Deregulating the Deck Chairs
Libertarians should save the Republic to downsize it.
The first viscerally political notion I remember having as a kid of the 70s was when an older kid told me matter-of-factly that, even though my parents “owned” our house, they didn’t really own it because the government owns everything and just lets us use it. That sat wrong with me in a way I still remember, though I was probably soon over it and back to roaming the sand dunes, vacant lots, and convenience stores that held most of the prospect for adventure and/or empty calories in our coastal fishing town.
Everyone treads a unique path to their political mindset. Those paths are so varied in part because they comprise patently nonpolitical events, too. For example, my dad used to put pieces of dry ice in his mouth to amuse us kids. He’d mastered a sort of oral acrobatics to keep the ice in motion, thus avoiding frostbite while he blew little puffs of carbon dioxide vapor that rounded out the performance. As a chemistry researcher at a marine science lab he had access to a freezer-full of the stuff; sometimes I’d get to take a chunk with me. He’d return to using it to isolate compounds from organic samples for stable isotope analysis, while I’d go home and drop it in a glass of water to watch the CO₂ “fog” spill out onto the countertop.
With no access yet to video games and only a single clear channel on TV, I found this to be reasonably entertaining — until the chunk inevitably shrunk down to a tiny, boiling pebble. It seemed contradictory. Here was ice that turned not into a liquid as it warmed, but a gas. I didn’t know it then, but this cheap diversion carried an important lesson with it: apparent contradictions suggest we’re missing some information.
A vote, not a wedding
Forty years and many lessons later I’m living two hundred miles up the road in Austin, trying to ride out a pandemic like everyone else. I also just voted for the Biden-Harris presidential ticket — the latest point of interest on my political trek. “So what?,” you’d be reasonable to ask. “Some guy in Austin, a blue pixel in red Texas, who was probably raised in a family of Democrats [how did you know?], whose father was a university professor [true], is supporting Biden? Shocking!” I acknowledge your sarcasm. But, let me add that I’m not a Democrat, but a longtime Libertarian. Since I changed my Twitter name earlier this year to “libertarians for Biden 2020,” I’ve been accused of being a paid shill (“15 dollars an hour”), brainwashed, and many other unflattering things. Apparently, some see the very idea of a libertarian supporting Joe Biden as a contradiction. They fall into two categories.
Some Libertarians are frustrated by claims that this election is the most important in our lifetimes or that we should vote for the least bad candidate. It’s the same story every cycle, they complain. As these faithful Libertarians tell it, we faithless never see it as the right year to vote Libertarian because we always say the stakes are too high to let the worse of the two traditional party candidates win. On the contrary, say the true gold Ls, the lesser evil is still evil and we should not settle for what the “duopoly” pushes on us. They may add that the Dems and the GOP are more or less equal in their awfulness anyway. “They are the same,” the Libertarian Party of Texas tweeted recently. What sense would it make, then, for a Libertarian to vote for a Democrat or a Republican? It would be self-defeating — an act of self-contradiction.
Conservative commenters, meanwhile, tend to express disbelief that a libertarian could prefer Biden over Trump. Surely I’m joking, deluded, or a troll, I’m told. Can’t I see that Trump is for smaller government and that Biden is for socialism? To hear some tell it, Trump has been a libertarian’s dream come true. He “has done more to reduce the size and scope of government than all of his predecessors combined,” maintained one commenter, who also equated my Biden vote to one “for a violent Marxist revolution.” “Focus on the results,” not Trump’s “brusque manner and blunt demeanor,” another advised.
They’re both mistaken. One can be a consistent libertarian and vote for Biden instead of for Trump or Jo Jorgensen (the Libertarian nominee). Some readers may think anyone who claims to be a libertarian for Biden is simply lying or that they don’t understand the definition of “libertarian.” I’d like to offer an alternative hypothesis to these readers: you don’t have enough information. Just as there’s no contradiction in the fact that dry ice transitions directly to gas given the right conditions (I’ll leave it to the reader to look up CO₂ phase diagrams), there’s no contradiction in libertarians voting for Biden, given the right conditions. Nature and society are full of dependencies and complexities.
One such complexity is the uniqueness of our political paths. Each person’s views on government and society emerge from processes even we can’t fully fathom or control. As a result, two people having a political discussion will never completely comprehend the route the other took to their beliefs. The best they can do is try to explain and listen earnestly. They might turn out to have clashing outlooks or goals, and yet vote for some of the same candidates. That’s because, if conversation is a hazy medium through which to understand someone’s politics, trying to do so by observing how they vote is like looking through a brick wall. Voting for particular candidates doesn’t reveal our worldview or sign us up for one. One’s vote is a data point (or more, in the case of alternative voting systems) used by a governing body to determine the outcome of an election, nothing more.
(Not) everyone in here is innocent
If each of us hikes our own political trail and enters the voting booth alone, why should you care about what I have to say? Because swapping tales from our journeys can alert us to hazards. One of these is when people try to put us in an ideological box. Since you control your vote, one way your cousin’s friend or your friend’s favorite YouTuber can affect it is by convincing you to voluntarily limit your own options. As a Biden-supporting libertarian, a creature as mythical as a griffin to hear some tell it, maybe I can help allay the worry that voting strategically means you have to change your beliefs. It hasn’t for me.
