James Gillen

That’s a question I see a lot of liberals asking on social media. The gist of the query was probably best summarized by celebrity George Takei on Twitter September 24: “Libertarian Johnson supports TPP, fracking, Citizens United, and no min wage. How any Sanders supporters could back him is baffling to me. ”

Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Party presidential nominee, has gotten a lot more attention than most third-party candidates, often for the wrong reasons. But while never having much of a chance, Johnson cannot seem to be killed. Even despite his own best efforts. I had thought that this means that Johnson has learned from Donald Trump that any publicity is good publicity. But I have also said that the primary lesson of the Trump campaign is that voters will lean toward you if they identify with your own ignorance. It seems that others agree. The Christian Science Monitor had a recent article citing the polls on Johnson’s foreign policy gaffes.

“It isn’t that foreign policy doesn’t matter to young voters, although older people do place slightly more importance on it. … But the young also tend to view foreign policy differently. A 2015 study by the libertarian Cato Institute concluded that Millennials – defined here as those born between 1980 and 1997 – see the world as “significantly less threatening than their elders,” and policies drawn up to deal with foreign threats as less urgent. They’re also more supportive of international cooperation, and far less keen on the use of military force, the report found.  Both major candidates are considerably more hawkish than this standard. In comparison, Johnson’s floundering on foreign policy questions might seem relatively benign. ”

Indeed, his polls don’t seem to be going down. The same article says, “The lapse didn’t hurt him in the polls: for months, about 7 or 8 percent of likely voters have said they would support him.  His peak, of just over 9 percent? According to polling averages from RealClearPolitics, it came from Sept 8-14: the days immediately following the first incident.”

And more than that: On September 27, Johnson was endorsed by the Detroit News.  This was followed two days later by his most prominent newspaper endorsement to date, when the Chicago Tribune officially endorsed Johnson for president.

In context, what makes these endorsements that much more remarkable is that they were issued AFTER Gary Johnson started having his “Aleppo moments.”

I direct the reader to the Tribune article, because it’s one of the better opinion columns I’ve read on this subject and the 2016 campaign in general. It goes over why (despite his problems) Gary Johnson is a serious and qualified candidate for President, and why Clinton, despite her obvious superiority to Trump, has too many problems to endorse, addressing much the same points that I did earlier, but in much greater journalistic detail.

I’m sure these editors, like the rest of us, are perfectly aware that “third” parties don’t win elections, at least for president, because to get Electoral College votes you need to win at least one state, and third parties don’t have enough votes to do that (without effectively supplanting one of the other ruling parties) and they certainly don’t have those votes this year.  Knowing that, and knowing that other conservative papers have endorsed Clinton, I take these endorsements to be a “no confidence vote” in our political system from a center-to-Right community that is not “with Hillary” and also recognizes that the Republican Party, at least currently, is too broken to fix.

What then of all those lefty “progressive” Millennials who supposedly should be voting for Clinton? Why are they looking at the “neoliberal”, pro-market, pro-privatization Gary Johnson and preferring him to Hillary Clinton or even Jill Stein? It’s actually a good question.

Because if I were a “progressive”, I’d probably follow the logic of Bernie Sanders: Run for the Democratic Party nomination on the premise that they are a more effective vehicle for my ideas than the Green Party or an independent run, and if I win the nomination (unlikely given my lack of network in the party), that’s great and I can move on to the general election. If I don’t win (likely because of the structure of the party) I can still use my support base to agitate for reform of the convention platform- and at that point, I will endorse the eventual nominee on the premise that she now IS the most effective vehicle for my ideas.

Of course I’m not a progressive, but broadly speaking, the Democrats have done a fair job adapting to that community, to the extent that the party has experienced less internal dissent than the Republicans with their civil war of Tea Partiers versus “Republicans In Name Only”. But a lot of leftists do remember that Bill and Hillary Clinton didn’t seriously endorse gay marriage until after the Obama Administration did. With the Affordable Care Act, there were several opportunities to make the final project more “progressive” and closer to single-payer (like the public option) than the corporatist project that the ACA became. And the main reason it had to be compromised down was not to win Republicans, who were already a bloc against any Obama legislation but were not yet a majority, but moderate (often pro-corporate) Democrats. Not only that, Senator Barack Obama had promised as a candidate to roll back the security state that George W. Bush and Congress had created in the wake of 9-11, and his record in that area has been uneven at best. And if a young and woke Barack Obama has proved disappointing by “progressive” standards, they won’t be much more enthused by Hillary, who as Senator voted for an Iraq invasion that Senator Obama opposed.

It’s pretty clear that just from the standpoint of not making things worse, a center-to-Left voter ought not to choose Trump, or even to abstain from voting Clinton if she is the most realistic way of stopping Trump. But on economic issues at least, a lot of voters are seeing “progress” only in drips and drops, often despite and not because of the Democratic Party. This is why a lot of them supported Bernie Sanders in the first place. And the way that ended up is part of why they still don’t trust Clinton.

During the Clinton-Sanders run to the Democratic Party nomination, Clinton ended up winning a majority of states without counting superdelegates, although there were several states where results were close enough and tabulations were vague enough that the outcome was in doubt, and Sanders voters felt the need to investigate. The state of Nevada was the most prominent example. Under the caucus process, which is questionable to begin with, Clinton ended up winning a majority in Nevada, but that simply meant electing delegates to represent candidates at the county conventions, which would then send delegates to the state convention to vote at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. To the surprise of the Democratic Party in Clark County, more Sanders people showed to the Clark County convention than Clinton people, despite their pre-emptive suspension of the party credentials chairwoman for allegedly being pro-Sanders. So going into the State convention, Sanders people had a technical majority, except that this time the party got more Clinton people to show up. According to party rules, delegates had to be approved by two-thirds voice vote, which party chairwoman Roberta Lange ruled for Clinton. Even a Politifact article which was sympathetic to the party position conceded “trying to determine the outcome of a voice vote from a video of around 3,000 delegates is somewhat arbitrary to begin with. The only person with authority to call for a different voting mechanism is the convention chair: Lange.” And: “Volunteers circulating the petitions changing the rules abandoned their efforts after the permanent rules were adopted, saying they missed their chance to introduce them. Either way, any rule change would require a two-thirds majority vote which would be highly unlikely given the Clinton campaign’s public opposition to any rules changes.”

Now with me, I think that the September 26 debate proved Clinton to be far superior to Trump in both knowledge and temperament, while Johnson is getting problematic in both areas (although STILL better than Trump). But the liberals ‘shakin my head’ as to why Sanders fans would pick Johnson apparently didn’t remember that the lackluster past eight years inspired a “change” campaign with both Trump and Sanders after Obama’s “change” failed to give us much. They forget that some of us were physically present (and posting on social media in real time) about the “Democratic” establishment ginning the results at party conventions. And establishment liberals look at something like Secretary Clinton’s email issues (which the press has obfuscated as much as illuminated) and ask why she is considered “untrustworthy” as though not being forthright on email security was one isolated reason why she would be considered untrustworthy.

This undermines the final promise of the Sanders campaign: that even in the likely event that he lost the nomination, he would still have an influence. A party establishment that goes to such lengths to control results can’t be trusted to maintain its promises more than it absolutely has to. Yes, a lot of the dissenters are grousing because they’re “kids who don’t understand how the world works”, but I’m not sure that anybody who gets into American politics for the first time would come away thinking that it DOES work.

And a lot of those folks look around and if they’ve rejected the Green Party (because it has that much less organization, registration and exposure than the Libertarians) they look at the Libertarian Party and think, “okay, these guys aren’t really aligned with me on a lot of things, but they are with me on some things, and they seem like they would actually LISTEN.”

Not only that, but there’s the impression that Donald Trump could be a Central Casting villain recruited by a Democratic focus group to trigger all the buttons of feminist/liberal support networks, AND is so incompetent at running his own campaign that he might as well be throwing the race, and it just contributes to a sense that the fix is in.

Indeed, this resistance (subconscious or otherwise) to the establishment foist of Queen Hillary the Inevitable would explain not only why the anti-Trump majority hasn’t fully rallied around Clinton but why Trump remains competitive in the polls despite his kamikaze debate performance in September, not to mention despite objective reality.

 

 

On Wednesday, Chris Matthews at MSNBC deigned to have the Libertarian presidential ticket of Gary Johnson and William Weld appear at 7 pm Eastern time at a town hall at the University of New Hampshire. While the ticket did take some time to dispel a few strawmen (Johnson DOES believe climate change is man-made, and does believe we should have an EPA), events did not all turn out well. Not only was Johnson a bit… agitated (at one point predicting that Hillary Clinton could ‘press the button’ in a war), he didn’t seem to get Matthews’ question as to why marijuana is called dope (answer: it makes you a dope), and there was one point Matthews held a lightning round, promising “maybe you’ll make some news.” He asked, “who’s your favorite foreign leader?” Johnson said Shimon Peres of Israel – who has just died. Matthews specified it had to be a living leader. Johnson confessed, “I guess I’m having an ‘Aleppo moment’ in the former president of Mexico.” (Vicente Fox, by the way.)

So out of all the other things (good and bad) that came out of Johnson’s mouth, GUESS WHAT WAS THE ONE THING THE PRESS WILL. NOT. SHUT. UP. ABOUT.

In one respect, this just confirms it’s a bad idea for libertarians to appear on MSNBC (or as I call it, MSDNC), given that most of their hosts, including Chris Matthews and Rachel Maddow, love libertarianism the way an Orthodox rabbi loves bacon cheeseburgers, but really it confirms a point I’ve made here more than once: If a “third” party candidate wants to be taken seriously by the press, they need to ACT like a serious candidate and bone up. Again, you are NOT Donald Trump. People will not watch you do a spontaneous monologue from Ubu Roi on national TV and say, “Aw, that’s not fair, his mic was bad.”

Well, cheer up, liberals. If you’re a Clinton fan (or just someone who doesn’t want Trump to get elected and make his first executive order the restoration of droit du seigneur), Johnson’s apparent quest to destroy what credibility he might have had will greatly reduce the chances that a third-party vote will “spoil” a state for Hillary. But then, you won’t be able to blame Johnson if Hillary chokes anyway, so everything’s a tradeoff.

If however Johnson retains his previous poll numbers or actually increases them, it will mean that Gary Johnson has absorbed the primary lesson of the Donald Trump campaign, which is that people will vote for you if they identify with your ignorance. Either that, or Americans hate Hillary THAT FUCKING MUCH.

Meanwhile, the lesson I take from this, which the Libertarian Party should note for 2020, is that just because marijuana use should not be a bigger crime than armed robbery, that does not mean that you want a marijuana user to be your presidential nominee.

Just sayin’.

Well. That was definitely a thing. I’m not sure what kind of thing it was, but it definitely was one.

The first debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump was actually very exciting and almost substantial. Here’s my short take.

Clinton: After being constantly told to smile more, Clinton seems to have overdid the advice a bit, smiling even when it was quite obvious that she wanted to go full Louis Black on Trump’s ass. It was still a pleasant contrast to Trump in split screen with his (sorry, feminists) Resting Bitch Face.

What actually impressed me is where she went after Trump on all the issues where people have been waiting on the press to grill him for years. Like, how can he say that he knows how to manage money when he’s stiffed most of his contractors in Atlantic City? She did defend her record – not that well, but less defensively than she did with Matt Lauer. And in head-to-head comparison with Trump, it wasn’t that hard to look good.

Trump: Seriously, WHAT THE FUCK WAS WITH THE SNIFFING???

To me, Chump’s best moment was challenging Clinton on an email scandal where any other official in the same situation would have been at least censured. It was also a good ante to say he would (finally) release his tax returns IF Clinton releases the “33,000 deleted emails.” It’s just by this point, it comes off as Boy Who Cried Wolf. We already know how Trump reacts to a challenge. If the birther thing is any guide, if Hillary somehow releases deleted data, he’s gonna bullshit continuously for three more years regardless before finally conceding the issue in such a way as to blame the Democrats for him making himself look stupid in the first place.

The other problem being that half of what this guy says is what Freudians would call “projecting.” Trump says (with some accuracy) that Clinton and the Obama Administration didn’t stop the spread of ISIS, but his main policy seems to be hitting up allies like NATO and Japan for extra money to cover their treaty obligations or we’ll pull out of them. He said, “I also have a much better temperament than she has” – which might have been the biggest laugh line of the night. And then, apparently thinking that he’d hit on some magic mantra to invoke Clinton’s 9/11 collapse, he said, “She doesn’t have the Stamina. I said she doesn’t have the STAMINA. To be president, you have to have the STA-MI-NA.”

Yeah, whatever you say, Sniffy.

Sad thing (for anybody who has issues with the Democrats) is that Trump did, again, have the opportunity to score some serious points on Clinton, over the emails, over ISIS, and all he could do was bluster and insult without giving a serious answer as to what he would do better. But then when confronted with his own venality, Trump doesn’t rely on a Big Lie technique. He relies on a Golden BB technique. This is basically where you fire so much rapid-fire bullshit downrange that there’s no way anybody can dodge it all. The drawback is that people get a bit… tired of it. Like when Lester Holt said, “we need to move ON…” Whereas when confronted about her issues, Clinton downplays them. Like, “I did apologize for the term ‘superpredators’, let’s move on.” Or, “Yes, I voted for Iraq, and I helped President Obama stage a withdrawal. Let’s move on.” She has to do this, because apparently unlike Trump, she is aware that the press has this new Weird Science invention called videotape that they can use to compare what you just said to what you said then.

The media conventional wisdom was that Hillary just needed to be competent and professional and also pleasant in demeanor, while Trump just needed to speak words good not drool. My estimation is that Clinton somewhat exceeded expectations and Trump somewhat disappointed his.

Well, as it turns out, SINCE I went off on Gary Johnson’s “and what is Aleppo?” fiasco, he actually topped himself in a press conference where someone asked him to address global climate change and he said, “the long-term view is that in billions of years, the sun is going to actually grow and encompass the Earth, right. So global warming is in our future. ” Now, he’d said just before that, “I just argue that the result (of government spending on climate change) is completely inconsequential to the money that we would end up spending, and that we could direct those monies in other ways that would be much more beneficial to mankind.”  But that doesn’t really go into serious detail as to what should be done, if anything, and as we’ve seen, the same press that gives Donald Trump credit for walking on two legs and says that his not displaying symptoms of Tourette’s Syndrome is “professionalism” will dive on any comment Johnson makes and make that a Libertarian Straw Man the size of Godzilla.

What’s weird is that despite Gary Johnson turning himself into the San Diego Chargers of political candidates, he’s still at least 8 percent in a lot of polls.  Which is to say, he hasn’t gone up any, but he hasn’t gone down either. Seriously, why is that? All I can say for myself is that Johnson’s comments ought to be disqualifying to any serious candidate for president. The problem is that at least one of the two “serious” parties doesn’t have a serious candidate for president. And no, liberals, this isn’t a “both sides are the same fallacy.” I know damn well that President Clinton would not be the same as President Trump. President Hillary Clinton would not mount a giant gold-plated T on the roof of the White House. President Hillary Clinton would not make Wednesdays Hot Oil Wrestling Night in the Blue Room. And Hillary Clinton did not say she would turn her business holdings over to her offspring as a “blind trust” the way Trump did –  even though many people have pointed out that having family in charge of the assets is the opposite of a “blind trust.”

That in itself should be enough reason to make sure Donald Trump does not become President. Another would be the use of donations from other people to his Trump Foundation charity for private purposes, buying personal gifts, and making political contributions  – which is not just skeevy or unethical but outright illegal. Yet, after crashing in the wake of the two party conventions, Trump is now leading polls over Clinton in several key states like Florida. And liberals are casting about looking for someone to blame, from “third” parties to double standards to the idea that anyone not bowing down to Hillary is being “unrealistic” because their candidate isn’t “perfect.” In fact, that’s the argument being puked out in multiple sources.  Do an internet search on “Hillary Clinton is flawed” and you’ll get Daily Kos going “Cause, you know, I’m flawed. And you are flawed. And Bernie Sanders is flawed and Barack Obama is flawed and even Michelle Obama is flawed. But the difference between all of them and me–and probably you, is that they have all given their flawed lives to public service. And now, they are all working together in their inevitably flawed ways, to save all of us, and the whole world from a sociopathic narcissist. ” Or Jonathan Chait going “Hillary Clinton Is a Flawed But Normal Politician. Why Can’t America See That?” This is a bullshit argument, and the fact that liberals seriously seem to think that this is the best they can say is proof of how defensive and desperate they are. Do you really think that Chump voters aren’t aware by now that their guy is “flawed”? When a car dealer wants to sell a Hyundai Elantra, he doesn’t start out by saying that it’s not a Lamborghini. All we want is a car that will get us to work and back without blowing up within two years. That’s the problem here. The whole country, Left and Right, is sick of business-as-usual, “Normal” politicians, and constant war.  We don’t know if Clinton will go full neocon or let her paranoia turn her into a left-wing Nixon.

Look: If we’re going to be “realistic” here – which is what all the liberals who are desperately afraid that their Perfect Inevitable Queen may lose are always telling me to do – then we first need to dismiss both Gary Johnson and Jill Stein. Because whatever their merits OR flaws, neither has the voter base necessary to get a majority or even a three-way plurality of votes, or even win on a state-by-state level, which is what is actually required for the Electoral College system. (That’s why Gore didn’t get elected, remember?) Then you have to consider that Donald Trump declares himself more disqualified to be president with every public appearance he makes, because apparently he just can’t help himself. So you’re left with the conclusion that Hillary Clinton is the inevitable president after all. So that means going over her record becomes that much more important for navigating the next four years, not less. Things being what we’ve seen, the second Clinton Administration may get itself into yet another paralyzing and possibly impeachment-worthy scandal, and it won’t necessarily ALL be the fault of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy (TM) of Republican meanies.

