Nick Gillespie: Authoritarians vs. Libertarians Is the Real Fight On The Right

Source:The Daily Beast- John Belushi vs Big Brother?

Source:The New Democrat

I disagree with Nick Gillespie for a couple of reasons on this. When I’m willing to take Donald Trump seriously as a presidential candidate and not some bad reality TV performer whose just there to perform a role, draw ratings and attention and promote their future career, then I might take The Donald seriously as not just a presidential candidate, but a Far-Right fascist authoritarian. Every Anne Coulter Neoconservative utopian fantasy come true. But the problem is Senator Marco Rubio so far has the best comment about The Donald’s presidential campaign and that he called him a con man. The Donald you see today is not The Donald from even five years ago, let alone ten years. The Donald Trump we see today politically we’ve never seen before. No one has and he’s losing friends as a result.

As far as Senator Ted Cruz, I don’t buy him as an authoritarian either. Demagogue? Sure. Hyper-partisan? Sure. Someone who believes in shutting down the government over governing even though he’s an elected government official? Sure. But those things alone don’t make you an authoritarian. If you look at Senator Cruz’s positions when it comes to civil liberties like the Patriot Act and the broader War on Terror, marijuana legalization, criminal justice reform, right to privacy, he does very well there. And is one of the strongest proponents of civil liberties in Congress and he’s only been there for a little more than three years. And even on issues where he would disagree with Liberals such as myself and Libertarians such as Nick Gillespie, he takes a federalist approach. Instead of the neoconservative big government nationalist view.

As far as the future of the Republican Party. Do they want to be a big government neoconservative authoritarian party, or do they want to be a conservative-libertarian party where both Conservatives in the Ted Cruz sense and Libertarians in the Rand Paul sense, can thrive and succeed? Assuming Donald Trump is there next presidential nominee and we’ll know tomorrow night how close he is to that, they probably need to lose another presidential election big and lose most of the big states before we see which direction they go in. Because if The Donald is their next presidential nominee, he’s going to lose and lose big. Even if he moderates for the general, because he’s already on record for taking so many Far-Right neoconservative views. As it relates to women, Latinos, Muslims, etc. And won’t win the presidency simply by winning a shrinking a Caucasian working class. And the Christian-Right.