The People’s Party got nearly 9% of the vote–six times the spread between winner and loser–in 1892. This frightened the Donkey and Elephant parties into making all individuals into beasts of burden under the income tax–a tax that was in neither of their platforms. Then came the surprising discovery that importation of communist manifesto planks into Federal legislation meant economic collapse.
In the year 2016 the situation is not much different. Mystics still demand that the violence of law be used against their neighbors–especially women. The mascots of the two entrenched Kleptocracy parties are those same beasts of burden, Jackass and Pachyderm. The election struggle is presented by their media as a contest between “idle holders of idle capital” and “the struggling masses,” a tableau framed by William Jennings Bryan and recently exhumed by Bernie Sanders.
Even the background issue of individual rights has barely changed. Women–who in 1892 fought for the power to vote, and in 1932 used that power to rescue the nation from economic collapse from the income tax and prohibition, are today beset by male fanatics intent on again denying them individual rights in violation of the Constitution. But after a century and a quarter, in the middle of another Great Depression caused by prohibitionist asset-forfeiture, there is a third set of pieces on the chessboard–the Libertarian Party.
When the Supreme Court enforced individual rights for African-Americans, bigoted collectivists promptly appealed to violence to restore the status quo ante. The Court again moved to enforce individual rights–this time for women. But in the Roe v. Wade decision the Supreme Court acted to protect the Republican and Democratic parties, that had nominated and confirmed its members, from competition–namely, the pro-choice Libertarian Party. The Roe v. Wade decision was handed down two months after the Libertarian Party ran the first woman candidate for vice-president, Tonie Nathan, alongside John Hospers on a pro-choice platform. Many court cases, most recently involving the right of individuals to marry whomever they please, have been decided with nervous glances in the direction of the LP.
Pressured by the game-changing power of small-party spoiler votes in the wake of the Y2k election, the Kleptocracy has begun fragmenting. The slave-Elephant’s mahouts are calving off Apocalyptic hate groups dedicated to the coercion of women (and also spouting occasional libertarian-sounding positions). As in Germany in 1933, they are organizing another Holy War pitting Christianity against foreigners and persons of Semitic provenance. The Jackass-of-burden party spalls econazi End-Times Cassandra cults led by parasitical ex-scientists and predatory politicians. Those worthies fasten like lampreys onto the taxing and regulatory power of industrial society and are hailed by the subsidized media as prophets. These mutated offspring have now turned on their spawners. Three separate factions, the GOP, “Constitution” and Tea parties, compete for the power to force women to reproduce against their will. Three others vie with equal ferocity for the destruction of industrial civilization and a return to communist-style dictatorship.
If the Republican Party–dominated entirely by prohibitionists since 1928–were able to break free, it would have done so between 1932 and 1950. Instead it scolds us with 2266 words of a Bryanesque “Cross of Scold” speech around which the rest of the GOP platform–including preservation of the individual income tax and all manner of asset-forfeiture looting–is daubed like mud into wattle. The gist of it is that the Constitution is wrong and men with guns–people like the cop-killing Planned Parenthood shooter–need to be sent after physicians to show them uppity Jezebels who is boss.
Porcupine libertarians are, of course, targeted by infiltrators from both variants of coercive collectivism, but the taint has not adhered at all well. Visit the Twenty-First Century alternative to Ottoman-style prohibitionism and East-German totalitarianism at LP.org.
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