 

Part of the issue is that when “first past the post” means that only two parties have a realistic chance of support, the issue of “can this candidate win?” takes almost exclusive precedence over what should be at least as important a question: “should this candidate win?” One of the problems with that mentality, as Hillary Clinton is discovering, is that not wanting Candidate B to win is not the same thing as wanting Candidate A to win.

In my example: I’d already decided that after George Herbert Walker Bush, I was never going to vote for another Bush on principle. (Even then, I didn’t realize that Bush Junior would make Senior look like Eisenhower.) That’s part of why I ended up supporting Libertarian candidates. But Michael Badnarik was appealing only insofar as he wasn’t Bush or Kerry. In 2008, the Libertarian Party nominated conservative ex-Republican Bob Barr while the Democrats picked Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton, and Republicans nominated Senator John McCain – who’d picked Sarah Palin as his running mate, the woman who turned out to be the John the Baptist to Donald Trump’s Cheeto Jesus.

With that decision, I knew I couldn’t go Republican. I also didn’t trust Bob Barr, being one of those social conservatives who turned me off to the Republican Party in the first place. So in 2008, I voted for Obama. And not just as a “lesser evil.” Indeed, I think that was the only time I voted for a candidate that I liked AND that had at least an even chance to win. He didn’t have to be a doctrinaire libertarian; I wasn’t a doctrinaire libertarian. He just had to be good on balance, and I didn’t think Barr or McCain were.

Over the next four years of Obama’s first term, he was disappointing on a lot of issues, certainly on civil libertarian issues like Guantanamo detentions and the “War on Terror.” On the Affordable Care Act, the Administration was, depending on perspective, either too socialist or not socialist enough. By 2012, I wasn’t too enthused about Obama but I thought the Republicans (under Romney-Ryan) hadn’t learned anything. On the other hand, Gary Johnson had gained the Libertarian nomination, and as a former New Mexico governor who had successfully run things with a strong Democratic opposition, he seemed like the kind of practical right-winger that Republicans used to promote and have since actively rejected. So I voted for him.

Now, I continue to have serious issues with the Obama Administration, but I would actually rather have Barack Obama serve a third term than have either Clinton or Trump, two dysfunctional, power-hungry creatures, be president of the United States. And while Gary Johnson, with his increasingly dippy statements, is no longer somebody I would support over Obama, I would STILL rather have HIM as President than Clinton or Trump. Because if Johnson doesn’t know where Aleppo is, Clinton helped make Aleppo the way it is, and Trump would end up making a real estate deal with the Russians to buy Syria dirt cheap for hotel properties.

There are reasons why it normally doesn’t pay to vote third party. Constitutionally, we have a “first past the post” election system, not a runoff or parliamentary system. Politically, even beyond the constitutional structure, we have an entrenched duopoly that has ginned up the laws to force any possible competitors through a prohibitive series of legal hoops to cut off even the diminished level of dissent that they would normally have. However when people who apologize for the status quo (usually liberals) tell the rest of us this stuff, they’re “mansplaining” this to people who already KNOW that going “third” party is unproductive, if only because gross vote nationwide does not translate directly to Electoral College votes.   (Which is why Ross Perot never got Electoral College votes.)  But what it really comes down to is that the third parties are “third” because those few people who do look them up find their platforms too immoral, or too impractical, or they like the platform but don’t think enough people (in their state) will vote with them.

The problem with using that logic to support the status quo, though, is that it still applies to one of the major parties if it becomes unpopular enough in a certain state. If you live in California, voting for Trump is just as much a vain, throwaway vote as voting for Johnson or Stein. But if you’re in Georgia or Texas, voting for Clinton would be the equivalent of a “third” party vote.

A point that Clinton apologists either do not address or actively dodge.

The problem with “but the other candidate is worse!” point is that it reveals that the binary logic of the two-party system has already reached its terminal point of absurdity. The expected result of such a system would be polarization. But polarization pays off only if the whole voter base is polarized, and in equal degrees. In practice, when that doesn’t happen, one party polarizes by purging all of its “squish” voters and candidates, which means that all the relatively moderate people who have been made unwelcome by their old party are refugees who get scooped up by the other party without them having to change their positions much at all – even if ultimately those new people are really not a good fit. So when the Republicans purged all their Jon Huntsman moderates, their Gary Johnson libertarians, their Colin Powell neocons, their RINOs, their get-alongs-to-go-alongs, they were essentially left with either the kind of people who actually take Trump seriously and those who know better but want the votes of the former group. And that latter group, like Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, are the next on the chopping block, whether they admit this to themselves or not. Meanwhile, all those other guys either became official Libertarians like Johnson, publicly decided to sit things out this time, or actively declared they were voting for Clinton. So these center-to-right people, by definition, are the kind of people who have already rejected the premise ‘You HAVE to vote for the Republican, because the Democrat is always worse!’ So why would you expect them to obey a faulty programming code just because you switched the nouns?

The people on the Right who accept that premise, like Ted Cruz, are the people who are trying to rationalize voting for Trump, even if (or especially if) they know better. They’re already rehearsing their rationalizations for 2020: “Look, our nominee may be a fire-breathing demon with acid for blood and maybe he just raped an entire orphanage including the nuns, but at least he’s not Hillary Clinton.”

So the irony is that if Trump DOES win the election, it will be mainly because the Republicans embrace liberal “logic” more than the Democrats do. Because the people in the middle that the Democrats need are the ones who reject binary partisanship, and the ones who embrace it are the wrong team.

What then of the largely “progressive” Millennials? You would think that they would accept the premise “You HAVE to vote for A because B is so much worse” if only because it is so undeniably true this time. But as I keep telling people,  it is not the Right that Hillary needs to worry about so much. The substantial complaints about her are from the Left. Hillary Clinton is not trusted, because she is not trustworthy. For Millennials and the Left, this does not have so much to do with Benghazi and emails as the fact that Hillary Clinton has had to be dragged kicking and screaming to every one of the “progressive” positions she currently (for the duration of expediency) holds. “Progressives” may be stupid about a lot of things, but not in this case. Again, even setting aside the constitutional and political reasons against voting for a third party, the reasons an individual doesn’t vote for one usually come to: The platform (or candidate) is immoral, the platform is impractical, or one thinks that the party won’t get enough votes. And while the Constitution effectively dictates that there can only be two effective parties, liberals do not (or will not) point out that they haven’t always been the same two parties in history. At some point in the cycle of absurdity, one of the two parties will be considered by the majority to be too immoral, too impractical, or too unpopular to get enough Electoral College votes. It’s just a question of which party that happens to first. So if enough people decide that Hillary Clinton is too immoral to support, or can’t get her platform through Congress, or think that she doesn’t have enough votes in their state…

Well, hi, liberals. Welcome to MY world. I don’t know why you’re not happy here, you did so much to create it.

Not like this is more than academic in my case. In recent weeks, polls in my home state of Nevada have brought Trump to competition or an outright lead over Clinton when after the conventions her margin in the state was about 60-40. So according to my own logic,  I have to vote for her if that trend keeps up. I still think that with the major “blue” states being near-impossible to dislodge from her bloc, Clinton will still ultimately win an Electoral College victory, but I still want to take my state away from Trump in order to prevent it from inflicting on itself a disgrace even worse than the Sharron Angle fiasco that we barely avoided not long ago.

Fuck this dumb-ass country and fuck my dumb-assed state. Because the ONE good thing about Trump getting elected would be the sense of Schadenfreude I would feel when the reality of Trump actually becoming president and having to take responsibility for something invokes a fit of whining, pants-shitting terror in the people I hate the most.

First and foremost of these being, Donald Trump.

I was going to go over some more thoughts in the wake of Gary Johnson’s self-sabotage, namely on the point that despite that apparently reduced threat, Hillary Clinton is still losing her lead over Donald Trump. But in the midst of all the, uh, excitement surrounding this campaign, I forgot that the first presidential debate is September 26, or next Monday. At such occasions, the media will often pose questions from members of the audience. As I plan to be washing my hair and/or laundry that day, I do not expect to be present for the debate, but I did at least want to pose these questions for discussion.

 

Donald Trump

1. Did you know that the Trans-Pacific Partnership deal does not involve China?
2. Even if we renegotiate bad trade deals with China and other nations, what would your administration actually do to bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States?
3. In March, you posted a memo to the Washington Post saying that you would use the “know your customer” provisions of the Patriot Act to prevent wire transfers from Mexican workers in America to their families back home, in order to pressure the Mexican government into paying for the border wall. Was this how you were actually expecting to get Mexico to pay for the wall, and do you honestly think their government will take you seriously?

4. In August 2015, you told a CNN interviewer that the secret to your success was that, quote, “I do whine because I want to win. And I’m not happy if I’m not winning. And I am a whiner. And I’m a whiner and I keep whining and whining until I win.”   Mr. Trump, I do not consider that a proper attitude for an ADULT, let alone the President of the United States, and that is one reason I will not vote for you, one reason of many.    What is your response to that statement?

