If trying to pick a political team always means settling for the less awful of two awful alternatives, maybe you should stop choosing. It always leads to the abandonment of real standards. I notice some likely Democrat-leaning psychology expert insisting, for example, that Biden isn’t suffering from dementia, merely senility, whereas Trump shows signs of dementia. Choose wisely.
I’m reminded of the bumper stickers years ago meant to fend off a racist Louisiana gubernatorial candidate—who was up against a candidate accused of corruption and racketeering—by urging people to “Vote for the crook: It’s important.”
But if you insist on voting, at least it looks increasingly likely you’ll have the choice of voting for Trump this year, since he got the all-clear Monday from the Supreme Court to appear on the November ballot in Colorado, an indicator of how such suits should work out in other states. And he probably should appear.
Or at least convict a man of insurrection (or whatever else) in a trial before you impose drastic limitations on his right to participate in the political process. Doing an end-run around democracy and removing candidates who’ve merely been accused of insurrection would inevitably just lead to everyone who was a threat to the establishment being accused of insurrection.
The willingness of real Democratic judges and other officials to try short-circuiting the usual process of picking elected officials should give pause to anyone tempted to point at the right wing as the sole threat to democracy—maybe tempted to point to some relatively trivial, context-free, and likely satirical datum such as pundit Jack Posobiec raising a fist in the air at the conservatives’ annual CPAC gathering last month and declaring “Welcome to the end of democracy!”
He’s undeniably a jackass, but that moment seems to have been damn near meaningless, judging by the handful of half-joking, obfuscatory follow-up comments. Yet, understandably, all it takes is one careless moron like Posobiec saying, “All glory is not to government. All glory to God,” as he did after his CPAC anti-democracy comment, and you’ve probably driven another generation of atheists and skeptics into the left’s arms. I’m not sure what he intended, but if I’m generous enough to assume he had something coherent in mind as a goal, it seems to have been... theocracy, maybe.
Seeing how foolish both the political right and left are, and how obscure my fellow libertarians nonetheless remain, I’m often tempted to fall back on my main pre-political allegiance, the so-called skeptics movement: that is, just focus on debunking manifestly, empirically false claims, becoming like a scientist showing how easy it is to fake a séance—or how little evidence Posobiec has for his God.
Skewering the faithful and other gullible saps is so easy, one could build a whole career around it—and add layers of mockery atop the rationality, too. Maybe point out how much right-wing pillow magnate Michael Lindell looks like self-proclaimed UFO abductee Travis Walton. Drily note that it’s hard to trust the paranormal investigators at Skinwalker Ranch to figure out how many different phenomena face them when the lead investigator can’t remember whether “phenomena” is plural or singular. (I’m genuinely rooting for them to find something conclusive, though.)
In much the same way that politics is an afterthought for many intensely religious people—that is, if the Democrats lean secular, many of the religious will automatically lean anti-Democrat—it’s also little more than an afterthought for many of the so-called skeptics. If skeptics assume that anyone fueled by faith—a right-winger insistent that God will shield us from nuclear missiles, say—must be wrong on all issues across the board, the skeptics may end up oblivious to more subtle but more consequential forms of irrationality from the left or the centrist/liberal establishment that do far more real-world damage than imagining an illusory afterlife or misidentifying a UFO.
As we likely avoid another government shutdown this week only through a flurry of last-minute, bloated, barely-examined mega-budgets, for instance, I fear few of my fellow skeptics will pause to reflect that it’s as irrational and innumerate to accept giant, Democrat-pleasing federal budgets as it is to miscalculate the distance to the sun or falsely assert the age of the Earth based on scripture. Econ often has a bigger impact than science—though it’d be nice to have a party that understood both.
Right now, we have two major parties who understand neither of those disciplines but each of whom is confident it understands one of them very well and absent-mindedly suspects it therefore probably has a pretty good handle on the other as well. Escape persistent mental fog by recognizing you don’t have to trust either army of bozos—and should resist them at every opportunity.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on Twitter at @ToddSeavey