You can imagine Nick Gillespie of Reason.com is giddy about the Libertarian Party’s chances this year, but not without some reason:

And yet…lest we forget, it’s the Republican and Democratic parties that are imploding, with the former group split over a candidate who openly mocks handicapped people, has zero grasp of even the most basic policy issues, and calls for the forcible removal of 12 million (his count) illegal immigrants and their children (even if the kids are actually U.S. citizens). …

When it comes to the right wing, the elephant in the room isn’t that Trump somehow hijacked or stole the conservative movement and its causes. Rather, it’s that virtually everything he stands for is the fulfillment of precisely what Republicans and conservatives have demanded for decades, just with an added dose of crudeness and less fear of the gays. To the extent that his yammerings make any sense, we know Trump is anti-immigrant, bellicose when it comes foreign policy, and is obsessed with a backward-looking vision of “American greatness.” If he wants to keep Obama’s universal health insurance in place, then he’s what, like Mitt Romney, the 2012 GOP presidential candidate who was not only endorsed by National Review, but is constantly being pushed by The Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol as a cure to what ails the GOP?

On the Democratic side of the aisle, things are just as sad, with Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders tripping over each other to denounce Uber, Airbnb, and other avatars of the sharing economy, which is a rare bright spot in a generally sluggish economy. Why? Because such “gig” jobs don’t come with the gold-plated benefits the GM offered during its protectionist heyday in the 1950s or something. Don’t you know that kids are going hungry because we have too many flavors of deodorant? Sanders, whose only play now is to Gillooly Clinton so much that she agrees to raise the minimum wage to $15 rather than her relatively measely $12 per hour. Clinton is a hawk’s hawk who, like Donald Trump (at the same time!) called for censorship of the internet because of Islamic terrorism.

At each next rally, she recites her resume lines more loudly for the simple reason that despite 25 years in the public eye, she has no discernible vision for the future of the country she so desperately wants to lead. Clinton is anti-trade and has been attacking NAFTA since 2008 or so, when she tried to outflank Barack Obama on the left. She calls Edward Snowden a traitor, has never met a surveillance program or secret presidential kill list she didn’t want to add a few names to, and has the most censorious history of anyone currently running for president. Seriously, look it up.

And yet…and yet, it’s the Libertarians who are a joke, because despite no funding and help from ballot-access laws and other schemes designed to silence alternative voices, they have somehow managed to nominate two successful, centrist former governors who believe in economic and cultural freedom, that the government is too big and expensive, that overseas interventions should be less frequent than they have been during the past 15 years, that school choice and reproductive choice and legalizing weed are good things…

Let’s stipulate that however silly Libertarians may be, and however much they might desperately want the future to feature only private sidewalks and for Soylent Green to be purchased exclusively with Bitcoin or Ethereum, they are not as batshit crazy and unhinged as Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, and the two parties and movements they represent. Yes, we libertarians (big L and small l) like comic books and science fiction and have people who show up at national conventions wearing boots on their heads and strip down to thongs and argue over whether such unannounced nudity contravenes the non-aggression principle. Dunno about you, but when I look at a future in which I can be hanging out with the likes of Ted Cruz and Mike Huckabee or Elizabeth Warren and Anthony Weiner or with Vermin Supreme and James Weeks II, I’m happy to choose the latter pair every time.

I think it’s effectively impossible that Johnson and Weld will win in the fall, but that’s also not the real endgame here either. As I write in a new Daily Beast column, the important thing is to change the general direction in which politics is headed. To the extent that the two major parties are having problems, it’s because of who they are and what they represent. Each of the parties is still locked into a mind-set where its people should control large areas of your everyday life—how you do business, say, or whom you can marry. Those days are over for pragmatic reasons (thanks to technology, it’s easier than ever to route around government and just get on with your life) and to changes in belief systems (we really are a more live-and-let-live nation, thank god).

Politics is a lagging indicator of where America is headed as a country. For the past half-century or so, we’ve been trending to greater and greater freedom and possibilities of how to live our lives. We are more comfortable with choices about what to eat, whom to marry, where to live, how to learn, how to express our values through our work and social commitments, and so much more. There is a reason why our identification with the two major parties has been falling over that same time frame: The Republicans and Democrats exist only in yesterday’s America and fewer and fewer of us want much to do with such hollowed-visions that only 29 percent identify as Democrats and just 26 percent as Republicans.

Johnson and Weld and the Libertarians won’t win this time around. Even a post-Kardashian, post-body-shaming America isn’t quite ready for a striptease performed at a national convention.

But everything they stand for, and that the American people are demanding—more peace around the globe, more choice here at home, the ability to innovate and speak freely—will be absorbed either into both major parties, or by whatever replaces them. …

You’re welcome to your own world, liberals and conservatives, but sooner or later (and whether you realize it or not), you’ll be living in a libertarian world that is freer, fairer, and more fun than ever.

