“I don’t doubt George Allen’s sincerity about how much he respects the institution of marriage. Hell, he respects it so much, he’s had two of them.”
– Radley Balko

Blogging has been light of late, and for that I apologize. My day job has sent me on some travel and I’ve been working more during the week. And on top of that I’ve started a second job (teaching), for which I’m in the middle of training right now. Yesterday, however, I did have a relaxing time at the Mo-Kan Comics Conspiracy. I picked up seven new sketches for my sketchbooks and had a great time talking to many of the creators, especially Howard Chaykin, Freddie Williams II, Phil Hester, and Ed Brubaker.

Note to all comic convention organizers: get Howard Chaykin to do a panel. He could read the phonebook without being boring.

“Perhaps if we saw what was ahead of us, and glimpsed the crimes, follies, and misfortunes that would befall us later on, we would all stay in our mother’s wombs, and then there would be nobody in the world but a great number of very fat, very irritated women.”
– Lemony Snicket

“Our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics or geometry.”
– Thomas Jefferson

“If a person who indulges in gluttony is a glutton, and a person who commits a felony is a felon, then God is an iron.”
– Spider Robinson

A new study from the Cato Institute suggests that libertarians might be the new swing vote.

The libertarian vote is in play. At some 13 percent of the electorate, it is sizable enough to swing elections. Pollsters, political strategists, candidates, and the media should take note of it.

After examining the relevant polling data, Cato concludes that libertarians and libertarian sympathizers constitute somewhere between 10 and 20% of the American population. Some explanations are offered as to why libertarians constitute such a bigger constituency than one might expect. First is that libertarians tend not to be as well-organized as other interest groups. Most groups that organize and try to exert political influence want some sort of government action: unions want favorable labor laws passed, the Christian Coalition wants abortion outlawed and anti-homosexual laws passed, environmentalists want pollution restricted and ecosystems protected, businesses want favorable tax and commercial laws. Libertarians generally don’t want government to take action, and are therefore less likely to organize into a pressure group because of that. It also argues that the difficulty people have in breaking out of the left-right liberal-conservative paradigm of politics keeps “populists” (authoritarians) and libertarians underrepresented. While most political scholarship accepts the inadequacy of a simple one-dimensional view of politics, it hasn’t sunk down into popular culture as strongly. Often talk shows and debate programs on television and radio will feature someone “from the left” and someone “from the right”, squeezing libertarians out of the picture.

An unexplored reason that might contribute is the higher prevalence of libertarianism among younger people than older people. The Cato paper notes this statistic but doesn’t explore its relationship to voter turnout. It explains the phenomenon this way. Younger people were more influenced by 2 of the most significant individualist movements of the 20th century: the ’60s counter culture and the ’80s Reagan Revolution. As a result, younger generations have seen both the socially liberal and the economically conservative side of individualism and turn to libertarianism as a way to emulate both ideals. The downside is that since younger people in general are less likely to vote, libertarians wind up underrepresented at the polls.

But don’t libertarian have to swing their votes to become a swing vote? Well, more and more frequently libertarian-minded people are losing the loyalty to the party they usually vote for (mostly the GOP), which puts their vote as a bloc in play.

Many commentators noted the high turnout in the 2004 election. Nationally, voter turnout increased 6.1 percent. That might help explain some of the swing in 2004. According to ANES data, libertarians reported turning out to vote at higher percentages than total respondents in 2000 and even higher in 2004.

This libertarian swing trend is particularly pronounced by age. Libertarians aged 18–29— many of whom were new voters in 2004— voted 71–42 for Kerry. Libertarians aged 30–49 voted almost completely the reverse, 72–21 for Bush.

Going back to the generational argument, I imagine that older individuals who can remember a time when the religious Right wasn’t nearly as omnipresent of a force in the Republican Party and therefore don’t automatically associate it with tirades about the moral dangers of homosexuality and feticide. So I can understand younger libertarians leaning more democratic than older ones who might remember the time of more Goldwater-like or even maybe Reagan-like Republicans.

What does all this mean in practical terms? What will we see coming out of the major political parties

Conservatives resist cultural change and personal liberation; liberals resist economic dynamism and globalization. Libertarians embrace both. The political party that comes to terms with that can win the next generation.

It would really be great to see both political parties converge to a libertarian center. But as the article points out, the nature of libertarians makes them much harder to corral than other groups, which makes attracting us to their political parties a far more expensive and riskier proposition than going after churchgoers and soccer moms. Perhaps in time it will happen. But I doubt it will happen very soon.

“The press is never going to report judicial opinions accurately, they’re just going to report, who is the plaintiff? Was that a nice little old lady? And who is the defendant? Was this, you know, some scuzzy guy? And who won? Was it the good guy that won or the bad guy? And that’s all you’re going to get in a press report, and you can’t blame them, you can’t blame them. Because nobody would read it if you went into the details of the law that the court has to resolve. So you can’t judge your judges on the basis of what you read in the press.”
– Justice Antonin Scalia

“And why do we fall, Bruce? So we can learn to pick ourselves up.”
– Thomas Wayne (Batman Begins)

My own view is that the Churches should frankly recognise that the majority of the British people are not Christians and, therefore, cannot be expected to live Christian lives. There ought to be two distinct kinds of marriage: one governed by the State with rules enforced on all citizens, and the other governed by the Church with rules enforced by her on her own members. The distinction ought be to quite sharp, so that a man know which couples are married in a Christian sense and which are not.

– C.S. Lewis

A moment of silence, please, for the doctrine of habeus corpus, which finally died yesterday. Habeus corpus has been on death’s door before–see, e.g. The Civil War, World War I, and the Japanese Internment Camps. But it has always managed to come back once an enemy has been defeated. At least, in the United States. Elsewhere in the Anglo-Saxon sphere of influence, it’s been dead for years. But now that there is no enemy–just a nebulous collection of people randomly assigned the label “terrorist” or “Islamofascist” without regard for accuracy or definition (yes, I was guilty in the past of such linguistic crimes, too)–it appears that the doctrine may well and truly be dead.

Of course, if there is one constant in Western Civilization, it’s that of resurrection. So maybe there’s hope yet.