From the hip-and-happening
Meet the Press (“these third-party candidates, are going
to be making a lot bigger of a difference come November 4th than we
thought”) to the staid old-fashioned
Vice (“these political interlopers smell blood”), not to
mention
right here at your favorite news and commentary site, everyone
is talking the potential importance to this midterm of the Libertarian Party.
Not necessarily as actual victors (nearly impossible), but at
least as an ideological
swing vote wider than the difference between the two major
party candidates, and perhaps most important of a sign that growing
numbers of Americans are willing to defy the wasted vote syndrome
and express both dissatisfaction with government writ large and
with our political choices in the most direct way they can.
(Granted, musing about the sudden surprise rise of Third Parties
is
a perennial for those who have a professional obligation to
write many words about elections.)
With that in mind, it often isn’t worth that much thought
parsing out the specifics of the candidates running under the L.P.
label. It is overwhelmingly likely that for the most part, the
Libertarian voter is voting the Party, not the person.
In that case, does it matter to a libertarian-leaning voter that
not even all people bearing the Libertarian Party label will seem
either the type of person you’d want holding elective office, or
even one who stands for everything you like about the Libertarian
message? The latter point might be vital if you really
believed that the candidate is going to win the office—but almost
certainly, if you are a sane L.P. voter, you don’t think that.
So some of the recent media follies surrounding L.P. candidates
seem less important than the L.P. itself does as an outlet for
small-state, anti-two-party expression for those who choose to
vote.
It’s a common plaint from party higher-ups that the L.P. must,
alas, go to battle with the candidates they have, not the
candidates they might ideally want. L.P. National Committee
Executive Director Wes Benedict was especially thrilled at the
unprecedented vote percentage last year of Robert Sarvis,
successful tech entrepreneur, in its potential to attract more
well-established humans to run with the L.P.
Sarvis himself is back in the fray, this time running for
federal Senate, and emphasizing, the media reports, economic
growth and fiscal responsibility—some areas where he might be
able to outflank Republican Ed Gillespie, and without any stench of
disagreeable social conservatism/busybodism (although Sarvis is
not polling that strongly, and not tending to beat the spread
between a generally behind Gillespie and leading Democrat Mark
Warner.)
While those who imagine that Libertarians are just there to
outdo Republicans on the shrinking government message might image
that fiscal responsibility is one of their main cards, that’s not
true of one of the most talked-about L.P. Senate candidates,
longtime Party hand, pizza deliverer, and antiwar candidate Sean
Haugh for North Carolina Senate.
Haugh is a living reminder that not all people immersed in this
libertarian thing think alike, and that a more “left” orientation
is both a real, and apparently really attractive to many, part of
the current slightly bigger tent of both Party and movement.
Haugh is such a rebel that when he made comments about his
sincere dislike for “dark money,” I at first
assumed that he must be kidding, since a firm belief that
anyone should be able to spend any money they want to speak out
about or support politics or candidates is pretty widespread among
libertarians as a free political speech matter. But Haugh exhibited
a more old-fashioned civic republicanism and condemned the Kochs,
and by presumption any rich person’s “ways of influencing elections
and policy at all, very corrupting & anti-republic….”
Although Haugh got very mad at my colleague Stephanie Slade
for writing about it, for reasons he will not go on record
about to her (and did not return my call seeking clarification
either), Haugh was also not kidding when he spoke up against
rampant Medicaid cuts, charging that they cause people to suffer.
Although he condemned the Weekly Standard article
reporting on this, Haugh said effectively the same thing in one of
his own
videos on his own web site, tut-tutting harsh cost-cutting
policies that could lead to grandma being “thrown out on the
street.”
Now, Ron Paul also told me that when trying to shrink
government, payments that directly helped the indigent aren’t the
wisest or kindest place to go slashing first. Haugh represents an
understandable and real modern trend in what goes out under the
name libertarian; though he’s old school, having worked with the
L.P. since 1980, he has a new-generation tinge in his approach to
the Libertarian message.
I cannot defend this proposition chapter and verse, but I’ve
noticed a very real tendency among younger libertarians to stress
much more, and in some cases even to seem to only believe in, those
aspects of the libertarian message that are on the surface and
agreeably “nice”—that is, about the areas where the state (or even
an individual) is clearly doing things, from war to drug war to
surveillance to police abuse to racism and discrimination, that
harm innocent, or at least not so guilty as to deserve
that, people.
They shy away—and Haugh deliberately walks away—from the parts
of the Libertarian message that might mean the state must stop
doing things that do in fact help some people, even if as part of a
complicated roundrobin system of theft and subsidy. We libertarians
can and will point to studies that indicate that, say, on the whole
access to Medicaid seems to have
little positive effect on actual health. (The mistaken conflation of health care
with health is a category error that has damaged our public
policy for decades, at least.) But to those of a more genteel
disposition, the mere ability to guarantee access to doctors and
health care services without risking penury is something worth
fighting for, unabashedly a good thing, and the last step on any
path to a night watchman, or less, state. This sort of “nice”
libertarianism is something that activists both within and without
electoral politics involved in the movement need to grapple with,
because it is showing signs of changing the tenor of the
movement—perhaps not as radically as the meaning of liberalism
changed from 1870 to 1930, but in a similar direction.
Haugh is not the only prominent L.P. candidate taking a leftish
tack; see also Lucas Overby, running for a Florida House seat in a
race with no Democrat, talking simultaneously
about tax reform and veteran care as primary issues,
self-identifying
as a left-libertarian and at least months ago polling as high
as 31 percent.
As a non-voter I reserve the right
not only to complain but also
to advise voters how to vote, and to vote Libertarian if you
must vote. It is not alas, for the reason that L.P. National
Committee Chair Nicholas Sarwark
wrote here on Reason the other day, that it has
“Libertarian” in the name. As Haugh shows, not even that name
guarantees modal libertarian views on all issues. (A candidate for
Senate as antiwar as Haugh is worth considering for the Senate
regardless.)
Especially when you can be confident that your vote is not
actually going to propel any specific candidate to office, you can
rest assured in another point Sarwark made: that “Voting
Libertarian is the only clear message you can send.”
The Libertarian message is still strong, and still appealing,
even if every candidate doesn’t seem to fully grasp it, or
otherwise seems someone unwise to put forward for public
office.
Maybe, as the
Chicago Tribune complained about Illinois’ L.P.
gubernatorial candidate Chad Grimm (who is beating
the spread between his opponents in polls), some L.P.
candidates aren’t good at coming across like sufficiently wonkishly
knowledgeable about policy and government when talking to newspaper
editors. (I’ll have to take their word that most other major party
candidates do, since my own experience as a reporter talking to
actual congresspeople makes me doubt that all the “real” candidates
come across with high levels of competent understanding of the deep
workings of policy and government, combined with ideological
sharpness.)
Maybe L.P. candidates will be, like Idaho L.P. Governor’s
candidate John Bujak, someone who has the unattractive as a
candidate traits of a series of
professional ethics complaints and
contempt of court charges for unpaid child support .While this
doesn’t mean he wouldn’t govern, from a libertarian perspective,
better than his opponents, it does alas make it harder for many
people to take voting for him, or for a party that endorsed him,
seriously.
But as said earlier, when it comes to candidates, the L.P. is
largely stuck with whoever is willing to take the trouble to run.
And a vote for the Libertarian Party says something loud and clear
that no other vote does: that business as usual government is
dangerous, damaging, and unacceptable, far more so than some
minuscule chance of sending a possibly inappropriate, in ideology
or deportment, candidate to office.
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