James Taranto:

Since the 1980s Hugh Romney has been waging a campaign for president, though not on his own behalf. Romney, an entertainer better known by the stage name “Wavy Gravy,” is the man behind Nobody for President, described in a 1988 Reuters dispatch quoted by this column four years ago this week:

The signs sprouting in the crowd were a little different from the usual campaign fare: “Nobody is Perfect,” “Nobody Cares About the Homeless,” and “Nobody Bakes Better Apple Pie than Mom.”

Bumper stickers were selling out fast. “U.S. Out of North America: Nobody for President in 1988” appeared to be the most popular.

Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal reports that Mitt Romney, no relation, is waging an “increasingly lonely challenge to Donald Trump,” the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. No, this Romney isn’t running for president either, though he’s done so twice before:

Mr. Romney, 69, wasn’t worried when Mr. Trump joined the race in June, believing the 16 other Republicans made up a “very capable, well-experienced, very deep field.” Along with other politicians, he expected the businessman to implode after his pronouncement attacking illegal immigrants. . . .

Conservative stalwarts [have] revived a push for a third-party candidate, with a keen interest in Mr. Romney. “I made it clear I’m not running,” he said.

So the “challenge” consists merely of speaking against Trump, and it’s not clear he’ll even keep that up:

At his oceanfront home, Mr. Romney said he didn’t expect to criticize Mr. Trump further but wouldn’t rule it out.“I know that some people are offended that someone who lost and is the former nominee continues to speak, but that’s how I can sleep at night,” he said. “And there are some people, though it’s a small number, who still value my opinion.”

“I know that some people are offended that someone who lost and is the former nominee continues to speak, but that’s how I can sleep at night,” he said. “And there are some people, though it’s a small number, who still value my opinion.”Mr. Romney said he won’t vote for Mr. Trump or [Hillary] Clinton. “Hopefully, I will find a name I can support,” he said. “If not, I will write in a name.”

Mr. Romney said he won’t vote for Mr. Trump or [Hillary] Clinton. “Hopefully, I will find a name I can support,” he said. “If not, I will write in a name.”For this Romney, then, it’s Anybody for President. (Well, anybody except the candidates, or himself.) Bill Kristol,

For this Romney, then, it’s Anybody for President. (Well, anybody except the candidates, or himself.) Bill Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, is on the same page, except that he thinks “it would be great if Romney chose to run.” It would also be great, Kristol adds, if Joe Lieberman, Paul Ryan, Mitch Daniels, Condoleezza Rice, Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, Nikki Haley or Susana Martinez ran. And it would be pretty good if Mike Pompeo, Adam Kinzinger, Judd Gregg or Mel Martinez would run. They’re all on Wikipedia.

Failing that, Kristol observes, “someone who hasn’t yet held elective office” could run. He suggests David French, a writer for National Review who earlier this week published an article titled “Mitt Romney, Run for President”:

I happen to know David French. To say that he would be a better and a more responsible president than Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump is to state a truth that would become self-evident as more Americans got to know him. There are others like him. There are thousands of Americans who—despite a relative lack of fame or fortune—would be manifestly superior to our current choices. And there are many, many others who stand ready to help whoever emerges to have the basic resources, assistance, and infrastructure to mount a credible effort.

We suppose we should disclose that we too know French, find him likable, and give him a favorable job-approval rating, though we find his anti-Trump stuff overwrought. It occurs to us it would be funny if he ran for president of France, since victory would yield a word palindrome: French President French. But we have no clue if he’s even eligible over there.

As for the American presidency, French’s response to Kristol’s floating his nom is noncommittal. This morning he tweeted: “An independent campaign against Trump/Clinton is a national necessity.” We’re taking that as a non.

Kristol’s list raises other questions. Jerry Skurnik, an occasional contributor to this column, wonders where is Kristol’s former boss, the seasoned elder statesman Dan Quayle. For that matter, where’s Kristol himself? If writing an article urging Mitt Romney to run qualifies French to run, then why doesn’t writing an article urging French to run qualify Kristol to run? Recognizing that this line of thought poses a danger of infinite regress, we peremptorily declare that, in the words of Gen. Sherman, “even if unanimously elected [we] should decline to serve.”

On the other side, what’s Joe Lieberman doing on there? He’s a Democrat, was Al Gore’s running mate, and cast the deciding vote leading to the enactment of ObamaCare—not exactly a conservative stalwart, unless support for the Iraq war is sufficient to earn that distinction.

And what about Marco Rubio? Did Kristol miss the news that Jennifer Rubin (or as we’ve come to think of her, Ayn Rand Jr.) has expelled Florida’s junior senator from the conservative movement? “Rubio has ceded a potential role in the rebuilding of the GOP post-Trump,” Rubin decrees. “A man of such flimsy character and fleeting convictions cannot be part of the rehab process that will go on once the election is over.”

The Washington Examiner’s Philip Klein details the offense that led to Rubio’s excommunication:

On Thursday, Rubio took another step toward fully embracing Trump for the presidency by telling CNN’s Jake Tapper that he not only planned to attend the Republican convention, but that he would be “honored” to speak on Trump’s behalf.

