I would say it's not Big enough to compete with the Republicans and Democrats if they've never managed to ever capture a Congressional seat.
I'd argue all partisans are "dumbasses being led by the nose of big money", Libertarian partisans included.
You know, I think I can say this now, being one of the foremost brainwashed liberal Negroes on this wuvvable site… My mother voted for Ronald Reagan both in 1980 and in 1984. I was a young and arrogant little neo-Muslim insurrectionist…barely a glimmer in the eye of Mein Führer und Reichskanzler Barack Obama… I remember the 1984 presidential election, especially. I rarely saw my mother animated about anything…she had a very direct and subdued approach and perspective on most things. But always around election time, she seemed unusually vibrant and frenetic…like a kid right before he opens his Christmas presents. Didn’t matter if it was state or national…she loved everything about the election cycles. I was in middle school at that time, and was just politically aware enough to know that my mother voting for Ronald Reagan made about as much sense as the Pope voting for Liberache for “Man of the Year”. I asked her on election night, why she voted for Reagan. I don’t remember the specific list of reasons why I thought it was a bad idea (I’ve ingloriously done away with more than a few brain cells in the interim)…except to say it was a pretty lengthy one. To her credit, my mother let me rail on until I’d spent myself. She didn’t usually brook intransigence from me (even though she would often times encourage me to voice an opinion). I guess she must have sensed an opportunity to tell me something I probably hadn’t heard before, and maybe needed to hear this bit insight from her first, before I heard a skewed version of it somewhere else. I don’t think my mother looked for teaching moments…she just knew when to seize upon them. “Boy, I’ll tell you somethin’…everything you tellin’ me probably is right. You real smart. Got a lot of sense. Gonna be hard, I can tell, for anybody to get a lie past you. Sometimes, though, life ain’t about findin’ lies. It’s about lookin’ for truth. I spent a lotta years bein’ told I ain’t had no vote…I ain’t had no right to say nothin’ about nothin’…I ain’t smart enough to know what to do with a vote if somebody gave it to me. Spent a lotta years havin’ to take that from white folk. Wasn’t right then…and they knew it. It ain’t right now, what you doin’. ‘Cept you don’t know no better. And I thank God for that. Maybe, boy, I just want to vote the way I want to vote. The way the law say I got a right to. I done earned that much, I believe. Even if it’s the wrong thing to do, I want to say I done it. A man ain’t never had a coat, don’t complain about the one he do get that ain’t got a hood on it. Anyway, ain’t nobody talk about God as much as that man do all bad.” I sat up with my mother the entire night, watching the election returns, a foregone conclusion way before the night ended. Every half-hour on the hour, CBS and Dan Rather would tick off a state that Reagan had won. My mother would let out a whoop and a cheer. And she would say “My vote counted! My vote made the difference!” And I stopped caring about who would win, or who I wanted to win. I realized what I cared about was happening right in front of me. History. And destiny. You’re right, RedRedemption. We will all of us be better off when we care as much about one another (even the ones that don’t look or talk or think like us) as we do about the sound of our own voices and the righteousness ringing in between our own ears. Richard Nixon, of all people, actually had a good take on this (rhetorically, anyway) in his first inauguratorial speech: “In these difficult years, America has suffered from a fever of words; from inflated rhetoric that promises more than it can deliver; from angry rhetoric that fans discontents into hatreds; from bombastic rhetoric that postures instead of persuading. We cannot learn from one another until we stop shouting at one another, until we speak quietly enough so that our words can be heard as well as our voices.”
Libertarians believe individuals should be able to do whatever they want, excluding violence and theft. Don't need a long video to explain it.