Hillary Clinton

1. Secretary Clinton, I ask you the same question I asked of Donald Trump: What would your economic policies do to bring manufacturing jobs back to the US?
2. Secretary Clinton, when you did the “Commander in Chief” interview with Matt Lauer, you told the audience that we would never go back to having boots on the ground in Iraq. But several sources have confirmed that we do have special forces in both Iraq and Syria assisting against ISIS as well as official advisors to Iraqi forces, along with of course air support against the Assad regime. What would your policy be toward the region in general- specifically, what is your policy toward the Bashar al-Assad regime? Would you support it as the legitimate government of Syria or work to have him leave office? And in answering that question, how would your policy be supported by diplomatic and military means?
3. Mrs. Clinton, FBI Director James Comey, in his report to Congress on the issue of your email account as Secretary of State, said that you and your staff were “extremely careless” with emails you later said were “retroactively classified.” At the Commander in Chief event, an audience member said he was a naval officer who had held a top secret clearance, and had he not communicated information according to protocols, he could have been prosecuted. Yet you are saying the nation’s top diplomatic official is under lesser restrictions, and that the system your department was using was unclassified, which is why you were using a separate system. Can you at least understand that this issue- among others- is a major example of why so many Americans think you ARE secretive, you are suspicious, you are controlling, you can’t be trusted, and – more important than such opinion – that the system IS rigged to protect people at the top, like you?

——

Thank you, and God bless America.

 

Today (September 8 2016) Libertarian Party presidential candidate Gary Johnson actually got on MSNBC’s Morning Joe program, which would normally be great exposure, especially for a third party candidate trying to get into the national debates. But frequent panelist Mike Barnicle of The Daily Beast asked him at one point, what would you do about Aleppo? Johnson responded, “And what is Aleppo?”  And Barnicle said, “You’re kidding.” Host Joe Scarborough asked, rationally, “do you really think that foreign policy is so insignificant, that somebody running for president of the United States shouldn’t know what Aleppo is, where Aleppo is, why Aleppo is so important?” Johnson demurred, “I understand the crisis that is going on,” but at this point his stammering defense wasn’t convincing.

Never mind that Barnicle himself forgave Johnson’s flub,  apparently on grounds that not too many other people know what and where Aleppo is. For example, the reporters at The New York Times.  It doesn’t matter. You never get a second chance to make a first impression.

Not that I am much for public speaking myself, but if asked, I would probably say something like: “Aleppo is a humanitarian crisis. But it is a crisis because of Bashir Assad. As a libertarian, and believer in constitutional government, I think that America should only involve itself through humanitarian aid. But that may not be enough. If it is not enough, the president has to ask Congress if it is worth going to war against Assad. I don’t think it is, but I could make that case, because Assad’s war is the main cause of the refugee crisis that affects Greece, Turkey, and NATO partners further in Europe. If we withdraw, that situation will get worse, and Russia and Iran fill the vacuum. Any decision we make will have consequences, including the decision to do nothing. What we CANNOT do is do what Barack Obama did, which was to draw a line in the sand, and then do nothing when Assad crossed it. We cannot wash our hands of the thing and then act surprised when Russia brings Syria into their sphere of influence. And we cannot cluck that ‘someone needs to stop the bloodshed’ and then contribute to it without doing anything to conclude the war.”

One of the problems, if not the problem, with American politics is its tribalism. Rather than follow a party because it holds to your favorite policies, more and more, people change their policies to promote their party.  So I suppose one good thing about being a “third” party supporter whose candidates have slim to no chance of election is that we do not have to bend over backwards to pretend bending over backwards will help them. Unlike, say, Paul Ryan, we can call a spade a spade. So I’m glad that the libertarian community’s general reaction to Gary Johnson’s brainfart is about the same as everybody else’s.

You cannot ask to be on the same stage as the big kids and then, when asked a debate-level question, give a non-response that isn’t even Trump-level bullshit. This is why I have kept saying: If you’re in a third party you need to be able to answer the question of what you would do when you actually have power. Because not only are major-party candidates not sufficiently grilled on that matter themselves, the less serious the two major parties become, the more people will look for alternatives, and someday some journalist will actually come to you, Third-Party Candidate, and ask a serious policy question- in the expectation of a serious answer. And guess what? That someday was today. And as we have since observed, the media which pretended you didn’t exist no matter how much you jumped up and down for attention will give you ALL THE ATTENTION IN THE FUCKING WORLD as long as it causes the maximum embarrassment to you and your political movement.

Which goes to something else I’ve said:  Take the process seriously, so that people think you deserve to be elected. Because you will not be carried. There is a double standard against you. The system does not change, because various people, including the Beltway press and the Commission on Presidential Debates, make a living by not letting it change. You are PETA, and they are Colonel Sanders. Their people will be given every excuse, and they will damn you to Hell for one mistake. You are not “cool.” You are not Donald Trump. You will not be given credit for being the smartest paste-eater in the Special Ed class just because your daddy bought the school.

But speaking of which:

The biggest political news last night prior to the Johnson fiasco was the ultimately bigger fiasco with the “Commander-in-Chief Forum” hosted by a veterans’ organization and broadcast by the NBC networks. If there is anyone who has been more ridiculed than Gary Johnson, it is Today‘s Matt Lauer, who was hammered in real time by social media for being as hard on Hillary Clinton as he was easy on Donald Trump.  But while both Clinton and Trump were asked not asked about the city in Aleppo in particular, they were both asked about Middle East policy, and their answers were hardly more satisfying than Gary Johnson’s. I am not sure if that is consoling or depressing.

Hillary Clinton had to take questions from both military Right and pacifist Left members of the audience, and was at pains to stress why she had taken positions – especially on supporting the Bush Administration’s invasion of Iraq- that are now unpopular. While she now takes responsibility and regrets that mistake, she defended her more recent decision as Secretary of State to support the overthrow of Qaddafi in Libya, knowing that if the US did nothing, his regime would cause a humanitarian crisis. Which is a great point actually, but it doesn’t change the fact that, as with Iraq, we intervened and did not do a good job of helping to create a stable, effective and responsible civilian government for the country, even though the Libya rebellion was a spontaneous uprising and not an American takeover like the conquest of Iraq. And while Clinton defensively insisted that we will not go back to having boots on the ground, it’s been pointed out that the Obama Administration has already sent “advisors” and even Special Forces to help Iraq against ISIS on the Mosul front.

After that, Lauer started his interview with Trump, who boasted that unlike Hillary, he was always against the Iraq War – even though Clinton had warned Lauer minutes before that Trump was in fact in favor of the war at that time, and had said so in interviews with Howard Stern and others. And when Trump was sort of pressed on what he would do to defeat ISIS in Syria, Trump at first said he had a plan, but “I don’t want to broadcast to the enemy exactly what my plan is.”  Isn’t that like where Nancy Pelosi said, “we have to pass the bill so that we can find out what is in it“?  Oh, I forgot, it’s okay when YOUR party has the White House.

But that should give you an idea of how fucked America and the “international community” will be after this election: On the matter of Syria, Trump is doing his usual con man spiel, Clinton will “take responsibility” for her past policies but has no vision for how to resolve the conflict without getting us further involved, and Gary Johnson, the last hope of sensible people, has no grasp of the matter whatsoever.

The best a libertarian can say for Johnson – and this is charity – is that he is no more clueless than the two “respectable” party nominees, to say nothing of a superficial mainstream media that has decided for the rest of us which two candidates get to be “respectable” and which are beneath notice. But if you’re no less clueless than the establishment, that defeats the purpose of replacing it.

Having gone over the problems with the current two-party setup, it gets to the matter of why we need to even consider alternative “third” parties. Why not just wait out this bad patch? Why not hope the Democrats and Republicans will just get back to normal? Well, as I’ve said, part of the issue with a two-party “first past the post” system is that if there is no motivation for anyone to vote for other than the two current ruling parties, likewise those parties have no motivation to seek votes from anyone other than those who already take their most partisan positions. This is part of why America has one of the lowest voter-participation levels of any democracy, because participation of the majority doesn’t matter, only the participation of those who are motivated to show up.

The usual result of this in politics is a “polarization” where the two parties operate at extremes – the Democrats were peaceniks who wanted a strong welfare state, Republicans were warhawks who wanted to do away with the safety net – but the result of the last few election cycles has been something similar but not identical to what is meant by polarization. The drive to the extreme has taken place mainly on the Republican side, as practicality is deemed inferior to ideological purity. This is where we get internal insults among conservatives like “RINO” (Republican In Name Only) or “cuckservative.” This is the cycle that got Republicans from the mainstream Right to the Tea Party to the “alt-right”, where “alt” is short for “alternative” and thus “alt-right” means “an alternative to being right.”