That’s unacceptable, as per Klein, because Rubio previously said harsh things about Trump:

Rubio’s assaults on Trump during the primary season were about more than “policy differences.” In addition to repeatedly calling Trump a “con artist,” Rubio: predicted that a Trump presidency would bring “chaos”; said Trump was “wholly unprepared to be president”; and warned about handing over control of the U.S. nuclear arsenal to an “erratic individual” and a “lunatic.”

Klein thinks this inconsistency reveals “Rubio’s true character—and it is not pretty.” He imagines that primary rivals’ uniting after a heated campaign is something other than politics as usual.

But if Rubio is disqualified for supporting and denouncing Trump at different times, why isn’t Romney, who praised Trump to the skies when collecting his endorsement in 2012? Never mind, we suppose that question is Mitt, or rather moot. …

For his part, Kristol isn’t quite ready to climb aboard the Clinton jalopy. “The fact” of Mrs. Clinton’s “unfitness for the Oval Office” is, to him, as “self-evident” as that of Trump’s. But what happens if he is unable to persuade Anybody to run? Will he join Hugh Romney’s Nobody for President effort?

That might be tough, too. It would require Kristol to admit Nobody is better than Donald Trump.

People touting the presidential race as being between The Donald and Hillary! forget that there is no provision for only two political parties in the U.S. Constitution; in fact, there is no provision for political parties, period.

I have been touting Comrade Sanders’ need to run as a third-party candidate once he loses the Democratic nomination to Hillary!; in fact, his failure to run as a non-Democrat would end the credibility of his campaign. If he is sincere about his (wrong-headed) principles, as even his detractors claim, he has to run this fall. If his supporters are sincere, they need to push Sanders to run, because it has been obvious for more than a year that the Democratic Party has no intention of allowing anyone but Hillary! to get the nomination.

Jonah Goldberg has a scenario for a four-way race:

As it stands now, it seems almost inconceivable that Sanders could become the Democratic nominee — unless the FBI indicts Hillary Clinton before the convention, or she reveals herself to be some sort of animatronic device sent from the future to bore us to death (which would make her ineligible under the “natural born” clause of the Constitution). The former seems about as plausible as the latter, given that Trump’s nomination makes it even less likely the Feds will risk interfering with the election. But by staying in the race, Sanders is clearly hurting Clinton. A raft of new polling has Trump either tied or beating Clinton. If Sanders got out and supported Clinton, many of the “Never Hillary” liberals would come home to the Democrats, just as many anti-Trump conservatives have made peace with the presumptive nominee. The polling suggests that a unified Democratic party would give Clinton a daunting lead over Trump. And yet Bernie just won’t go. Why?

Part of the answer is personal: He’s simply having the time of his life. This is a man who was kicked out of a hippie commune in 1971 for talking about politics too much when people were trying to work. The young socialist liked chatting about revolutionary labor more than actually laboring for the revolution.

After spending decades as a gadfly on the periphery of national politics, suddenly he’s the belle of the ball. Millions of people are hanging on his every word rather than trying to escape the conversation. That has to be a heady thing for someone so in love with his own voice. It’s like he spent all his life hanging around minor-league baseball and, in his golden years, somehow become a sensation in the majors. Why quit? To preserve his viability to run when he’s 78 or 84?

More important, he really believes in his “political revolution.”

As a result, it looks like Sanders is creating a liberal tea-party movement within the Democratic party. He’s endorsed the primary opponent of the hapless, pro-Clinton chair of the DNC, Debbie Wasserman Schultz. He’s sharing some of his dragon’s horde of campaign cash with handpicked progressive candidates. And he’s encouraging his supporters to harden their animosity toward Clinton.

At this point, the smart thing to do from the purist-progressive perspective would probably be to continue fighting within the Democratic party for ever more leverage over the Clinton campaign and in Congress, while the best thing for the party would be for him to fold up shop immediately.

What if Sanders does neither? What if he concludes that the party rigged the game against him and bolts to run as the independent he is? Would the Green Party — which ran Ralph Nader to disastrous effect for Democrats in 2000 — nominate him at their August convention?

One might assume that the obvious effect of a Sanders independent bid would be a Trump victory in November. Indeed, Trump, with his trademark subtlety, has encouraged Sanders to run as an independent for the obvious reason that doing so would doom Clinton’s candidacy.

But in this season where the standard playbook is as outdated as the instruction manual for a Commodore 64 computer, Sanders’s third-party bid could well encourage a fourth-party bid from an authentic conservative, such as [2012 Republican nominee Mitt] Romney or Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse. And in a four-way race (or five-way, if you include the Libertarian party), all bets are off. Theoretically, a winning share of the popular vote in a four-way race could be 26 percent. In a five-way race, 21 percent (which is where Romney is polling right now). States that haven’t been competitive in decades would suddenly become battlegrounds. Of course, if no one gets a majority in the Electoral College, the decision goes to the House, for even more exciting postseason drama.

Trump just wants to win. Sanders wants to smash the status quo in both parties. The opportunity is staring him in the face.