The Orient sent out a plea recently for more conservative editorialists. I was tempted to answer the call this week and the Democratic convention would have provided plenty to criticize. But in accepting the Orient's invitation I would have been nourishing an anemic political discourse that seems to nourish only two ideologies, both of which are bankrupt. With (social democratic) liberals and (neo)conservatives directing the conversation one is quickly corralled into a decision of Republican or Democrat. Right or Left. Red state or blue state. Pick-up truck or Volvo. You must choose immediately and only between these two; there are no other options.
For argument's sake let's ignore the uninspired choice of calling yourself a moderate and assume that you want to join in the political discussion. The punditry of our college Democrats and Republicans exerts enormous pressure on you to pick teams. On one side are liberals who grossly overestimate civil society's flaws and believe that government can and must intervene to fix them. On the other are conservatives who once upon a time believed in smaller government, but who are now beating the liberals at their own game while also pursuing crusade after bloody nation-building crusade.
Many students at Bowdoin became politically aware during the current administration and are horrified by the well-documented crimes of our Bush-Cheney, Pinky and the Brain outfit. Given the obvious Republican immorality these students are given to assume that the Democrats offer the best hope for peace.
Unfortunately the Democrats have a worse foreign policy history than the Republicans. It was under Harry Truman that much of our willful warmaking and imperialist stance was developed. Since Truman, Democrats have done as much as Republicans to brutally force their will on the rest of the world. When you consider that Truman also was the only leader to drop the atom bomb (twice, both times on civilians), it becomes clear that liberals have an even looser grasp on morality than our current president.
The parties are nearly indistinguishable as well in their domestic policy. Republicans advocate slight tax cuts and emphasize different government programs, but they joined the Democrats long ago in enthusiastically exercising the New Deal legacy of social welfare and economic intervention. In fact, a Harvard professor named Jeffrey Frankel has written a paper arguing that the two parties have exchanged ideologies.
The domestic policies underwritten by both parties in recent times may have damaged society even more than persistent foreign intervention. The Federal Reserve, through its manipulation of the money supply, made the twentieth century a period of unprecedented boom and bust, ruining lives and robbing us of unrealized prosperity.
Meanwhile, as Hans-Herman Hoppe points out in his book Democracy: The God That Failed, during the last century "the rates of crime, structural unemployment, welfare dependency, parasitism, negligence, recklessness, incivility, psychopathy, and hedonism have increased." These are all problems that the government claims to have answers to, and ones that it has done more to "solve" in the last one hundred years than ever before in our history.
Deciding which party played a larger role in these developments is less important than accepting that both parties are thoroughly depraved, and that electoral politics holds humanity's doom rather than its salvation.
To begin to understand why these disasters have occurred, follow the advice of Murray Rothbard and characterize all government actions in the same moral light as you would the actions of a private citizen. Obeying this idea, "war" simply becomes mass murder, "conscription" becomes enslavement into armies, "taxation" becomes robbery at the point of a gun. The less offensive words are customary because the conventional role of both political parties and most intellectuals?especially since Marx and later on Keynes?has been to apologize for crimes committed by the state.
If you believe in perpetual war, human depravity, and the socialism of the central state, the Republicans and Democrats here on campus will be happy to represent you. If instead you believe in peace, freedom, and civilization, you can begin to make a difference by simply choosing to ignore the theatrics and punditry of our campus ideologues.