The Democrats’ unstated and boring real pitch to American voters at their convention this week, an echo of Biden’s implicit appeal, is the promise of being more predictable and normal than another non-consecutive four years of Trump. If cackling authoritarian Kamala Harris and chummy socialist Tim Walz are what passes for normal in America now, though, we’re allowed to step back from the clash of the two parties for a moment and reflect on just how horrible things have gotten.
And we shouldn’t be fooled for a moment by v.p. candidate Walz’s preposterous but strategically savvy recent claim that old-fashioned Nebraska (he said Nebraska, not just Minnesota) libertarians and Republicans should be eager to jump aboard the (commie) Harris-Walz bandwagon.
With each of the two major parties now attempting to cajole the suffering average-Joe working class, shore up the most popular centrist big-government programs, and prove its nationalist credentials at the same time, it might clarify things greatly if the Democrats and Republicans merged into what we might call a National Socialist Workers’ Party. That’s what they’ve both been since roughly World War II anyway, despite their periodic attempts to make the other (half of the de facto single) party sound lacking in commitment to the program—and despite those rather superficial history book accounts about the Allies “winning.”
I’m not saying any of the major-party candidates are Hitler or Stalin, but as Jonah Goldberg wrote years ago, they’d probably be hard-pressed to explain where they differ significantly with Mussolini, founder of fascism and real political model for our era.
Every presidential election, no matter how inconsequential, is heralded with rhetoric about how this is the most important election ever and will decide the fate of the nation, and thus that you’re supposedly obliged to vote for one of the two major parties just this one more time. Yet there surely comes a point when, on the contrary, things are so bad that even a desperate symbolic gesture is worth more than nudging the superstate a teensy bit to the left or a teensy bit to the right one more time.
Anyone who tells you with a straight face that this is not the time for a desperate symbolic gesture should be regarded as a lunatic. It’s a wonderful time for a desperate symbolic gesture. If you’re going to keep voting—and I’m by no means saying you should—why not vote Libertarian every single time? Claiming that one of two major parties really needs this next win and will make a big difference this time just isn’t an argument that can be taken seriously anymore.
I’m also not promising Libertarians will win, but cost the other parties enough votes and their constituents might at least notice—and then listen to your arguments. That may be worth more than rooting for any Cabinet appointment or tiny regulatory tweak from one of the major parties at this point. There aren’t many Cabinet positions or regulatory tweaks that will erase that $35 trillion federal debt.
Chase Oliver, the Libertarian Party presidential candidate, found himself making the long-term, big-picture argument in a debate at the Soho Forum in Manhattan last week, and cordial though his pro-Trump opponent, famed and still-feisty conservative Art Laffer, was, the argument for picking either of the two major parties seems increasingly insane at this point. If there were some serious prospect of the Republicans axing half the government or the Democrats alleviating half of poverty, one would have to at least continue giving the non-Chase Olivers in the race a polite listen. But no one, absolutely no one, believes any longer that such prospects exist.
Stop going through the motions, America! Stop voting for the Republicans and Democrats! It’s not hope. It’s a ridiculous once-every-four-years ritual pantomime of hope that even the loudest participants don’t believe in anymore. Vote Oliver—or loudly refuse to vote—and tell the world where you really stand.
Laffer’s reasonable but low-bar argument was mainly just that he’s pretty sure from talking to Trump that he’s mainly bluffing about being a protectionist and just wants to get other trading nations to the negotiating table in an effort to end all tariffs. Swell, but there’s no good economic argument for keeping ours regardless of what other nations do, just as there’s no argument for punching your grandmother in the face just because your hated enemy vows he’ll keep punching his grandmother in the face until you cave to his demands. Taxes help no one in the long run.
Farther-right-wing arguments against Chase Oliver have arisen lately from within the Libertarian Party itself, its recently ascendant (and often young and naïve) right-leaning faction put off by the fact Oliver undeniably came to libertarianism from the left and still has the old BLM rally, gay banner, and Obama supporter photos to prove it. But then, almost all libertarians started out somewhere else. We tend to have arrived at libertarianism not by birth but by disillusionment. As with immigration, all should ultimately be welcome (assuming they commit no violations of private property).
I was impressed by the fact that Oliver, in his dozens of answers to a long online survey about candidates’ positions, while he may sometimes have used liberal-sounding phrasing, always gave the radical and recognizably libertarian answer on policy questions and again and again would go the extra mile and say, in effect: but then, I would completely abolish that government agency anyway. No weasel words or holding back. He doesn’t have the cowardly mainstream politician’s instinct to shy away from giving direct, difficult, possibly unwelcome, admirably frank answers at every opportunity.
While Trump deflects with juvenile insults and Harris deflects with meandering cackles and pseudo-sentences—and even nice guys like former Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson try to give limited responses that won’t frighten anyone or rock the boat—Oliver just lays down the (very minimalist and strictly circumscribed) law with an almost autistic candor that the most right-wing and offensive trolls of the Libertarian Party ought to appreciate. As for his substantive positions, style issues aside, his most lefty positions are probably the dim views he takes of U.S. cops and Israeli military leaders—but then, those are positions the most right-leaning among the current Libertarian Party leadership purportedly like. What’s not to love, then?
It may be time to throw away your vote, with pride.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey