This is an argument about principles but I think the real issue is a disagreement over facts.
Democrat politicians use the government to forcibly shut down news websites for publishing stories Democrats don't like. (e.g. Letitia James and Vdare)
So if the argument is that Democrats are the side of the rule of law, most right-leaning libertarians are going to find that laughable.
That's a completely legitimate concern, and one that I share. The degree of collusion between government and companies like Meta and Google to silence voices that dissent from the party line is a deep concern to me. And as of late, that power has been exercised disproportionately by Democrats. Republicans talk a better game on issues of free speech, though I have my doubts about how deep this commitment is (see both CRT + Israel/Palestine). I think a lot of the issues here are structural rather than ideological, though perhaps this issue has been getting enough public attention that we'd actually see some movement on it under a Trump regime.
At any rate, my argument definitely isn't that "Democrats are on the side of the rule of law" and Republicans aren't. It's that in the choice between these two particular candidates, Trump poses a much greater threat to the rule of law than Harris. Both have some abysmally bad policies, but Trump poses a threat to fundamental democratic norms in a way that Harris doesn't. I think it's silly to worry that he's going to be a Hitler. But he might well be a Orbán or an Erdoğan. And that's pretty bad.
This is an argument about principles but I think the real issue is a disagreement over facts.
Democrat politicians use the government to forcibly shut down news websites for publishing stories Democrats don't like. (e.g. Letitia James and Vdare)
So if the argument is that Democrats are the side of the rule of law, most right-leaning libertarians are going to find that laughable.
That's a completely legitimate concern, and one that I share. The degree of collusion between government and companies like Meta and Google to silence voices that dissent from the party line is a deep concern to me. And as of late, that power has been exercised disproportionately by Democrats. Republicans talk a better game on issues of free speech, though I have my doubts about how deep this commitment is (see both CRT + Israel/Palestine). I think a lot of the issues here are structural rather than ideological, though perhaps this issue has been getting enough public attention that we'd actually see some movement on it under a Trump regime.
At any rate, my argument definitely isn't that "Democrats are on the side of the rule of law" and Republicans aren't. It's that in the choice between these two particular candidates, Trump poses a much greater threat to the rule of law than Harris. Both have some abysmally bad policies, but Trump poses a threat to fundamental democratic norms in a way that Harris doesn't. I think it's silly to worry that he's going to be a Hitler. But he might well be a Orbán or an Erdoğan. And that's pretty bad.