, Gabriel Kolko's "Triumph of Conservatism" is often thrown out as an example of how a better understanding of the rise of the modern American corporatist state blows apart the traditional narrative of the business community opposing government regulations. But Kolko's work, while influential, is not the end all tomb for us. I've mentioned several books recently that undermine the traditional narrative's emphasis on Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt as outside elites implementing a top down reform agenda onto a regressive Democratic Party. In many ways, the Democratic Party's original reform agenda was a bottom up movement that was a perfectly reasonable push for a party representing the colonial dependencies of the South and the West. The executive in both eras of Reform, Wilson and Roosevelt, were in many ways conservative counterweights more responsive to the elites of different business communities.

Thomas Ferguson's "Golden Rule" goes into greater detail the back and forth in Roosevelt's alliances with various sectors of the economy. His book is helpful in educating someone who assumes that the business community is a monolithic interest group that all supports the same agenda. Marx's division of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, based on the earlier class theories of Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer, is far too simplistic to fully explain the competing factions attempting to use government for their own ends. The crackup of the Chamber of Commerce over the push for new energy legislation implementing a cap and trade system is just one example of the diverse interests of different businesses.

I don't think having an approach to politics founded on a real understanding of the Investment Theory of Party Competition and Agorist or Libertarian Class Theory argues for a complete and total rejection of all politics, although that is often the end conclusion of agorism. The point about adopting the left-libertarian approach of libertarian means for liberal ends is that the size and influence of government at this point in time may be so vast that political reform may be necessary for creating enough space for agorism and left-libertarian direct action to flourish. That at least has been my view and one I think could be agreed on by most who frequent this blog.

Furthermore, an understanding of partisan politics as essentially two elite-dominated parties battling one another doesn't mean that we have to reject both as equally bad. Ferguson argues that the more the two parties agree on economic issues because of a consensus at the elite level the more partisan politics is dominated by social, ethnic, and religious issues. This has been true throughout history from nativism to prohibition to today's culture wars. If both parties are pushing a corporatist economic agenda, I see no reason to ignore both if one is offering a more socially liberated corporatist society. It's also true that even if you have a corporatist consensus within both parties the differences within the business communities will still drive some economic differences. This also provides for the opportunity to differentiate the two parties enough to potentially find one as superior to the other.

Historically, I think this has actually been the general situation of the libertarian movement. Peter Zavodnyik's "The Age of Strict Construction" and Brian Balogh's "A Government Out of Sight" offer a look at the interventionist policies of the antebellum American state, with Balogh also giving attention to state and local governments and the so-called Gilded Age after the Civil War. Both paint a picture of government rarely limited in all spheres, but instead partisan politics differing on what spheres government should be active in and who should benefit from government policies. The antebellum Democratic Party, for all of its Jeffersonian origins, believed in a largely unlimited government in matters of expansion for its agrarian yeomen state.

In the end, I generally reject the mainstream narrative of a limited government eventually expanding under the benign executive dictatorship of Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt. I think it's clear that the national government rather quickly bent interpretation of the Constitution to allow for a wide level of intervention. The level of intervention has largely been limited by resources, the technical ability to carry out desired goals, and the level of the desire by interested factions. If a protective tariff is enough for your business community, why expend additional resources trying to implement more bureaucratically complicated proposals? The Investment Theory of Party Competition would, after all, open the door to an argument that the investment in the political process can reach a point of diminishing returns.

The question for libertarian Democrats or Freedom Democrats today is the same that I've always discussed at this blog. What are the small victories that can be won within this statist system to allow for agorism and antistatism to flourish and grow? What victories online, or in space, or on the water? What victories are there for the more socially liberal of the two corporatist parties, and how do we guard against nanny statism? Which business groups, if any, seem most aligned with our causes? I've always found this community to be home to fruitful discussions on these and other questions, and I welcome whatever strangers stumble onto our blog as well.