In turn, the result of that internal purge is that the Democratic Party looks more attractive to “fiscally conservative and socially liberal” ex-Republicans, or even some socially conservative voters who can no longer keep up with the Right’s version of political correctness. Being an essentially pragmatist party, the Democratic Party can handle “political immigration” better than the Republicans can. This has caused criticism within the more left-wing parts of the Democratic Party because of their leaders’ willingness to accommodate Big Business while dragging their feet on “progressive” social issues, but then, the Democrats are the ones winning presidential elections, and thus setting the national agenda. Their own internal weaknesses have caused them to fall behind in Congressional elections and state governors’ races, but as the Republican Party continues to make itself less attractive, even that disadvantage may lessen.

So if you’re a “progressive” or a Democrat who disagrees with the direction taken by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee, you can still hope that the party’s gradualist approach will work in your favor, and that factors of social change will make the party take your position, as now seems to be happening with gay/trans issues.

If you’re a right-winger, whether libertarian or “True Conservative”, you have a much bigger problem, because “your” Republican Party doesn’t seem to be following the same direction as you whatsoever, and to the extent that it goes in any direction, it’s following the voters who are most likely to undermine the Party’s chances of electing candidates, and of getting legislation passed even if they do get elected.

And that’s because of a much deeper issue with what is called “conservatism.” The ideologues who bitch that hardcore, anti-abortion Republicans like John McCain and John Boehner are “RINOs” might be naive about what it takes for a political party to get things done, but they have a point. What IS it that Republicans want to get done? Why don’t they get serious about a constitutional amendment on abortion? What would promote American business, more freedom or more protectionism? If the Affordable Care Act is so horrible, what would they replace it with? Come to think of it, wasn’t Obamacare basically a national version of Romneycare in Massachusetts?

Conservatives don’t get anything done because they don’t know what they want. And they don’t know what they want because they don’t know what they ARE.

What does “conservatism” mean? What is it trying to “conserve? To the extent that the term has a common definition, it means not changing things, or not changing things more than required. The real problem here is that ultimately, conservatism is NOT a political philosophy. It is a governing approach TOWARDS a political philosophy. 

For example, when Mikhail Gorbachev became leader of the Soviet Union, he was not trying to get rid of Leninist Communism. He was simply trying to reform it socially with “glasnost” and with greater economic freedoms (which the Soviets had actually experimented with before Stalin). But in this he was opposed by those in the Communist Party elite who preferred the previous centralized and undemocratic system. At the time, political analysts referred to this hardcore faction as “conservatives.” But doesn’t “conservatism” in America mean the exact opposite of Marxism-Leninism? Yes, in America. Because the American philosophy is liberal representative democracy, or at least what used to be called liberalism. The Soviet philosophy was Marxism-Leninism. Conservatism in Marxist-Leninist states means protecting the ideology against “reforms” that dilute its purity (in this respect, conservatives succeeded in Cuba and failed in China). So already, the fact that “conservatism” in America means protecting an essentially liberal political project creates a contradiction. (Part of which is based on how the term ‘liberal’ was co-opted by the American Left in the 20^th Century before the Left decided to rebrand themselves as ‘progressives.’ More recently, though, right-wingers have been willing to say that things like opposing mandatory speech codes and religious dress codes are defenses of liberal Western civilization. Meanwhile, ‘progressives’ insist on using the term ‘neoliberal’ only in a pejorative sense, and often synonymously with the insult ‘neoconservative’, which demonstrates not only how vague and useless our political labels can be, but that the Left was probably not in favor of classical liberalism in the first place.)

Another contradiction is the idea of our free-market, classical liberal system being based in a religious conception of humanity, going so far as to being fundamentalist Christian. It is quite true that the Founding Fathers were if not Christians then at least deists who believed in God. It’s also true that their concept of God did not have much in common with the modern Republican one.  It’s even more true that the crowned heads of Europe were operating on a concept of Christianity that was that much more “conservative” than what Americans conceive of, and even then, the policies between Great Britain, Ancient Regime France, Protestant Prussia and autocratic Russia differed from each other greatly.

In short, even though religion is supposed to reflect an ultimate or universal value system, it is most often a subjective one that is applied subjectively. This is why the framers of the Constitution and Bill of Rights made “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion” part of the First Amendment. The very fact that our government does not base its policies on theology is why pluralism and tolerance of different religions is possible.

This is one reason that “liberalism” (meaning, the mainstream Left ideology that Europeans would call social democracy) largely avoids basing its modern philosophy in theology, even though many of the great liberals, from the Kennedy family to Dr. Martin Luther King, were also devout Christians. And also huge philanderers, but I digress.

Where Ayn Rand would say that the fundamental contradiction of conservatism is its insistence on conflating religious altruism with secular capitalism, I would say the issue goes deeper. Again, it is a matter of our political system applying labels long past their point of usefulness. Just as the tag “liberal” is now associated with a large amount of politically correct, state capitalist and ultimately illiberal ideas, “conservative” is a tag associated with a grab bag of ideas that ultimately cannot work together, because their only common point is that they were once thought of as traditional practices – often at different times – and therefore must be conserved regardless of whether they work now, or ever did work.

Which is where the “alt-right” and Trump come in.

According to the Wikipedia article, “The alt-right has no official ideology. The Associated Press stated that there is “no one way to define its ideology” and the BBC has called it an “amorphous movement”. “Commonalities shared across the loosely-defined alt-right include disdain for mainstream politics and support for Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.”

It seems like an incoherent mess fueled by resentment. And if that seems like a great description of Donald Trump, that may or may not be coincidence. Donald Trump is not exactly a theorist, but he just happens to be saying what many on the Right have been saying when not running in general elections. They’re against “crooked” politicians and financial elites, which is why they support Donald Trump, one of America’s most crooked financial elites. They don’t care so much about abortion or the welfare state, but they do care that immigrants are using the system. They don’t care too much about gays, but they’re saying that Muslims (even in assimilated families that have been here for generations) are a threat to American culture. And in regard to that culture, they’re willing to say the most sexist things about women, but still think they’re defending our values.

The secret to Donald Trump’s political success is that Donald Trump is what the average Donald Trump supporter would be if he had money.  That’s why he won against people who had lots of campaign funds and more conservative credentials.  He prevailed because he seized upon an opportunity to make personality and celebrity bigger factors than consistent ideology.  But that opportunity didn’t just arise out of nowhere.

Conor Friedersdorf had an excellent column in The Atlantic where he talked about how one of Rush Limbaugh’s own listeners (along with a columnist at RedState) called him on supporting Trump even when it was clear to many he would flip-flop on immigration, even when Rush said “I never took him seriously on this!”

But that’s something I picked up on a while ago. Back when I was still conservative enough to listen to Limbaugh’s show, I remembered that right up to the last week of Hillary Clinton’s Senate campaign against Rick Fazio, he was predicting that she would find some reason to back out. Or that she would end up losing. Of course, she didn’t. I distinctly remember the day after the 2006 midterm elections (when Democrats under President George W. Bush regained the House) when Limbaugh angrily confessed,  “I feel liberated. … I no longer am gonna have to carry the water for people who I think don’t deserve having their water carried.” Heck, way back in 1992 (when Rush had a TV show) I remember a TV Guide cover with a blurb on an article, “Rush Limbaugh: I’m so-o-o happy Clinton won!”

Other people have made this point, but whereas there used to be serious intellectual discussion in media like National Review, that has mostly degenerated to presenting politics as pure entertainment, with recognizable good guys and bad guys- much like pro wrestling- and the consequences of political action are not dwelled upon. In fact, we can see in Congress that Republicans (in direct contrast with the ‘Contract With America’ era) are not at all interested in initiating action or shifting the terms of political debate, only reacting against whatever President Obama wants, even if, as with Obamacare, it was largely their idea to start with. Even better, rather than be a party engaged in the political process (and thus either have the enemy take credit for your best ideas, or win a majority and actually have to take responsibility), always be a party in opposition so you can stoke resentment and righteous indignation. The Republicans have become like the hunter in that joke where the bear pokes the hunter in the shoulder and goes “You didn’t come here for the huntin’, didja?”

It’s almost as if a large part of the conservative base was conditioned by experience to conclude that politics is worthless, and every politician is a liar, and even when they aren’t, the system won’t let them get anything done.

Why not then vote for an outright joke? Why not vote for a candidate whose core dogmas (like ‘we’ll build a wall and get Mexico to pay for it’) cannot be taken seriously, even by conservative standards?
It’s basically the reason pro wrestling ate boxing’s audience: Everybody knows the fight is fixed, but they at least want it to be entertaining.

So if Trump has a “softening” on his core immigration policy,  and even Mr. Tell It Like It Is turns out to be a lying politician, then so much the better. If Republicans continue to follow him when they know he is lying, then their self-deception is just emulating their new role model.
Or as W.C. Fields put it, “you can’t cheat an honest man.”

Conservatism today is an essentially unserious, even nihilist approach to politics, that at worst regards the democratic process as inherently flawed compared to direct rulership by a strongman,  even when the strongman in this case is not very strong, intelligent or competent.

The Republicans cannot be called the GOP – Grand Old Party – any more. They are now the POT. Party Of Trump. (Which would make his supporters the POTheads.)

