Those things did line up in the Virginia elections. It’s hard to say whether the Old Dominion is a barometer of change or not, though. The commonwealth has been perfectly counter-cyclical since the Carter years, electing Republican governors every time a Democrat is in the White House and Democratic governors every time a Republican is president. There’s a mundane explanation for that, at least going back as far as the Clinton years: Virginia is a divided state where the intensity of either side counts for a great deal. The side that occupies the White House is typically less intense — it’s playing defense — while the anger and energy is on the side of the out party. We saw that in the McDonnell-Deeds gubernatorial contest, and we saw it four years earlier when Democrat Tim Kaine prevailed. The country as a whole, like Virginia, is divided, and the activist energy is very much to the Republicans’ advantage right now. Unfortunately for the GOP, the 2010 elections will be fought district by district and state by state, where local conditions are not always close to those in Virginia or the nation as a whole. Hoffman benefited from the nationwide counter-Obama activist energy, hence the Conservative Party candidate’s great showing for out-of-state fundraising. But local realities trumped that.

The tilt of the playing field in 2010 will favor Republicans, but they still have to play a good enough game to take advantage of it. I do expect them to make gains, but not the huge gains that the base is expecting — not enough to take back either chamber, at least as things stand now. (What happens to the economy over the next year will naturally make a tremendous difference either way.)

New Jersey defied my guess that Corzine would pull through. My prediction was down to the heavily Democratic lean of the state and the tendency of Republican senate and gubernatorial candidates time and again to start strong but ultimately fall short. New Jersey has elected and re-elected plenty of crooked, creepy Democrats before. But Corzine’s luck ran out. I tend to think that the Garden State is less reflective of the direction of the country than Virginia is, however. Certainly Democrats have pulled through in unfavorable conditions there before. The real contest in New Jersey is usually not between conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats, but between Democrats and their own corruption. The moderate Republican Christie was the “not Corzine” choice.

The inconvenience of hunting and pecking to write-in Paul and Goldwater led me to disregard my own advice further down the ballot. Rather than writing in Pat Buchanan for Senate, I went ahead and voted for Bill Redpath, the Libertarian candidate, and I voted for the Independent Green, whoever it was, for Virginia’s 8th District Congressional seat. (I did, however, write in Mr. Buchanan for the Arlington School Board. There were only two candidates running for two seats, and I wasn’t about to approve of either of them.) As I say in my TAC article, there’s nothing wrong with symbolic voting — it’s symbolic organizing that libertarians and traditional conservatives ought to stay away from.

Why vote at all, when your ballot is statistically worthless? I vote because it feels good to check “No” next to every bond issue, tax hike, and referendum to increase government power. My vote isn’t decisive even in those municipal questions, which of course have a much smaller electorate, but the more people who vote to oppose further government debt and spending, the better the odds that those measures will fail, as they should. And even if they don’t, it’s psychologically pleasant to say “No” to taxes and spending.

Tuccille is getting modal in his old age, but his youthful memoir, It Usually Begins With Ayn Rand, is still a classic.

A few thoughts on Tuccille’s complaints against Rothbard: although you could conceivably have several kinds of legal systems develop in a free market for justice, I think a functioning Rothbardian system would include a “loser pays” rule that would mitigate Donald Trump’s advantage in lawsuits. High-power legal firms could offer to represent a plaintiff in a suit against Trump in the hope of getting a big payout if they win the case. The willingness of such a firm to take on the suit would, of course, depend on how strong they thought they suit was. There is a natural balance here: where Trump is plainly guilty or probably guilty of a violation, a firm would be eager to take the plaintiff’s case. Where the suit was frivolous or weak, they would be much less inclined to accept it. Trump would enjoy fewer advantages against poor plaintiffs in this system than he does under the current system — surely Tuccille is well aware that the rich already enjoy the kind of advantages he says they would have under Rothbardian justice.

These matters can’t really be discussed in brief, and I don’t have time to write up a full-scale defense of Rothbardian justice. So, for the time being, I’ll leave my remarks about the judicial system at that. As for “libertarian slavery,” this is a question on which Rothbardians differ, but again keep the parallels to the status quo in mind. Is it really worse to insist that a thief work to pay for his crime (he need not be a “slave” — garnishing his wages may be sufficient) than to throw him into prison for years, where instead of providing restitution to his victim the thief instead becomes a burden upon taxpayers? That’s a poor system for criminal and victim alike. White collar criminals who commit fraud presently go to jail; would it be better or worse if they had to provide restitution for their actions? Or does Tuccille propose something else entirely? And just as there are (officially) no debtors’ prisons today, why assume that debtors will be subjected to harsher penalties in a Rothbardian world? I suppose the claim might be made that we have benevolent government to thank for the abolition of debtors’ prisons, and that without such state benevolence we would go straight back to savagery. I don’t believe it.

