After 12 years of maintaining my personal and political ties to the Libertarian Party of Maryland, I have registered as a Democrat. This piece is adapted from a Daily Kos diary, and may have "quirks" reflecting that format.
It is hard to say goodbye to that good group of idealists. My wedding in 1999 was essentially a Libertarian "mafia" wedding, with the LPMD state chair as my best man, one additional LPMD activist as a groomsman and a large number of LPMD activists as guests. I had even served as party Treasurer - a hateful job that I mostly did poorly, even at low levels of revenue and expenditure.
Much of my social circle was LPMD. Before Democrats has Drinking Liberally, the LPMD had the "LDDS" - the Libertarian Drinking and Debating Society, founded by activist Earle Peace - a character if there ever was one, think George Clooney's character in O Brother Where Art Thou, and you get the idea. It was an informal party hash-out session (I mean hashing ideas, not hashing hash - an important distinction in that crowd) every week in a semi-honky-tonk bar in East Baltimore. What's sad is that there are 1000 times more Democrats in Baltimore than Libertarians, but Drinking Liberally is very weak in Baltimore. (Sadly, lots of things that should not be weak and broken in Baltimore, are weak and broken, starting with elections themselves.) When we didn't complaint and argue, we drank and even danced.
The Libertarian Party of Maryland was and is a cantankerous group of highly opinionated people committed to their ideas and not at all shy about arguing forcefully and creatively about them. Like some other people I know....
What made the LPMD great was that it was a community, not a machine. Of course it had no political power, though some of its leading lights were rather good at local political organizing, fighting well above their weight class. But the community was not a bunch of cultists, more like a family with family squabbles, traditions, peculiarities and inside jokes. Frankly, Daily Kos at its best reminds me of the LPMD - a lot. It mourned its dead like a community as well; when long-time activist and solid mentsch Terry Atwood was killed by a hit-and-run driver, the funeral service had many more Libertarians than Episcopalians. Sadly, his gracious wife Kitty has now passed as well.
My decision to join the Democratic Party this week - sent in my change of registration form to Baltimore County Tuesday - was a painful one to execute in many ways. Even through my leftward political evolution, I had been reluctant to deprive the LPMD of my registration. Due to discriminatory ballot access laws used by Democrats with Republican collusion to keep power tight to the vest, the LPMD must spend a large amount of its quadrennial human and financial capital just maintaining its party status through signature collection. These injustice of these laws still offends me in the land of the free. Maintaining a certain number of active registrants helps the LPMD escape some of those arbitrary burdens, burdens that the Democrats and Republicans of course refuse to impose on themselves, that would be "unfair!"
But despite this pain at changing over, I did it. I have felt enough kinship with the Democratic politics, Democratic activists, liberal and progressive organizers and the liberal blogosphere in Maryland (such as Free State Politics of course, which absolutely deserves more support than it's getting), and my continued revulsion at Bush, motivated me to make the move.
I still lean Libertarian on a lot of issues; the Democratic nominee if elected will push the drug war hard, will invade privacy with no shame, will throw same-sex couples under the bus just like Bill Clinton did, will maintain and grow the same damn apparatus of war that George Bush has badly damaged on a fool's errand, and may indeed pursue that damn fool's errand further.
It was Libertarians, not breast-beating Democrats like Steny W. Hoyer, who first called out President Bush on the wrong-headed, counter-constitutional means and ends that Bush was pursuing as early as late 2001. I still recall the phone calls among us Libertarians around September 12th and 13th, 2001, wherein we despaired for the civil rights and liberties of our republic, wherein we imagined presciently in general outlines the Gitmos, the Abu Ghraibs, the unitary executives, the Abu Gonzaleses, extraordinary renditions, the contempt for habeas corpus, judicial review and the Constitution itself. Earle Pearce was more right that week on the phone than he ever was at the LDDS. It's six years later, and Steny and Rahm and Hillary and Lieberman (!) and the gang are still six years behind the ball. Some &&&&&&& gratitude I showed Libertarians, eh, when I ditched them with a signature and a first class stamp to the elections office.
But in the end, I would rather be in the Democratic tent shouting "freedom" in a crowd than shouting it in the wilderness. So I now say, with a tear in one eye, but with a smile, "Hello, fellow Democrats." |
