Comments Elsewhere

Jim,

I’m one of the people who’s doled out such critiques. But I don’t think that Kos has anything like the same thing in mind. Thus:

Libertarian Dems are not hostile to government like traditional libertarians. But unlike the liberal Democrats of old times (now all but extinct), the Libertarian Dem doesn’t believe government is the solution for everything. But it sure as heck is effective in checking the power of corporations.

In other words, government can protect our liberties from those who would infringe upon them — corporations and other individuals.

He then goes on to explain how the New Deal State (minus gun control, I guess) “maximizes individual freedom,” as he sees it.

As I’m sure you know, anti-corporatist left-libertarians consistently stress that government power is the chief enabler and weapon of the robber barons, and they advocate the abolition of all forms of State economic intervention as the only proper response. The idea that Leviathan does or should or even could serve as a “check” on Behemoth is, from this standpoint, sheer statist fantasy.

Basically, as far as I can tell, “Libertarian Dem” is Kos’s new phrase for just another damn corporate liberal who likes to use Rooseveltian “Four Freedoms” talk. The contrast point is, apparently, an imaginary form of corporate liberalism which loves Big Government for its own sake and envisions no independent role for corporations or individual initiative. There is no actually existing corporate liberal who believes this (FDR, JFK, LBJ, Galbraith, Hubert Humphrey, Mario Cuomo, Ted Kennedy, and the rest of the crew certainly did not or do not; they all loved the idea of a properly “checked” or “coordinated” market), but it does make a useful rhetorical foil for passing yourself off as something new in intra-party power struggles.