Of course, I had no inkling while attending a fundraiser for the Libertarian Party’s 2000 nominee, Harry Browne, that I would one day be trying to elect Joe Biden. I couldn’t have foreseen it while shaking hands with Ron Paul at his 2007 Austin fundraiser, nor while helping take over a Senatorial district in support of his ’08 presidential bid. As a consistent Libertarian voter since the 90s, I certainly wasn’t anticipating voting for a Democratic presidential candidate when I was attending libertarian meetings and events in Texas and around the country. I’ve defended libertarianism from friends, family, and colleagues for more than thirty years and I’m confident I know what the word means. I haven’t become less enthusiastic in my views. So, it’s fair to ask why I won’t be voting for the Libertarian Party ticket this November.
Libertarians do hear vote-for-the-lesser-evil appeals every election season. If they were always swayed by those appeals, they would never vote for the Libertarian. But, who is proposing always being so swayed? And even if we shouldn’t always vote for the lesser evil, does it follow that we never should? Even if some libertarians advocated for George W. Bush over Harry Browne, or John Kerry over Michael Badnarik, it’s not the same individuals making that argument in each case. Yet, even if it was, this does not remove the possibility that Biden is the wiser choice in 2020. Consider another deliberative body. Would it make sense to complain that, in every criminal trial, a defense attorney argues for the innocence of the accused? (“Why, if we listened to defense lawyers, it would never be the right time to find a defendant guilty!”) It’s true in a strict sense, but such a straw man — in collective guilt garb — would never be taken seriously in a decent court.
Either it is or it isn’t possible for the difference between a Republican and a Democrat to be so stark as to justify uniting behind one of them to defeat the other. For those who maintain it’s not possible, what’s the point in their criticizing Biden or equating him with Trump since they would apparently not throw their support to him even if Trump had banned the Internet and personally invented SARS-CoV-2 in the Whitehouse China Room. For everyone else, there is a decision to make: Is Donald Trump so much worse as president than Joe Biden is likely to be that, though we disagree on many things, Americans of every political cline should temporarily vote as one to defeat him? I say yes.
If it was the Libertarian Party candidate surging in the polls and fundraising, presenting a serious threat to the incumbent, I would be enthusiastically supporting her. If Texas used approval voting, I would vote for her and Biden. But, I expect the sun to rise tomorrow, puppies to continue being cute, and for either Trump or Biden to win this election. Given that, voting for Biden is by far the best way to minimize the chance that Trump will win again.
Smoke, not fog
I think Donald J. Trump is the greatest threat to liberty and prosperity the United States has faced in a long time. As bad as he’s been on matters of policy, and a sober assessment shows he has been plenty bad, the greater threat he poses is that of undermining our cherished and vital form of self-government. Even if Trump occasionally champions a promising policy, his cynical assault on the integrity of our elections, pressure on foreign states to interfere in them, non-stop barrage of lies, boosting of racists, authoritarians, and conspiracy theories, calling for the arrest of his political adversaries, revealed preference for criminally-inclined advisors, stiff-arming of Congressional oversight, denigration of the judiciary, and murky personal finances all testify to the likelihood that, at best, he is deregulating the deck chairs on the Titanic. At worst, he prefers the icebergs.
It is widely observed that Donald Trump has said and done many things each of which, taken alone, normally disqualify candidates for higher office. But, his overt threats against the right of Americans to decide whether to reelect him should be the final bale of straw. A president who states publicly, without regard for evidence, that the only way he can lose is if the election is rigged is an impostor in the body politic. Our civil immune system should reject him, with every vote an antibody (the lymphocytes in the Senate having faltered).
Since republics aren’t guaranteed nor constitutions foolproof, liberties aren’t assured. Their survival is determined by our day-to-day actions — both during and between elections. No transient policy victory is worth degrading the institutions that make continued self-government viable, however imperfect and incomplete it might be.
This would be true almost no matter who the Democrats had nominated. None of the leading hopefuls visited the depths of cynicism in which Donald Trump long ago set up headquarters. However, we could have done much worse than Joe Biden. He is more moderate than most of the other Democratic finalists. Someone who advised on national television, “If you want to protect yourself, get a double-barrel shotgun” and who stood up to significant pressure to endorse Medicare For All and the Green New Deal doesn’t seem like a radical or a pushover. Biden’s been vetted. He has executive and legislative, domestic and foreign policy experience. He’s flawed, but, crucially, he’s not lost. Unlike Trump, he is not immune to the wisdom and expertise of his advisors — and Biden’s are likely to have more integrity and knowledge than Trump tolerates.
Similarly, I find plenty to object to in the Democratic Platform, but it includes some ideas worth supporting, such as ending the “failed ‘War on Drugs,’” increasing use of police body cameras, once again limiting transfer of military weapons to police departments, avoiding “self-defeating, unilateral tariff wars,” returning to multilateral cooperation on Iran’s nuclear activities, and ending support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen. Yet, this election is, in a real and urgent way, about the two candidates.
Defeating Donald Trump is necessary. I have no illusions that it is sufficient. Trumpism will remain even if disempowered. Biden is no libertarian and I expect to oppose many of his actions in office. I also hope to again support the Libertarian candidate in 2024. But, to escape a burning building, it is sometimes necessary to resist instinct and enter a room that is already aflame. Fiscal and regulatory reform, more fully realizing Constitutional rights, avoiding military intervention — all of these depend on rule of law, separation of powers, a free press, and democratic accountability. The President and his allies chafe at these restraints which they have made substantial progress corroding.
Our republic is not impervious to dissolution. Donald Trump is no contradiction where his actions in office are concerned. They cohere — and we have more than enough information to conclude that he strives for an authoritarianism with American characteristics. There is no reason, short of electoral defeat, he will not move the country farther toward that goal. To advance instead peace and equal freedom, we should inform him his services are no longer needed.
Kevin Parker
@hayek
