Mimesis in Politics

Liberal Party Wet Plank

Politician impersonators are an industry today, but what about political party impersonators? The Liberal Party of America, organized in 1930 to repeal prohibition and blue laws, scared the bejeezus out of the ku-klux and Methodist White Terrors. Sure enough, as soon as its 1931 platform hit the stands, impersonator parties sprouted like toadstools. None of their platforms mentioned repeal. Here’s a sample of the Liberal Party Platform:

Hypocrisy is in the saddle. Mercenary religion is throttling the nation’s life. Paid preachers, quartered in magnificent offices, and working for large salaries, are stifling the life of the people. Some of them are laughing in derision when the poor and the weak are convicted and sent to prison. Some of them are advocating the poisoning of alcohol, so that those who are tempted may die—the sooner the wretches are out of the way, say they, the better for Prohibition. And the Sunday laws—these mercenary preachers are spying around corners to trap the unwary and to fill the jails.

And in both parties there were wets and drys who would exact a shameful straddle upon the paramount question of the day—the paramount question not only in politics, but in life—Prohibition–while the abortive enforcement of an unenforceable law would continue. The Government would keep on with its tragic tyranny of sending twelve hundred men and women to jail every week in the year. The President of the United States would call for more and bigger prisons. The Attorney General would carry out his essential practice of paroling hundreds of victims from their cells—and yet other hundreds—in order to provide space for new prisoners, until he finds himself with six offenders in each cell that was built for one.

The Liberal Party aims at the dissolution of the Ku Klux Klan, because that society, suppressing the social and political rights of Jews, Catholics, and Negroes, is a foul vulture that is eating the heart out of the body politic; and when it was in its greatest power it continued to enroll new thousands in its membership through the encouragement which Mr. Ford gave to its propaganda with his senseless campaign of libel against the Jews.”

Libertarian impersonators 1932

Looters wasted no time in organizing “Liberty Party” rallies at which the vilest totalitarian collectivists held forth on coercive measures they imagined “freedom” ought certainly to entail. The Kleptocracy could hardly have organized such a slap in the face of the anti-slavery party that toppled the Whigs–not with jobless veterans marching on Washington to cash in Bonus bonds prior to maturity. This was the reaction of parasitical socialism to the emergence of the first approximation to a proto-Libertarian party. This 1932 reaction against libertarians dedicated to the defense of individual rights is by now a familiar sight. It is the exact same thing we are seeing today.

The Democratic and Republican party platforms want your kids in jail, your home and assets forfeited–though the economy be again destroyed to achieve this–and men with guns collecting individual income taxes. Your vote can endorse or forever go on record as opposing this gangland violence. Which will it be?

Clarity isn’t oversimplification

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