Shamu,
First of all, your experiences would not surprise me. Libertarianism as a political philosophy embraces a rather diverse set of views ranging from the classical liberalism of people like John Locke, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison to a philosphy of a very minimal state (i.e Robert Nozick, Ayn Rand) to the idea that governments are illegitimate entities and that legal systems, justice, services, etc. are best handled through private providers. Also known as anarcho-capitalism, if you have encountered people who hold these views (or read the pages of LewRockwell.com), it would not surprise me that you would find those views on the fringe because they are.
I am familiar with all these viewpoints and I would have to say that I am clearly in the classically liberal camp although I do hold some views toward legitimate roles of government that would put me closer to people like Rand or Nozick. You are right about the ideals this nation was founded on, as they are completely consistent with the classical liberal view on our natural rights as free men. This is embodied both in the Declaration of Independence and our Constitution, neither of which seem to be taken seriously by just about everyone on the Left and substantial portions of the Right.
Most of the more mainstream libertarians (broadly defined as socially liberal but economic conservative) do not belong to the Libertarian Party but have historically operated within the big tent of the GOP, although that may be changing as the big-government elements of the American Right, whether the neoconservatives, the so-called national greatness conservatives, moral majority types, etc. have wielded significant influence. Combine that with a big government President and you have a giant headache. It probably wouldn't surprise you that many of the ideas that now wield influence on the Right are from people who were formerly leftists.
Regarding libertarian unity: there will never be any. Ron Paul's candidacy exposed (for all of those who were paying attention), the very deep rift between the more mainstream libertarians who try to work with the Washington establishment through the Republican Party (i.e think tanks like The Cato Institute) and the anti-state libertarians who have little interest in political machinery and believe that the state is evil and want to get it out of as many things as human possible, more than what could ever be considered achievable. This rift goes back to 1982 when The Cato Institute pushed out the more radical libertarians and went with more of a mainstream approach.
Because of the more radical elements of libertarians is very anti-government in nature, it attacts a very toxic mix of constituencies amongst what the fringe groups on the Far Right (neoconservatives and the Religious Right, for lack of a better term, hardly qualify as far right - I'd argue them as left of center). Neo-confederates, southern agrarians (i.e. paleoconservatives), Birch-type conspiracy theory nuts and just about every crackpot under the sun that think Jews run our banking system would find common ground with these people (although NOT with people like me). As a general rule of thumb, if the group in question was effectively marginalized by Bill Buckley when he was conceptualizing what became the modern conservative movement, these guys were reaching out to them. You'll find many of these kooks hovering over the Libertarian Party, all the more reason not to take them seriously.
Now, onto our many problems:
Our biggest problem isn't one of unity, it's one of ideas. I'll throw a few of them out there. After a while, I think people will understand why a relatively small percentage of the population hold views similar to this:
- We believe in an expansive private sphere, robust private property rights and that government's sole purpose is to protect them.
- We advocate constitutionally limited government that demands Congress be limited to its enumerated powers and that the broad protections of liberty, especially to those rights not enumerated in the Constitution but recognized in the 9th and 14th Amendments be vigilantly enforced by the Supreme Court.
- We believe that it is not "activist judges who legislate from the bench" (a monstrosity of a talking point if there ever was one) that pose the greatest threat to liberty, it is the sort of legislative factions that James Madison warned us of in Federalist 10. History has proven him right.
- We are skeptical of social engineering and central planning. The New Deal produced nothing but a massive entitlement program (Social Security), a modern regulatory state and the misguided notion that government tinkering can fix problems, an intellectual problem that haunts us to this day (especially since the New Deal was a government "fix" to a problem government itself caused in the first place while trying to "fix" other problems). It should also be noted that The Great Society did not produce one. The War on Drugs has done nothing to curb drug and everything to infringe upon the rights of individuals who are not violating the rights of others. Time will tell whether or not our plans to democratize Iraq will bear the fruit the planners insisted would be a cakewalk. All I can say about that is that our history in nation building is mixed at best.
- The fact that we believe that a welfare state is nothing more than taking from one group and giving it another through law (in any other context, it's called theft) does not mean we lack compassion for those in need of assistance. We believe charity as a purely private matter.
- Capitalism may be imperfect and produce inequalities and unjust outcomes but there is no other system that can correct those results. Blaming "failures" on the free market (or laissez faire capitalism) is often misguided because it is government intervention that often exacerbation problems. For example, it was not a failure of the free market that caused The Great Depression, the government 1) tightened credit when it should have expanded it; 2) imposed protectionist tariffs that did a lot of damage to our economy; and 3) raised income taxes on certain levels rather harshly.
- We believe in equality before the law. In that, the purpose of the law is to protect the rights of individuals so they can pursue happiness in the manner of their choosing so long as those actions do not violate the rights of other individuals. It is not the role of government to, among other things, dictate a minimum wage, dictate a maximum number of hours an adult can work, dictate "reasonable" maximum profits levels, give labor unions a government protected cartel, regulate consensual behavior in the bedroom, regulate consensual behavior in the boardroom, protect institutions from a perceived harm that cannot be measured, quantified or even alluded to and is simply a matter of one's very subjective opinion (i.e. marriage), etc. etc.
I think you probably get the idea. You can pretty much disqualify the Left as agreeing with any of the views on matters of economics. Their views on social issues are rather morally authoritarian once you get them beyond their rather selective definition of privacy. Conservatives, generally, are more skeptical of government but would exercise far more power locally than libertarians would find acceptable (some of the conservative insistence that we defer to the Executive in times of crisis is a bit of a sore spot but that's a whole other discussion). Also, the hostility towards judges is rather ironic since it was judges deferring to the will of the majority that expanded government to the state it's in today.
Polls have put the libertarian "persuasion" (social liberal/economic conservative) somewhere in the 10% range. On that note, we certainly have enough of a presence to at least matter, but our allegiance has traditionally been under the rubric of the Republican Party and away from the more doctrinairre and radical libertarians that you seem to have come across.
If I had my choice, I'd jettison all of the big government types out of the Republican Party, send them back to the Left where they belong and try to peacefully coexist with the more traditionalist wing of the conservative movements, whose similarities with me on the scope of the federal government make us natural allies.
Sorry so long...
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