Because what will happen if everybody embraced populism?
'Three strikes' and 'zero tolerance' will be increased. Crackdowns on drugs and illegal immigrants will rise. Abortion and possibly homosexuality will be criminialised. This means that America's already insanely high incarceration rate will skyrocket - that alone will probably cause enough harm to entirely cancel out the benefits of national health care, even assuming this government magically manages a competent Canadian-style implementation rather than the likely US horrible private-public compromise (and remember you weren't prepared to grant such competence to the libertarians). Foreign powers will be alienated or outright antagonised; foreign aid may actually be increased but it will come with mandatory missionaries. You will be rolling back the rights of women, homosexuals and most likely racial minorities, and teaching an entire generation of children that this is right and proper (and that the earth is 6000 years old and that ultimate truth comes only from the bible). By putting religious nuts in power you will be giving US society as a whole a strong push away from science and towards fundamentalism; keep that up for long enough and the eventual endpoint will be another Iran (not Afghanistan; the US populace is educated and relatively peaceful), but with the world's largest military to go crusading with. I'm honestly not sure what they'd do about gun control; libertarians obviously hate it, but US fundamentalists aren't exactly fans of it either, so I wouldn't expect either of these parties to increase it.
In short: my atheism is wholly political.
Yeah, I always thought libertarianism and atheism went hand in hand. I mean think about it, why are a lot of libertarians atheists? I'm not sure about the rest of you, but at least 75% of the libertarians I've met are atheist, as opposed to the so-called "atheist left" which is like barely 10% of the liberal population. I bet if there was a survey on which political group was the most atheist, the percentage of atheists who are libertarians would be alot higher than liberals and conservatives, hell it might even be as high if not higher than socialists.
Why is this? Because the belief in an omnipotent all powerful being seems to correlate with the belief in an omnipotent all powerful state. Granted there are a few instances where there are godless super statist dictators who kill millions, but in the place of an invisible sky daddy they replace it with big government, which becomes their own "God". The worship of Big Government is another form of religion. Libertarianism as a philosophy replaces the need to be subject to any higher power, therefore the want to worship God or Government is scant. There are some libertarians who believe in a god or some other deity, but they still at least acknowledge that man has free will, in time a lot of them will inevitably conclude that the rules and regulations of their belief make it impossible for man to have total control over his own destiny.
As for populists on gun control, it's only a matter of time. A philosophy obsessed with national security will treat all potential suspects, whether it be foreign or domestic, with extreme cautiousness. This means that when the outcry of White Moral America against immigrants, Muslims, and gays takes over this government the time will come to disarm those "threats deemed by the Department of Homeland Security" of any and all firearms or other tools of "terrorism against the US government". You see, populists are for gun rights, only for those that agree with them. This is what Adolf Hitler did: He revoked all gun laws for the "Aryan German who has supreme liberty" but later on he banned gun ownership for the Jews. Granted, Hitler was a fantastic liar who said he was just "protecting the Jews", but a majority of Nazi Germany applauded his actions for disarming the "Jewish threat to pure German society". Many people assume that the only way a tyrant can be effective with gun control is if he bans all guns, they forget that the best statist policy is empowering a large segment of society with the right to unregulated gun ownership whilst all out banning those who oppose them. I've noticed that alot of my progressive friends are becoming more and more pro gun as alot of my neo conservative friends are becoming more and more pro gun control because they're falling for the same feel-good bullsh**t most progressives used to fall for until George Bush.
George W. Bush is the turning point for gun politics in America. I'm convinced that many liberals will look back on what happened in the Bush era and realize that there is not much difference between a state that doesn't believe people have the right to privacy and a state that believes people don't have the right to self defense. Likewise, many of the neo conservatives that fell hook line and sinker for Bush's disregard for individual rights for the sake of "national security" will inevitably conclude that the government should have the right to disarm those who may be labelled "threats to American freedom".
Now I'm in favor of unregulated gun ownership, I'm just saying that giving one group full gun rights while banning it outright for others is still gun control and is still a very statist policy.
