What, then, should that proponent do? It is never inappropriate to quote Raymond Aron’s dictum that politics is not a choice between good and evil, but between the preferable and the detestable. If the libertarian feels that he must become a Democrat, then one is hard-pressed to make a heartfelt plea on ideological or philosophical grounds for him to stay. In any case, he will experience the true regard that the Democratic party has for him soon enough. He will find himself in the company of people who do not grasp the connection between capitalism and freedom; he will find himself attending party meetings with neighbors who wish nothing more than to seize his household income for their own civic purposes; he will realize that his new fellow-travelers have not the slightest intention of allowing him to raise his children as he sees fit; and he will see Markos Moulitsas, having concluded that beekeepers are the next swing demographic, earnestly explain how he learned to be a Democrat by watching bees. ~Joshua Trevino, The Remedy

Josh has a fine takedown of the pretentious Kos, and gives his “libertarian Democrat” article at Cato Unbound the disrespect it deserves, and points to a problem that all coalitionmongers encounter.  The coalition-builders know that politics is the messy business of trading influence and getting power to advance the concrete interests of specific constituencies, who are mainly out to get what they want and be done with it.  Party “principles” are drafted to lend some kind of coherence and rhetorical expression to these interests and make them sound deeply moral and serious.  This really begins to take off when you convince lots and lots of people to adhere themselves to party X rather than party Y because party X embraces your “values” and represents your view of the proper role of government, etc.  This creates problems when they discover that they have been had, but the coalitionmongers are there to keep the sheep, er, voters from scattering too much. 

Somewhere in this process academics, “intellectuals” and unemployed writers (each one of whom now has his own blog!) are summoned to write up elaborate tracts and arguments justifying party position X versus opposing party position Y and make sure that it is clear that this is a Conflict of Deeply Held Principles.  (Personally, I much prefer our old sort of elections when you had such memorable slogans as the one for the Democratic VP in 1836: “Rumpsy Dumpsy, Colonel Johnson Killed Tecumseh” and everyone knew that it was a fight for spoils and access.)  Elections are then the battles in this Conflict and an army of propagandists and still more unemployed writers are found to provide a plausible cover story in the event of either victory or defeat.  The unemployed writers have a great interest in maintaining the fiction that these cover stories are considered by all and sundry to be the truth about the elections. 

When power changes hands, this is when the frequently unemployed writers suddenly find themselves employed more than ever, as they are called on to do two things at once: vilify the incoming party, which clearly won because of fraud, deception or dirty tricks, and lament the collapse of one’s own party, which, of course, has failed in this particular election not so much for tangible, discernible reasons but because it is has abandoned Party Principles.  Of course, at each cycle, Party Principles get changed around and reconfigured, so it is never quite clear what they are (are we for intrusive government this week, or against it?  what is our position on torture again?), which makes it that much easier to make the claim that the party has somehow gone astray.  Just go back a few cycles, dust off an old copy of the Party Principles and you will have found What We Have Always Believed, which you can then use to shame and mock the other factions in the party who treated you poorly at the last convention or fundraiser or campaign appearance, etc. 

Always working in the background, however, are the coalitionmongers, who manage and control the vying factions in any given party by occasionally throwing them the appropriate policy bone or assuaging their dissatisfaction with references to “shared values” and commitment to Important Principle A or Deeply Meaningful Symbol B.  These are people who are very good at eliding huge differences between factions by making cloying, saccharine appeals to What We Have In Common and, more often, Why The Other Party Is Just This Side Of Inhuman.  There are other coalitionmongers who work very hard to create the appearance of already-existing common interests that dictate that this or that group really ought to be supporting our party (see the 3,423–and counting–Republican appeals to the “natural conservatism” of Mexican immigrants and blacks) or who concoct ramshackle intellectual justifications for cynical political alliances that are already in place (see “new fusionism”).  Of these two, Kos is clearly trying to pull off one of the former by showing what a great home libertarians would have with the Democrats.  As with traditionalists and Christians being lured into the GOP, it is a massive bamboozle.  Coalitionmongers are essential to keeping high levels of participation and activism in politics, because without them it would become clear very quickly to most constituencies that they have very little in common with their supposed allies and have little to gain by supporting the “common” goals of the party, which are, unsurprisingly, the goals of one faction out of many within the party.  Coalitionmongers keep the idea of the “necessity” of the two parties alive and make sure that actual representation in government is as minimal as can be.  Virtually no one is more vital to the system of controlling the public than a coalitionmonger. 

This is the way things are, and perhaps this is unavoidably what politics is like, but I can tell you that all of it seems extremely tiresome and preposterous.  Maybe the reason why I don’t much care for this, particularly the coalitionmongering, is because I am a curmudgeon, or because I don’t typically like things that resemble ecumenism with its muddling of real distinctions for the sake of concord, or perhaps because I would make a terrible salesman and so find those who are very good at putting the best spin on everything to be rather unnerving.  I would like to think that there must some better kind of politics in which representation of the whole of society was possible and feasible and in which serious ideas were not just the whitewash on the sarcophagoi of the two parties.  Basically, anything that would stop Markos Moulitsas from being considered an important contributor to public discourse would be a start.