just too small of one. The interests of Tea Partiers, libertarians, and your garden variety conservative intersect on the NPR/PP cuts, and they could be sold to the public as part of a broader set of cuts. The problem is, the cuts were so small and so partisan, that it was easy to frame Republicans as purely partisan in their cuts, i.e, merely interested in cutting programs that benefit Democrats and not Republicans. They should have been included in a larger packet of cuts, not focused on to the exclusion of all else.

that was motivated by spending and the deficit. It is not a libertarian or conservative movement per se, but it intersects with both quite nicely. Local movements may have their own issues (such is the nature of grassroots politics), but it’s possible to define the Tea Parties’ unifying issue — and it’s not abortion.

However, if half of what PP does is abortions, then funding the other half makes it that much easier for them to fund their abortion mills.

I think Repubs would have been better served to go for a Rand Paul-lite slashing of non-discretionary spending, including PP and NPR funding. That way, it would have been seen as less partisan and more sincerely motivated.

in discretionary spending — a pretty large chunk of discretionary spending. Republicans should have had a similar plan (maybe half or a third the size of Paul’s), with cuts to “Republican” and “Democrat” spending, instead of trying to play with piecemeal cuts, IMO.

I hope my libertarian decoder ring wasn’t stolen while I was away, because I’m on record for wanting to end both abortion and the deficit. (So are most right-libertarians, btw.) The problem, methinks, is with the myopic focus on these and other relatively partisan, bring out the base cuts (like the NPR cuts). We would have been better-served by a more comprehensive effort to cut, than by the piecemeal attempts by Republicans to be on record as opposing some cultural spending item or other. A comprehensive approach would have shielded us from accurate attacks of partisanship, would have made us look like the adults in the room, *and* would have had a better chance of getting us the PP/NPR cuts! The Democrat Senate was never going to agree to cuts to PP in se; they might have had to if the public thought that *they* were being petty about spending. Our activists need to get a little smarter about political strategery.

Libertarians, whatever else you think of them, have as a movement been on the fiscal responsibility bandwagon since forever. They’ve been waiting for conservatives to get off their big-spending binge to join them onboard. It’s pretty hard to imagine a libertarian in favor of funding just about any “positive right” using tax dollars; in fact, all of the leading lights of the movement (and 99.9% of its adherents) are for ending said funding, and always have been.

Libertarians hold plenty of beliefs that do not directly benefit them — many are anti-war for principled reasons, despite the fact that they will never serve on a battlefield. Most support lowering tax rates on “the rich”, despite the fact that most will never be among “the rich”. The vast majority are concerned with diminishing civil liberties in this country (esp as they relate to drug use), despite the fact that most are middle-class, white, and will never have to suffer the effects of a corrupt police force or most any abrogation of civil liberties. During the Cold War, most libertarians were anti-communist as a matter of principle — what benefit did the end of communism in a foreign country benefit a libertarian?

Look at the Reason.com blog, and you’ll see plenty of items that have absolutely no impact on the lifestyle of your standard libertarian, but which libertarians are interested in nonetheless. Just like any other ideology, some libertarians buy into it for reasons related to moral egoism, others do so in spite of its adverse impact on their lifestyles, and some will not be affected by it one way or another but endorse it as a matter of principle.

Seriously dude, calling people “selfish” without knowing their motivations is poor form.

It perfectly describes our movement in a way that is unambiguous. There’s nothing wrong with being anti-abortion, and I find that the term is a clear one. To use an analogy, it would be as if the abolitionist movement started calling itself the “pro-freedom” movement: while accurate, it is euphemistic. Abortion is a word that should be associated in the public consciousness with something that people should be “anti”.

an invention by some GOP insiders, rather than a grassroots effort by the base (SoCon or otherwise). I did note downthread that I didn’t find the goal to be wrong, but rather the strategy employed — I’m pretty sure it was my first comment on this thread. I argued that Pres Obama is more likely to find his hands tied by the public into accepting cuts if they are seen as comprehensive and fair, than if they are seen as partisan. The thing I took exception to was the generalization of libertarians who does not agree with the Republican strategy here (especially when one self-described libertarian already registered disagreement with Dio regarding whether cutting PP funding was the right thing to do). I agree that we’ve been presented with a golden opportunity as far as another pass at fusionism goes. I don’t think that generalizations about SoCons (which I have made from time to time, admittedly) or about libertarians are particularly helpful when it comes to realizing that potential.

I also think that you read libertarians wrong: as a group, they tend to be way too exacting, and make the perfect the enemy of the good. (Milton Friedman, Hayek and others being general exceptions whose successes should be noted by the libertarian movement.) Some also make the mistake of false equivocation (i.e., saying that both conservatives and liberals are unreconstructed and equivalent “statists”). They can’t really be said to be quislings, though: right or wrong, they stick to their convictions quite solidly.