But in retrospect it’s not very surprising that things turned out like this, even if it is pathetic that Republican elites seem surprised that their racket got taken over by somebody who’s better at it than they are.

This attitude has been going on for quite some time, at least by the start of the second Obama term. The Republican Party has been Trump’s party for years. They were just waiting for him to show up.

 

 

 

 

 

So to the matter of the Libertarian Party. One big reason I support them as an alternate choice in an obviously broken two-party system is that they’re the only minor party that has enough organization in each state to have a decent chance of getting a presidential candidate on the ballot in all 50 states, implying enough organization to get “down ballot” candidates as well. This means they cover my previously discussed position for a serious party, namely Have a Party.  And to some extent it covers the point of Ask What You Can Do For Your Party, including how to make a party more feasible as a choice on your state ballot or the national ballot.

There are a few other areas where I need to speak to the Libertarian Party directly. Because again, this is not only the party I most agree with (practicality aside) but is in the best position to take over from one of the existing parties. But that requires coming to grips with some things.

First, the dysfunction of the Republican Party is such that maintaining the status quo is no longer feasible. It is going to continue to huckster votes from reactionary groups and continue to be ineffective on a Congressional level (if for no other reason than that the various media and interest groups supporting the Republicans garner more interest when it’s a party in opposition), meaning that the Democrats will be the only ones in position to set the agenda for the government. I postulate that the Libertarian Party is going to have to become a major player whether it wants to or not. And that raises a serious question: Do we really want to be a major party?

Because some people actually watched the C-SPAN coverage of the Libertarian national convention, and they are not quite sure.  (I’m going to give a pass to the fat bearded guy who decided to strip to a speedo and break out in dance. Apparently the freak-flag contingent of Libertarians were concerned that we weren’t keepin’ it 100.) More specifically, national news audiences got to see the five candidates up for the party’s nomination take questions on such issues as whether the government should issue drivers’ licenses.

To me, Libertarians’ radical skepticism on government is simultaneously the best and worst thing about the movement. It’s good insofar as the country in general is not skeptical enough about government (in the wake of 9-11, the TSA got shoved down our throats, and there is a serious contingent of people who would pass Nuremberg-type laws against Muslims for the sake of ‘national security’) but even skepticism has its limits. Plus, apart from the question of whether a Libertarian candidate should fight and die on the hill of getting rid of drivers’ licenses, drivers’ licenses in the US are issued by the State, not the Federal government. This is nothing that the president of the United States would have anything to do with. If one wants to fight on that hill, you do it on the state level of office, not the presidential level. This is another case of a “fringe” party coming up with an idea with no grasp of how the political system actually works.

Same with whether it violates religious liberty if a conservative Christian baker (and I had no idea there were so many of them) is commissioned to make a cake for a gay wedding. (What would the Left say if this was Ernst Rohm and this was a gay Nazi wedding cake?) Those rules are usually determined on a state level. When the Supreme Court gets involved (and that IS a matter where the President’s choices apply) they usually rule that between two groups, the government should get involved only where Group A has no alternative but to get services from Group B. But even here, this betrays a lack of grasp about how the system works. The Libertarian nominee’s opinion on gay wedding cakes has no more bearing than President Obama’s opinion on North Carolina’s anti-trans bathroom law. I presume he’s against it, and it doesn’t matter. BECAUSE IT’S A MATTER FOR THE STATE TO DECIDE. Not only that, asking what the nominee’s opinion should be on a small-scale subject falls into the statist mentality of thinking the government at all levels has to be involved in everything. I thought that’s what libertarians were against.

This is all just picking at the margins while the two-party system is eating itself, and voters have NO serious alternative to it. The Libertarian Party could be that alternative. What is the point of having the level of organization that we have (and as Amateur Hour as it seems, the LP has a lot more resources than the Greens, who are the only other party even trying to raise a profile) if we aren’t going to get into government?

Taking the process seriously gets back to the point that a “third” party has to do more than vanity races for President. Just as there are “down ballot” races, there are down ballot issues that are only decided at the state and local level. If you want to have a say on those issues, you need to put resources into electing candidates for local and state offices. For one thing, issues like those mentioned above are dealt with in legislatures and governors’ offices during the years when there are no presidential elections, and if you have a “third” party actually in a bloc of a legislature getting things done, voters can make a better informed decision as to whether it’s worth voting for them on a national level. You still need to have people running for President in order to have a national profile, but without effective representation, having a profile doesn’t matter much. Ask the Reform Party.

This comes to a bit of advice that in retrospect I really should have put in the “Part 1” article. A politician, no matter which party, really needs to ask himself a question to set priorities. One might even call it a categorical imperative.

That question is: “What would I ACTUALLY DO if I had political power tomorrow?”

Hypothetically, put aside that a “third” party President isn’t going to have any support in Congress. This applies to mutually gridlocked Democrats and Republicans too. Assume there was enough support for your agenda to get it passed. What IS your agenda? For example, Republicans keep trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). What would they replace it with? If they don’t want to replace it with anything, have they considered that the public dissatisfaction with the status quo ante was why the ACA got passed in the first place? This is something that any anti-statist party (as the LP is and the Republicans falsely claim to be) needs to consider. Government expands because there is a demand for it. Raising objections to a new government program (such as, the reason we didn’t just get Medicare For All is because we can barely afford Medicare in the first place) doesn’t negate the demand, and the demand needs to be addressed, and if it could be better addressed by the private sector, it raises the question of why the private sector isn’t doing that.

Overall, I think the Libertarian Party under Gary Johnson and William Weld is trying to take the steps toward being a truly national party. Calling the party “fiscally conservative and socially liberal” is (to me and other libertarians) a superficial branding of what liberty means, but I think it is intended to appeal to a lot of people who would otherwise be sympathetic but haven’t realized it- in particular the centrist and relatively liberal Republicans who were effectively pushed out of their party but are ultimately not a good fit with the Democrats. This is where there is real potential for growth.

But we still need to address the elephant in the room, which is the elephant not just for Libertarians, but the entire country.

In a New Yorker article  that was otherwise a sympathetic and balanced profile of Johnson and Weld, Ryan Lizza gets to a scene where Johnson said the LP’s lack of “diversity” (meaning ethnic and gender diversity) would not become a problem as the Libertarian position became better known. “A few minutes later, an aide directed him to a room in the convention center that was named for Harriet Tubman. “Who’s Harriet Tubman?” Johnson asked. (After the aide reminded him who Tubman was, Johnson recalled that she will appear on a new twenty-dollar bill.) ”

That is just not going to work.

What both libertarians and “True Conservatives” are going to have to realize about how the Grand Old Party became the Party Of Trump is that the Republicans did not get votes because of a free-market (and ostensibly free-speech) platform but in spite of it. The Republicans did not get votes despite a reactionary social agenda but because of it. Donald Trump is finding that appealing to xenophobia and loutishness sold as “political incorrectness” wins primaries of Republican voters (if only by plurality) but it is losing with general election demographics. In this he is not an outlier but just the ultimate expression of where the Republicans have been headed for quite some time.

What this stuff comes down to is prioritizing getting votes (which every party needs to do in the short term) or getting votes for the right reasons, because that affects how the party operates in the long term. Barry Goldwater might have had a principled objection to the Civil Rights Act, but he and the rest of the Republican Party decided to oppose it (even when a lot of Republican Congressmen ended up voting for it) in order to coup the Democrats’ white, mostly Southern and largely prejudiced base. The fact that Goldwater’s main success in 1964 came in “Deep South” states caused Richard Nixon and other Republicans to further develop the “Southern strategy.” This had some pretty strong short-term benefits, but as America has become less white, the drawbacks have become more inescapable.

If one simply doesn’t know who Harriet Tubman is, that might simply be cluelessness towards the black community rather than malice, but after generations of “dog whistle” politics, it’s not clear whether black voters will see that as a distinction that makes a difference.

The thing is, one can make a pretty strong case that the racial struggle in America is intertwined with the need to promote liberty. The abolitionist and anti-segregation movements were based on addressing the central contradiction of a country that fought for the “liberty” of plantation owners to keep slaves (even as our British mother country banned the practice long before we did) all the while saying “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Many of our government’s anti-liberty policies, such as targeted anti-immigration laws and the roots of our current War on Drugs, are based on naked appeals to racism and to association of “marihuana” and other drugs with undesirable races. And again, we are now obliged to take off our belts and shoes at courtrooms and airports (which would not have stopped the 9-11 hijackings and will not stop terrorism now) because a bunch of Saudi Arabians got together to blow up American landmarks (and it’s not like the US did anything about that government either).  This is a point that Libertarians can use to seize the initiative in discussion of social issues, which will only grow in prominence in the next few years.