Update: David Gordon takes down Tuccille here.

There’s a campaign afoot to save the eXile, as an online zine if not a print publication, but as I typed this post, the eXile website went down, with Verizon kindly informing me, “Sorry, ‘www.exile.ru’ does not exist or is not available.”

An irony here is that Ames has always been even harder on the servile Western media than on the Russian government. For all their talk about human rights and democracy, the Western media loves nothing more than currying favor in Washington by stoking fear about the Great Russian Bear. And now Kremlin bureaucrats have handed their enemies in the Western press a useful bit of ammunition — though as the Nation notes in its current issue, media here in the Free World have been very slow to notice what’s happening to the eXile, obviously enough because the eXile has been a thorn in the respectable media’s flank.

Long-time eXile contributor Gary Brecher, aka the War Nerd, is also an occasional TAC contributor. I’ll blog about the whole story for TAC tomorrow.

Here’s Jack Hunter, the Southern Avenger, on this remarkable candidate.

Conley is running against incumbent Republican McCainiac Lindsey Graham, one of the worst of the worst, which is all the more reason to root for this Ron Paul-inspired Democrat.

See Dylan’s commentary at Left Conservative, too.

As a sign that the “liberty” message, aided by web-savvy grassroots supporters, can compete with the establishment Republican platform, the Paulites’ Internet presence now rivals the GOP online outpost, Red State, which once kicked them off of its site. “We want to infiltrate the GOP and take it over,” says Nathan. To Jeff Frazee, an official Paul organizer, Estey’s Cat Herder is the type of project that will be essential after the Paul campaign officially ends. If the “revolution” is going to influence the GOP to the degree that Paulites hope for, it will be by using tools like this one as well as communication on blogs and forums. These strategies may be catching on because of, not despite, the freewheeling, anti-authoritarian attitude that distinguishes Libertarians from other conservative groups, who have not yet taken to netroots type organizing.

The piece is titled “Is Ron Paul’s Revolution Just Beginning?“

“A large portion of those Ron Paul supporters are anti-Bush, anti-war Republicans,” he said. “They’ll wind up back with McCain because, while they may disagree on the war or be mad at Bush, the prospect of Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton is more frightening.”

And, as Carney notes, there is no Paul-like third-party candidate around whom they can rally and vent their frustrations.

Politco’s Jonathan Martin notes that that might not be true if Bob Barr gets the Libertarian Party’s nomination. But it won’t be true even if Barr doesn’t get the LP nod, because Chuck Baldwin, who endorsed Paul in the Republican primaries, has now won the Constitution Party’s nomination. Baldwin, who is socially conservative, antiwar, for drastically smaller government (asked at the Constitution Party convention what his first executive order as president would be, he said he would first repeal almost all the executive orders going back to Reagan), and against federal snooping on American citizens. The rightist part of the Ron Paul movement might find him a very attractive candidate indeed.

In small ways, the 2008 election is starting to look up. There’s the prospect that my ballot in Virginia might have at least two candidates I can support: Baldwin and Barr. Neither is perfect. And between them, I’m not sure which is better: Baldwin is more radically conservative and anti-statist, as far as I can tell, which commends him. In Barr’s favor, I’d rather vote for a Libertarian Party candidate than a Constitution Party candidate. I attended the CP’s 2000 convention in St. Louis and wasn’t very impressed by the proceedings. A brawl almost broke out at one session between Catholics and Protestants baiting one another about who had persecuted whom more violently throughout history. (Catholics attributed anti-clerical violence in the Mexican Revolution to Protestantism — improbably enough — while Protestants shot back with equally poorly informed accusations about the Inquisition. A gathering of professional historians this was not.) Convention sessions juxtaposed a speaker who wanted to stone homosexuals next to a speaker who had survived being aborted. Disgust and sympathy don’t make a pleasant emotional cocktail. The party didn’t exactly win any points with me in 2004 either, when it nominated for president a man who had given his wife’s children away to be raised by the state of Maryland. (His wife insists that turning her daughters into wards of the state was her idea. Either way, the story belongs on Jerry Springer — or Phil Donahue, where in fact it did appear — not on the resume of a “family values” candidate.)

On the other hand, LP presidential contender and mooted vice presidential prospect Mary Ruwart is a defender of consensual kiddie porn. If she’s on the ticket, I won’t be voting for the Libertarians. I’m fairly sure neither Barr nor Wayne Allan Root, the other top LP presidential candidate, would have someone with those views on their ticket. I hope.

And of course, Obama is better than McCain by far. I’d like to see him clobber McCain in November. So assuming these third parties qualify for the ballot in Virginia, I’ll have several choices in this presidential election. That’s an unaccustomed circumstance for me, and it feels kind of good. Now if only a third party will nominate someone decent for the Virginia Senate race…

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