Hello, I’m a Michael Miecielica. I started this blog and
group after looking around the web and finding very few resources for people of my
political persuasion. In short, I’m a
classical liberal (or libertarian) coming from a progressive/Democratic background
and culture. For the last few years I
have been working in the LGBT community and LGBT Rights movement. Now, because of
this, a lot of my connections are Democratic and progressive orientated. That is all fine and dandy but as the presidency
of Barack Obama demonstrates the current Democratic leadership isn’t even good
on issues, like civil liberties, that Democrats are supposed to be good on; Let
alone issues like fiscal responsibility and tax burden that Democrats have
always been iffy on. So, I spent sometime looking into other political groups, associations
and the like. While such groups are the Ron
Paul campaigns, the Libertarian Party, The Cato Institute and the like were a
lot better in a lot of ways I didn’t feel quite at home throwing my lot in with
them and I didn’t quite find substantial agreement in a couple of really
important ways to me.
Furthermore,
almost all the groups I ran into seemed to be focused on the Republican Party
and/or third party politics. Now, I know
there are some libertarian-leaning Democrats, like Russ Feingold (D-WI) and
John Lynch (D-NH), and I know that the Democratic Freedom Caucus exists. But
still, almost all the pro-liberty groups are Republican Party focused and the
Democratic ones don’t seem very active.
I thought
this was problematic in a couple of ways. First of all, millions of individuals
are partisan Democrats and they are not going to be convinced of the principle
of liberty unless someone works to convince them within the Democratic Party. Furthermore, for the committed progressive
libertarianism is just viewed as Republican under a different name. That is not correct, obviously, but a lot of
Progressives think in those terms. What
I am saying is that I see a real need for Libertarian Democrats, former
Democrats, and pro-liberty independents to create a movement in the Democratic
Party similar to the Ron Paul campaigns in the Republican primaries to make the
Democratic Party less awful.
On the flip side, in my various explorations of the current libertarian groups, I found
a lot of tone deafness and inability to communicate with progressives. (This is a constructive criticism;
Progressives have the same problem in reverse). A lot of times I found
libertarians talking about economics in terms of themselves first; that might
make for a sound argument but it gets filtered out by progressives immediately.
A part of this I think is libertarians’
misplaced focus on small(er) spending matters, like humanitarian foreign aid,
which yes ideally wouldn’t exist, or at least wouldn’t exist as a matter of public
policy, but it sounds bad to complain about when we are wasting so much more money
on more destructive things. So I, also,
saw a need to be able to convert libertarianism into progressive speak.
This is why
I started this blog and group. I am hoping
that this blog and group feeds both needs. One the one hand, this blog is meant to be a
nexus for pro-liberty people with Democratic connections and sympathies. On the
other, it is meant to build common ground between libertarians and progressives
in order to increase understanding between them and to work together on issues
of common cause. I hope others will join
me.
Personal:
I’ve been interested in politics since I was 8 years old. I recently graduated from UW-Milwaukee with a
BA in philosophy. In my free time I enjoy reading, cinema, video games and a
good debate.
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