In this regard I would direct the reader toward the Movement for Black Lives site https://policy.m4bl.org/ The six-point agenda presented is not intended to appeal to right-wingers. There are a lot of politically correct buzzwords like “collective” and “economic justice.” But it cannot be accused of lacking in detail. And there are some points where it can intersect with libertarian policy, in particular the concepts of making law enforcement and all levels of government more accountable to local communities. At the very least, even if you don’t agree with such opinions (and I’m not sure I do) you need to know what other people are thinking rather than just assume what they’re thinking or what their “rational best interests” are. Maybe that way you’ll have a better chance of getting them to listen to you. Assuming that’s what you want.

The Libertarian Party is in best position to take advantage of a gap that the Republicans have created by abandoning political responsibility. Failing to seize that opportunity will just make the government that much more dysfunctional as it tries to rationalize abnormality as part of the system. And that’s because the ruling parties have just assumed the power to rule without questioning what their principles of government are. We don’t have that luxury. There’s no point in saying you would do better than the other guys if you’re not going to. And if you can’t present a better party to the public, you won’t even get to try.

In my last post I said I would address how to make third parties more viable. What we need to consider is that the problem has at least two aspects, both stemming from the fact that the Founders of the republic were either against the party politics of the British parliament that preceded them, or did not consider the development of party politics within this country when writing our Constitution. The first President, George Washington, is often quoted in his Farewell Address: “The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party dissention, which in different ages & countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders & miseries, which result, gradually incline the minds of men to seek security & repose in the absolute power of an Individual: and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of Public Liberty.   Without looking forward to an extremity of this kind (which nevertheless ought not to be entirely out of sight) the common & continual mischiefs of the spirit of Party are sufficient to make it the interest and the duty of a wise People to discourage and restrain it.”

In large respect, Washington has been proven right. But again, this is a problem with two aspects. First, the structure of our federal election system is what is called “first past the post” and only accounts for one winning candidate with no such thing as proportional representation based on returns, or a runoff between leading candidates even when the first-place finisher has less than 50 percent of the vote. For these reasons the “rules as written” discourage more than two political factions within American government. At the same time, this fact encourages two factions to exist. This is an issue that had not been considered in the original Constitution and had to be partially rectified early on with the Twelfth Amendment, which changed the original rule that the second choice of the Electoral College became Vice President, which in practice meant that the opposition candidate automatically became part of the President’s cabinet. The standard from the Twelfth Amendment onward effectively acknowledged the practical reality of partisan politics.

The other aspect of the problem is that while the “two party” setup is formally created by our Constitutional structure, a very large reason for the lack of “third” party success is the creation of laws by our current ruling parties (Republicans and Democrats) to put new or smaller parties under restrictions they themselves are not under. Another issue is that an outlier’s access to the system depends on factors that are technically not under control of the government or the duopoly, but nevertheless serve the status quo. For instance, the Commission on Presidential Debates requires that candidates poll at 15 percent in five national surveys leading up to the three scheduled debates, and that they have enough spots on State ballots to potentially win an election. This qualification has been cited as arbitrary, not least because polling at that level requires a certain amount of media exposure which third-party candidates cannot get because they are not covered by mass media- for example, at debates. It is in fact a barrier that the Greens and the Libertarian Party are taking legal action against.  Prior to the CPD format, televised presidential debates were sponsored and managed by the League of Women Voters (including the 1980 debate with independent John Anderson) but following the 1984 election, the two ruling parties decided to create a debate system under their purview (leading to the creation of the CPD in 1987) and the League cited the new Commission format as their reason from withdrawing their sponsorship of debates since 1988.

With these factors in mind, in this post I intend to address the general issue of how to make any given third party more likely to achieve political goals, such as getting candidates elected. Assuming that’s what you want.

First off, the step that a lot of people bypass:

Have a Party. A lot of people are only considering supporting a third party because they just feel jilted by one of the two major ones. Ultimately they’d rather be in their “home” party when they consider the alternatives. For instance, a Republican conservative might refuse to vote Republican this year because of Donald Trump. You’d ask, “what about Gary Johnson? He’s pro-gun and pro-capitalism.” The Republican would go “he’s also pro-abortion and pro-marijuana.” You’re going to have to accept that going third party will involve at least as much political compromise as working with one of the major parties who were at least until recently trying to appeal to the largest possible voting base. If you’re a conservative who doesn’t like abortion, your most feasible choices are still going to be either Johnson, Hillary Clinton (who is that much more pro-abortion than Johnson) or Trump, whose opinion on the subject seems to be up in the air, and whose most likely first decision will be to appoint his favorite horse the president pro tem of the Senate. (No, wait. That wasn’t Donald Trump who did that, that was Caligula. Sorry, I keep getting them confused.)

Conversely, you could be on the Left and observe that the Democratic Party is in theory more likely to implement “progressive” goals than the Libertarians (who are generally opposed to them) or the Greens (who lack the numbers to vote in their agenda). You may also have observed that in practice the Democrats are very likely to sacrifice what you consider a valid goal for the sake of getting re-elected. You may also have observed that however many political concessions the Democrats made to progressives at their convention, they were rather keen to control primaries for the Clinton team even when the ultimate outcome of Hillary’s nomination was no longer in doubt. You have to weigh whether making the “sensible” choice will actually get you what you want politically. The reason so many people were voting for Sanders in the first place and why Jill Stein’s Green Party has been getting so much attention in the aftermath is the suspicion that the Democratic Party will not achieve progressive goals, or will achieve too few of them at too high a cost in other areas (like foreign policy).

So if you really believe that neither of the two major parties is sufficient, you need to decide what you want your party to accomplish. That means working backward. Ultimately, rather than engaging in a vanity-project presidential race (which even if successful will mean that your President is an orphan with no support in Congress for his agenda), in the long term you need to elect people in “down ballot” races who will actually pass that agenda. That will also mean electing people on a local level. But in order to start electing people on the lower levels, you need to go to the next step:

Ask What Your Party Can Do For You. Specifically, if one is going to focus on the city or state level of government, what do you think your party could accomplish or emphasize that mainstream parties are not focusing on? (Keeping in mind, your group could get its ‘foot in the door’ working on nonpartisan races.) The Libertarians might focus on protecting marijuana rights at the local or state level of law enforcement. Greens or other “progressive” movements would probably focus on making law enforcement in general more accountable, especially on issues of how laws are enforced in different ethnic neighborhoods. (Which is also something that Libertarians could investigate.) Have a candidate or group platform, sort of like the Contract With America, that people can point to as a statement of what you’re going to do, and through what methods it’s going to be done. The next step at that point is:

Ask What You Can Do For Your Party. This is where you need to do the usual things that political activists do. You raise money, specifically to raise awareness of your party and candidate so people actually vote with you. But at this stage you also need to address the aforementioned challenges that the system deliberately puts in the way of outlier ballot access. Concurrently to actual party politics and running individual candidates, you also need to create and sponsor ballot initiatives to remove state and/or local rules that are set up to handicap your candidates.

And frankly, this also means doing some homework on how the system works. For example, Aaron McGruder, creator of the comic strip The Boondocks, often tells the story of how the Green Party had noticed his politics and asked him to run for President in 2004. He had to point out to them that at that time he was not 35 years old and thus not eligible to run for President.

Don’t be that party. Basically, take the process seriously enough to where a decent number of people think that you deserve to be elected. We can’t all be Trump.

Given that the Libertarian Party is the “third” party which is the closest to getting its act together as a challenger to the ruling factions, in my next post I intend to offer some more focused advice to them from a libertarian perspective.

“So… what do you call this political party?”

“The ARISTOCRATS!”

Hi.

I missed posting last week, largely because you couldn’t go 3 hours without some sudden and different news event to further decrease one’s faith in the survival of civilization, so there really isn’t much point trying to keep up with current events, at least not directly.  But I had mentioned in an earlier post that I would address the subject of whether it makes sense to vote for a third party in this election (this election in particular, but the question still needs to be addressed in general).

Now if you follow me on Facebook you probably know I am a member of the Libertarian Party. Now that produces some reactions. Like, “Who?” Or, “there’s no point, nobody’s gonna vote for them.” Well, that’s BECAUSE nobody votes third party. Once people do, that’s no longer the case. Saying “third parties don’t win because nobody votes third party” is like saying “Nobody drives in New York, there’s too much traffic.”

Why would I vote for the Libertarian Party (LP) or any other third party, when it doesn’t make any sense? May I ask, doesn’t make sense compared to what? Compared to voting for Trump? Compared to voting for Clinton, who cannot do the easiest thing in the world- convince people she’d be a better president than Trump? One might say, I believe BECAUSE it is absurd. Doing the supposedly sensible thing is what has gotten us to this point. Voting for centrist “sensible” Democrats has not addressed the concerns of “progressives” on labor and trade issues. Voting for “sensible” and respectable Republicans has not stopped them from sotto voce endorsing racist, sexist and anti-intellectual influences, leaving them with no immune system or intellectual response to a demagogue like Trump who can give the target audience the raw meat they want with a less apologetic presentation than (say) Mitt Romney. Doing the sensible thing is not getting results. At least not good results.

