A big hat tip to Greg Dworkin at Daily Kos today for doing all the legwork collecting opinions on the re-brand du jour Rethuglicans would have us buy into, "libertarian populism" (our emphases):
Matthew Yglesias makes short work of the inherent contradiction:
I've been meaning to write a deadly dull low-traffic blog post on the subject of "libertarian populism" for a while now, and I think my bottom line is this—economic populism can (and probably should) become more libertarian, but libertarianism can never be populist.Roy Edroso has a longer piece detailing the right-wing blogosphere's infatuation with the concept, along with skeptics in the neo-con wing:
The phrase seems oxymoronic, but the idea is to make conservatives and their agents in the GOP walk the walk on libertarian issues -- excepting, naturally, the social issues that always seem to disappear when such discussions take place. From the arguments on offer, the result seems the worst of both worlds.
As we have said repeatedly, libertarianism is a niche brand of conservatism, and in these parlous times for conservatism there are a lot of rightbloggers who want to more overtly associate libertarianism with the parent brand, in hopes of exciting the interest of voters.And, as if more derision were needed, Paul Waldman adds:
Libertarian populism isn't doomed just because it's silly, but because it's fighting against so much history. The GOP's image as the party of the wealthy wasn't created in a week or a month or a year, it was built up over decades. Decades of advocating for tax cuts for the wealthy, decades of attacks on welfare moochers, decades of opposing any labor protections, decades of advocacy for freeing corporations from the burden of regulation. If there's anything even the least attentive voter knows about the Republican party, it's that that's where the rich folk are. Changing that is an almost impossible task, particularly if that's where the rich folk are staying.Why attempt the impossible? Why not just stick with a truth-in-advertising approach, i.e., the Rethuglican/ New Confederate/ Stupid Party? That seems to cover the right bases.
