The surging movement championed by President Obama towards gun control in the USA turns out to be a steady movement towards fewer controls. See this interesting map:
Illinois has just become a shall-issue state, which means that pretty much any law-abiding adult age 21 and above can get a license to carry a concealed handgun in public. To be sure, something will depend on how the law is implemented, and my understanding is that gun rights supporters see the law as narrower (and more burdensome) than they’d like. But let’s not miss the forest for the trees: Illinois residents — like the residents of all but 8 states — are now able to effectively defend themselves in public using pretty the same kinds of weapons that the police, bodyguards, and the like use to defend themselves ...
Rather, as with the immense success of the shall-issue movement more broadly over the last 30 years, a big part of the success was political. The notion that people should be free to be their own and their families’ bodyguards, even if they aren’t rich or important enough to get police escorts or hired bodyguards, has been remarkably successful politically, throughout the U.S., including in many deep blue states.
I can't now find a fine article I recently read that looks at how libertarian instincts in the USA variously work for both Left and Right as previously defined. But it made some of the following points.
The Left are winning big on gay rights/marriage, but the Right are winning big on guns. The fact that more Americans see über-leaker Snowden as a whistleblower (on the whole good) rather than a traitor (bad) gives uneasy encouragement to both sides: the Left like the powerful state controlling almost everything except the ability to bear down on favorite Lefty causes and people (see eg Suzanne Moore's recent wail); the Right want the state to be a damn size smaller and to mind its own business.
Abortion is a tricky one, as it involves an existential clash of libertarian principles themselves. Yes a woman has a 'right to choose', but do the unborn child or even the father have no rights at all? Here too the more conservative right-to-life tendency seems to be making more of the running, as individual states bring in new laws to narrow the scope for abortion and abortionists (see eg Texas) and technological advances make unborn children visible to their mothers as never before via scans, or viable at ever-earlier ages.
Therefore what?
Yesterday at the FCO a group of us talked about global trends and someone came up with a wonderful brilliant line: Legitimacy is Local. The Internet revolution empowers people around the planet to be different and energetic. All round the world in different ways everywhere government as previously constituted is now just getting in the way. Busybody Western-defined interventions are no longer desired or likely to work. Most political parties exist only because they want to get their greedy hands on state power. But if state power everywhere is increasingly unpopular, where does that leave conventional politics?
Trailing badly.
I am open to offers on how to redefine politics in a more explicitly intelligent libertarian direction. One I had yesterday was very interesting. Watch this space.
Or, as was famously put decades ago:
Galt is ordered to put on formal dinner clothes. He's led to the hotel ballroom by a man who presses a hidden gun into his ribs. They enter to the standing ovation of five hundred guests, and Galt is seated as the guest of honor, between Mr. Thompson and the goon.
After dinner, television equipment rolls forward, and an announcer welcomes everyone to the inauguration of "the John Galt Plan." Speakers commend him for his genius as a planner, his practical know-how, his selfless leadership. Mr. Thompson declares that Galt is present of his own free will, motivated by love for mankind and a sense of duty. "And now you will hear his voice...Ladies and gentlemen, John Galt!"
Galt rises swiftly and leans to one side, exposing the goon's gun to the viewing world. Then, staring into the camera, he says: "Get the hell out of my way!"
Indeed.