This may explain the confusion among a lot of leftists who wonder, with good reason, why Bernie Sanders fans disappointed with his endorsement of Hillary Clinton are thinking about voting for Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson, when Johnson supports the Trans-Pacific Partnership (which Sanders opposes and Hillary 180’ed on), doesn’t support a minimum wage (at all) and doesn’t go along with the economic goals of “progressives.” This is because of the appeal that both Sanders and Trump have to a lot of people who don’t agree on much else- these candidates are (or present themselves as) on the outside of the political system that is allowing their living standards to stagnate or decline. The main thing that Johnson has in common with Sanders (and in opposition to Trump) is antagonism to the corporate-welfare system that Trump profits from as a real estate developer and the Wall Street establishment that made the Clintons rich on “consulting” fees.

It’s also true that (as compared to the leftist Green Party) the LP is able to register on the ballot with all 50 states, so however fantastic or unrealistic it is to vote for something outside what the duopoly is providing, the Libertarian Party is still the most organized and realistic alternative if you just can’t vote for Clinton (or Trump).

Nevertheless, there’s a lot of resistance to the idea of voting third-party, at least on the Left. A huge reason for the fear and loathing of Libertarians and other “third” parties is the idea that they are “spoilers,” that is, that they will take just enough votes from the ‘right’ candidate to make sure that the ‘wrong’ one gets elected (this from the same people who say that third parties will never amount to anything because ‘nobody votes for them’). The primary example that keeps getting spit out is the fact that the number of people who voted for Ralph Nader’s Green Party in Florida in 2000 was within the margin to elect George Bush in that state, and thus win the Electoral College for Bush instead of Al Gore. Except that if the margin that won Florida for Bush was 537 votes, and the vote for Nader was 97,488, Libertarian candidate Harry Browne was 16,415. The vote for Reform Party conservative Pat Buchanan was even more, 17,484. Should we not blame the right-wing candidates for taking votes from Bush when fewer votes were needed to make a difference on the Right than the Left?  Should we not consider that in Al Gore’s home state of Tennessee, Nader got only 19,781 votes, and the margin of Bush over Gore in Tennessee was 80,229 – in other words, not enough for the spoiler to spoil George Bush winning Al Gore’s home state, without which Florida would have meant diddly squat?

I say this because in state races where the Republican lost because there was a certain percentage of Libertarian or US Constitution Party votes on the Right, the talk-radio crowd would always blame us for “spoiling.” That’s what tends to happen when you’re in one of the two parties that have engineered the laws to make sure that you’re the only ones who have a chance of getting elected: You think that you don’t have to earn your votes. So when the people who “should” vote for you don’t, you tend to get snippy (as Al Gore might say).

Given that most of the Libertarian-hate is on the Left, despite the fact that even Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney have made noises about considering Gary Johnson as an alternate vote, despite Trump being so loathsome that numerous Republican insiders have agreed that Hillary is the more sensible choice, liberals and Democrat-aligned “progressives” are pretty clearly broadcasting a fear that the third party vote is going to take just enough votes from Clinton to lose the election for her. In which case I say the same thing to Democrats that I said after Bush vs. Gore: IT’S NOT OUR FAULT THAT YOUR CANDIDATES SUCK AND NOT ENOUGH PEOPLE VOTE FOR THEM. And it certainly wasn’t the fault of Sanders fans that the establishment Democrats did what the respectable cloth-coat Republicans usually do, and voted in the old and dull candidate just cause “it’s their turn.”

There’s also a point that’s not being considered by the Left: It is a net negative when a liberal-left voter who “should” be with Hillary goes to another party or stays home. But it’s a benefit to them if a right-wing voter who “should” be with the Republican candidate votes for Johnson or another third-party candidate. Even if conservative-libertarian dissidents stay home, those are people not voting for the “wrong” candidate.

I’m actually starting to believe that the Libertarians might be a more realistic choice than Trump this year. No, seriously. I mean, yes, hardly anybody knows who they are, and of those who do, half utterly loathe their political philosophy, but unlike Trump and Mike Pence, Gary Johnson and William Weld aren’t going out of their way to actively piss off everybody who isn’t them.

There’s also the overlooked point that to actually join the Libertarian Party, you have to sign a pledge (https://www.lp.org/membership) saying that you reject the initiation of force as a primary means of achieving political or social goals. To the extent that anybody acknowledges this at all, it might be another reason people don’t join the LP. On the other hand, having a core principle that one has to sign onto is something the Republicans could have used to weed out both a flim-flam man like Trump and the kind of people who vote for him. But then, so would asking people to fill out a form asking “Can you spell your own name accurately?” and “Do you know what the word ‘accurately’ means?”

I frankly don’t think the Libertarians are ready for “prime time” yet. However in a campaign where Donald Trump is the nominee for a major party, it’s clear that being ready for prime time is totally irrelevant to being elected. At the same time, to improve upon the status quo, rather than merely replace it, a party ought to have a plausible plan for what it is going to do when it gets in power, which is questionable in the case of Democrats and not at all true with Republicans.

But back to Mike Pence.

To get back to the question of whether one should vote third-party this year, we need to exercise both idealism and pragmatism, and consider all factors.

First off, if you are voting for Clinton (or Trump, for that matter) understand that you are throwing away all moral considerations in doing so. Whatever Faustian bargain you think you are making for the “greater good” is worthless because Clinton cannot be trusted to hold to a commitment that interferes with her political survival goals, and Trump can’t be trusted because he is both too slimy and too ADHD to understand what a “commitment” is.

Voting for the lesser evil is still voting for evil. At best, it is not stopping or reversing the decay. It is merely choosing to let the decay proceed at a slower rate than it would with the More Evil party. However, this is constructive only if one is trying to develop a better alternative in the long term. If you are not looking for or not working for a better choice for future elections, you’re just lying to yourself.

Having said that, operating on pure pragmatism, between the two major candidates the final question is: Who do you want in charge of the nuclear launch codes- an experienced politico with Machiavellian survival skills and self-preservation instinct, or the spoiled little rich brat who doesn’t know which end of the fork to use?

Thus if one still chooses to operate within the binary logic of the system, Hillary Clinton is clearly superior to Donald Trump- if only in the sense that the country may survive her long enough to flush out the political system. But if that system needs to change, we still need to have a practical means of doing so, and work towards that goal. And thus, we still need to grow support for at least one “third” party.

The strongest criticism against supporting a third-party movement in the United States has to do with the “first-past-the-post” system in most of our elections, federal elections in particular. If there’s no second prize for losing, there’s certainly no third prize. Thus, if you’re not already in one of the big two parties, there’s not any real chance of winning, unless perhaps there was a runoff system where multiple candidates could run in a preliminary election and then a few months later the two top candidates run in the general election.

Changing the election process is something that has to be done in the long term anyway. The problem with that is that it can’t be done in the short term, for the same reason you can’t get term limits: In order to pass the laws to change things in the long term, you have to rely on the same group of politicians who passed the current set of laws, and have no motive to lose the advantages they gave themselves. So running third-party is no less (or more) quixotic than extra-party efforts to change the system overall.

The other thing that opponents of third parties overlook is that while America has always had only two parties able to seriously contend for presidential elections, they haven’t always been the same two parties. At least once, one of the parties has fractured or lost support, allowing a “fringe” or “one-issue” party to take its place, which is what happened in the 1850s when the Whig Party, long in decline, lost its position to the abolitionist Republican Party.

Given that the institution will not allow itself to be reformed outside the vote, and voting will not change the two-party structure, the only way to change within that structure is for a “third” party to replace one of the two current parties. Given the duopoly’s built-in advantages, the only way for a third party to do so is if at least one of the two establishment parties becomes so incompetent, so malicious and so alienating to the population at large that voters start looking around for a more reasonable alternative.

And look, here we are.

 

So here is my conclusion: Since presidential elections are decided by the Electoral College- that is, state by state- I advise that you keep a weekly or daily watch on www.fivethirtyeight.com to get a view of exactly how close your state is to voting for Trump.  If it looks like your state has a margin within 10 points either way, it’s probably close enough to where you have to vote for Clinton just to make sure. If the margin is wider than that, say if you’re in California and there’s no way that it’s going to Trump, you can afford to vote for someone other than Clinton if you want. Hillary, Jill Stein, Gary Johnson… just, Christ, don’t vote for Donald Trump. And if you’re thinking strategically, what you want to accomplish is not just a “protest vote” but aim towards making Trump not the second, but the third or even fourth-place candidate. And again, he is such a clusterfuck even by conservative standards that this could quite possibly happen. This is also aiming towards hitting the “down ballot” candidates for Congress to punish the POT (Party of Trump) for their decision. This unfortunately has the effect of making Democrats more powerful. But that means we also have to look for third-party and independent candidates who (like the younger Bernie Sanders) who actually have a chance of winning or placing in their races. Even second place means a chance to replace one of the two factions. Keep in mind this is not going to happen this election, or maybe even the next one, but you have to start somewhere. How that down ballot work is to be accomplished, and how the Libertarian Party in particular is actually going to deserve the vote, are subjects I intend to address in the next few posts.