Waking from the Nightmare

by L. Neil Smith
lneil@netzero.com

via The Libertarian Enterprise:

By now it has been made abundantly clear that the American political process will never be opened to libertarians, who are, ironically, the only remaining legitimate heirs to the Founding Fathers.

Four long decades have taught us that, even if we do stand out in the broiling sun or the driving rain to collect all of those petition signatures (something that is, quite mysteriously, never required of those who have thrown their lot in with the two-headed Boot On Your Neck Party) the bought-and-paid-for Old Media "news" will still ignore us.

Or make fun of us.

There is no guarantee that votes for our candidates will even get properly counted, and not end up discarded and scattered in a landfill somewhere, or electronically purged from systems designed from the ground up to prevent the election of any but the properly approved candidates.

And, if everything else fails, if our party begins to represent an unacceptable danger to the BOYN Party, they'll infiltrate a ringer, employ the useful idiots already in our midst (those, for example, who don't want the platform to say anything they'd feel embarrassed to explain to their mommies) to get him nominated as our candidate, and proceed to discredit and destroy all we have worked for forty years to create.

Many of us saw this kind of thing coming a long time ago, and have been wracking our brains, some of us for decades, trying to think of a way to prevent or counteract it. My wife Cathy and I had an idea 20 years ago (and some of our long-suffering friends have heard about it repeatedly), but it seemed like an impossibly arduous undertaking, and we were in what I have described as our electoral pacifism phase, anyway.

Now I don't think we have any choices left. Which is why I bring up the subject, one more time, of the National Recall Coordinating Committees.

The National Recall Coordinating Committees.

That plural form is very important. We want to build something that is essentially headless, but at the same time, visibly at work everywhere. We want the National Recall Coordinating Committees to become a constant threat to every corrupt socialist politician in America—the kind of threat that both the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Rifle Association should have become but are not.

Please keep in mind that the following is simply a crude outline, a skeleton that will flesh itself out as we move along. The National Recall Coordinating Committees would begin locally, by gathering and disseminating information on the processes of recall, impeachment, and other legal methods of dislodging political parasites from the jugular of voters and taxpayers, at every level, national, state, county, and municipal.

Potential volunteers should consider whether they want to start at the city, county, state, or some other level. Their first task, after they establish themselves with the national organization, should be to exhume their jurisdiction's recall and impeachment provisions and help get them onto a national database which can be put on an appropriate website.

Whatever national organization we permit should act simply as a registrar for local organizations, a clearing-house and data gathering point, and as a generator of various materials in various media for public distribution. Over the years we have learned from many other groups we've belonged to never to let it act as a chokepoint or gatekeeper.

The National Recall Coordinating Committees must be guided solely by the Bill of Rights and—since it's the creation of libertarians—the Zero Aggression Principle. I detest having to write these words, but it should avoid those areas of controversy that legitimate members of the freedom movement are divided on, such as abortion and immigration. I have strong opinions on these issues, myself, and it is distasteful not to pursue them, but if the Founding Fathers hadn't followed a similar course with regard to slavery (something they're often criticized for), we'd all be speaking with British accents today.

Once we have the free country the Founders intended, we can settle all our old arguments with coffee and pistols at dawn, if absolutely necessary.

With our national recall and impeachment database established, we can begin to research each sitting politician's weaknesses and exploit them. In which precincts, for example, did a legislator win by only a handful of votes, and can they be reversed in a recall election? Many different tactics are possible, but in the long run, it won't matter whether we win or lose any given recall or impeachment campaign, only that it cost the other side time and money. It's called "attrition", which is how our side won the American Revolution, and why we lost in Vietnam.

At every turn we must avoid watering down our principles with the ideological poisons of compromise, gradualism, political moderatism, incrementalism, and so-called "pragmatism". Remember: "The perfect is the enemy of the good" is only an empty slogan. The historic fact is that, if it weren't for those who insist on the perfect, if it were left only to the compromisers, gradualists, political moderates, incrementalists, and so-called "pragmatists", there'd never be any good.

A few more thoughts:

The Bill of Rights is the property of the people, not of lawyers, judges, or academics bent on weasel-wording it out of existence. It is also the highest law of the land, superceding all lesser statutes and ordinances, treaties, and the body of the Constitution itself. Judges who consistently rule against the Bill of Rights should face continual efforts to remove them from office. Wherever it is possible, the 14th Amendment should be used to prevent such creatures from ever holding office again. Avoid trivialities (like semen on a White House intern's blue dress) and focus, instead, on crimes against the people and the Constitution.

On the principle that, "This time it has to cost them something," we can't be satisfied when a bad policy is reversed. We must remove whoever proposed it from office, and, if possible, abolish the office, itself. Unlike the National Rifle Association, which I've often referred to as a "Necrotic Republican Appendage", Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership is almost alone in demanding abolition of the brutal, anticonstitutional Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. We would do well to follow their example.

Above all, we must always act with complete openness. We must never lie. Nor must we ever soft-pedal our principles or eventual goals.

First among these must be the placement of a stringent—no, let's make that Draconian—penalty clause within the Bill of Rights.

We must also repeal that section of the Constitution which gives legal immunity to legislators for whatever crimes they commit in office, and with it, all laws and findings that give similar immunity to those—like hired FBI assassins—who commit crimes for the government.

We must discredit the very concept of "emergency powers" and make sure that, "for the duration of the current crisis" all individual liberties are maximized, in part because that's what actually solves problems.

And we must abolish sovereign immunity and imminent domain.

Today marks the historic beginning of Bill of Rights enforcement in America. Make a note of it now, to show your children and your grandchildren. Then, until we get a national chapter house up, write to The Libertarian Enterprise and let us know how you're willing to help.

Four-time Prometheus Award-winner L. Neil Smith has been called one of the world's foremost authorities on the ethics of self-defense. He is the author of 25 books, including The American Zone, Forge of the Elders, Pallas, The Probability Broach, Hope (with Aaron Zelman), and his collected articles and speeches, Lever Action, all of which may be purchased through his website "The Webley Page" at lneilsmith.org.