Libertarian Democrats
Civil liberties advocates, and people against large national debt, also often support the Democratic Party because its positions on such issues as civil rights and separation of church and state are more closely aligned to their own than the positions of the Republican Party, and because the Democrats' economic agenda may be more appealing to them than that of the Libertarian Party.
They oppose gun control, the "War on Drugs," protectionism, corporate welfare, governmental borrowing, and an interventionist foreign policy. Some civil libertarians also support the party because of their support of haebeus corpus for unlawful combatants, opposition to torture of suspected terrorists, extraordinary rendtition, warrentless wiretapping, indefinite detention without trial or charge, the Patriot Act, the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base and what they see as the erosion of the protections of the Bill of Rights.
Mike Gravel was perhaps the most well known member of this faction, before leaving the party midway through the 2008 presidential election cycle to seek the Libertarian Party presidential nomination.
The Democratic Freedom Caucus (DFC) is an organized group of this faction, although it prefers to use terms such as "freedom Democrats" or "freedom-oriented Democrats". The DFC does not use the term "libertarian" on its website, because while it advocates individual liberty and limited government power, it considers its economic policies to be more progressive than, for example, the Libertarian Party. This is especially so because the DFC is in the tradition which holds that land and natural resources are subject to fundamentally different economic laws than human-made products (such as machinery, buildings, etc.), so its view of economic freedom advocates somewhat different economic policies. Specifically, the DFC advocates in its platform a tax shift away from things like labor, (and the products thereof), and sales and towards spatial-locations and natural resources.
Another group, The Libertarian Democratic Caucus (LDC) seeks to build libertarian coalitions on issues regardless of political party. The Democratic Freedom Caucus tends to focus on taxation while the LDC targets civil liberty issues such as legalizing victimless crimes. The LDC is a Democratic organization, but it advocates working with the Libertarian Party and libertarian Republicans, such as the Libertarian Republican Caucus, on issues they have in common. Website: http://libertariandemocraticcaucus.org
Read more about this topic: Factions In The Democratic Party (United States)
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—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)