As you know, recently I’ve been looking at comments on libertarianism by statist-progressives. My reaction to the ones missing the point has largely hovered between taking offense & WTF-are-they-smoking giggles.

This one I spotted is different though: It’s actually quite saddening. All emphasis is mine…

True Democratic values are undermined, not advanced, by libertarianism. Government is absolutely necessary to both create the equality of opportunity that is essential for individuals to truly have free choices and chart their own life courses. […]

Some are attracted to libertarianism on social issues. But it was liberalism that created all the freedoms we enjoy today. From the ACLU to a woman’s right to choose and any number of things in between, liberalism was responsible for their existence. The liberal heritage is good and strong, despite libertarian efforts to steal that heritage for themselves. […]

More democracy, not less government, should be the goal. And our goal should not be to tailor the Democratic Party to libertarians, but convince them of liberalism’s inherent power to deliver both freedom and equality - because those two things cannot exist without the other.

-Eugene, from Daily Kos

Uh, Eugene?  I have news for you: libertarianism is part of the liberal heritage.  In fact, libertarianism used to be called “liberalism”.  The activism of the ACLU comes from the same philosophical base that you’re treating as an ideological boogeyman come to “steal” liberalism.  Libertarianism doesn’t inherently mean anarchy, although many of the biggest names in liberalism throughout history (Henry David Thoreau ring a bell?) actually did go that far, for rather principled reasons I might add.  Anyone that has sat through an even remotely decent American History and/or Poli Sci class should know this.

“More democracy, not less government”.  Think about that line.  It’s where liberalism has been brought by the embrace of force as a tool of societal progress.  Somehow, the idea was accepted that the only problem with the State was the people in charge of it, and if the proper types were chosen all would be well.  The thing is, in practice the larger the scope of political power the closer representation gets towards an impossibility, as so much becomes a matter for politicians that only other politicians can understand what is being done — and as a result, the only ones served by politics are politicians & their friends.  In a system where the average person is ignorant of what their government is doing, it is irrelevant whether the officers of it are elected or not, “democracy” turns into little more than a meaningless catchphrase.

In the long run, for any semblance of democracy as is commonly understood to survive, it must be deliberately broken down to its literal root of the demos — the people — ruling themselves in a decentralized, local manner.  That inherently requires less government, if not no government.

Democrats do not need to convince libertarians of the rightness of liberalism, libertarians need to convince Democrats — and anyone else — to rediscover what it actually means.