Liberty’s Strongest Defender

Whether it is industry or immigration, both parties emphasize the freedoms they protect, wishing to paint themselves as the true party of liberty. Their focuses are both quite different yet they rely on telling their base that the other party is coming for their most fundamental freedoms. This argument works because it plays upon one of the bases of the American founding and the social theory behind it. The idea of the individual’s consent as the primary contractual building block of nations was necessary to allow a separation from Britain. Many other countries followed suit and held individual liberty above all else to justify their splits from mother countries. American began in rejection of large government, but has bloated into one of the biggest and most inefficient companies on earth.

American bipartisan politics, while aiming to continue this tradition of freedom, actually allows both parties to simultaneously encroach on the choices of the individual. Each party seems to have chosen a different set of freedoms to restrict while neither would think of themselves as against liberty. Over the course of electoral cycles the restrictions that one party put in place most often stay and receive a bevy of additional restrictions from the other party. It is easy for people from both parties to point out the attacks of the other on freedom, yet their narrow focus doesn’t allow either party to evaluate their own stripping of freedom. The removal of rights of a previous administration becomes an urgent justification for further suffocation of the people from the other direction. Individual liberty is not a casualty of willful tyranny, but slow destruction as a result of contentious governmental incentives. 

While self government was intended to increase freedom, the fear of the other half of the population has guided each election into an attempt to remake the nation in their own acceptable image. John Adams railed strongly against a two party system, because he knew it would lead to the strengthening of survivalist instincts that are fundamentally opposed to the clear thinking required for good governance. The structure of the American government has greatly increased in size because that is only natural when both parties are afraid of the other party growing too large and influential. Each individual’s desire for freedom is squashed by the desire to leave regulation keeping the other party in check. As long as the fight of the nation is about specific policy agendas rather than the role of government itself, the default will be a maddening descent into totalitarianism.

 Libertarianism is necessary because the form of government is its central concern. It is much harder to get distracted from defending liberty when liberty is the primary goal rather than a concept only brought up to shame the other side. The other two parties make liberty a casualty of their other more urgent wants. Having two parties battle one another is undoubtedly better than single rule, but a credible libertarian movement is a much needed reset. The role of the government as a minimalistic protector of order and civilization must be restored if this country desires to last. Libertarianism makes a distinction between problems that are human and problems that are governmental. With no clear division in place, anything wrong in the world falls into the laps of two party polemics. An obsession with government structure and incentives with a focus on the individual liberty that empowered the founders is most possible through the resurgence of the libertarian party. 

Government has almost never shown the desire or ability to decrease in size. This nearly universal principle makes the Libertarian focus necessary if any government desires to protect individual freedom. Politicians who know their people care about other goals more than the reduction of government size will gladly take that as an imperative to increase the size of the government into which they were thrown. The combative urgency of needing to go against the other side, coupled with people never fully feeling the encroachment on their liberty naturally leads to overregulation. The closer either party gets to their goals, the less freedom any given individual will have. The desired state of the world by both parties is fundamentally different and will require an incredible amount of coercion for either to see the world as they desire. There are few tenets of human behavior as well observed as the tendency of government to increase itself. This tendency must be held in check before the consequences become irreversible.