Huffington Post Gets One Almost Right

That post was trash, which is mostly what I expect from Huffington Post. The only time I find it useful is when they run semi-straight news (of course there will always be opinion throughout) that the MSM doesn’t cover.

The founders were right of center. They were also liberals. And far-right religious fundamentalists. What almost no one seems to grasp is that while the major debates at the time were quite different from those now, the positions held were just as wide-ranging and nuanced as those that exist in the political spectrum today.

It is hard to judge the positions of individuals almost two and half centuries ago, because of how the party allegiances have shifted over the interim. Most of Jefferson’s positions would today be considered liberal, but his insistence on small central government is libertarian. Of course, libertarians don’t have to be right-wingers, it is entirely possible to be a liberal libertarian, just as it is possible to be a liberal authoritarian (socialist/communist), authoritarian conservative (fascist), or libertarian conservative (what we commonly call call ‘libertarian’ today). In that light, Jefferson and Madison were libertarian liberals. Hamilton, on the other hand, was an authoritarian conservative (though not to the extreme of fascism). Washington was a non-interventionist moderate.

Their political opinions even ran the gamut on separation of church and state, so it is a little disingenuous to argue that the founders unanimously opposed establishment (a little ironic, isn’t it, the atheist telling the Christian that state-church separation isn’t as cut and dried as he thinks it is!).

I would like to request a clarification of what you mean by ‘liberal’. If you’re thinking of classic Protestant theological liberalism, then if anything several of the founding fathers were more extreme, Deists carrying the same approach much further (see, for instance, the Jefferson Bible). Talking about the ‘founding fathers’ as though they all shared the same view on everything is itself problematic.

So what sort of liberalism do you mean, and in comparison to who? Once we’ve sorted that out, perhaps we can figure out which founding fathers, if any, do or do not fit the label!

I’m curious though, how do you define “liberal libertarian”?

A very libertarian lefty and a very libertarian righty will end up having the same actual political position on nearly everything, but their personal beliefs on those issues will be rather different. Ron Paul is a fairly right-wing libertarian, though much closer to center than the rest of the current Republican candidacy. Both left- and right-wing libertarians, provided they follow their political philosophy far enough (which I don’t think Paul has quite done) should, for instance, support gay marriage as a political position (or else support getting rid altogether of marriage as a legal contract overseen by the state- which would be very difficult unless one proposes that spouses should not have legally protected rights of inheritance and child custody), despite the fact that their personal beliefs about gay marriage will be entirely at odds. This describes you pretty well, I think

Right, a libertarian doesn’t have to be socially liberal in his personal beliefs, they just don’t (ideally) believe in outlawing ‘victimless crimes’ they might find morally objectionable but have no quantifiable societal impact. A liberal libertarian would be one who does subscribe to liberal social and human rights policies on a personal basis.

And again, you’re a very good example of the right-wing (I’d say actually more like right-of-center) libertarian- you oppose many liberal goals on a personal level but also oppose outlawing them because of your political ideology.

I can see how abortion would be a tricky issue for libertarians more than most, though, because there’s nothing inherent in the ideology that sheds light on it. There’s nothing in libertarianism that will tell you whether killing a fetus is murder. Once you’ve made that decision, it’s easy- if it’s murder, it’s banned, if it isn’t, it’s not. But even though I’ve come to my decision (about the same as yours, think), I still wrestle with the issue; for those still undecided, and without an ideology that will provide a coherent viewpoint on it, it is very tough.

Actually, Paul is exactly as you described. Take a look at the Stossel interview where Paul ascribes to the very thing you described, calling for a the federal government to get out of the marriage business altogether.

The problem with that, though, is how do you handle things like child custody in case of separation, or inheritance, if not by recourse to the legal system?