Another Beatles anniversary today: Their “Beatles 1967–1970” album (also known as “the Blue Album”) reached number one today in 1973:
No comments on Presty the DJ for May 26
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Fellow conservatarian Tim Nerenz is not channeling his inner Louis Armstrong when he writes:
Here is your moment of clarity: either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump is going to be the next President of the United States of America. Thomas Jefferson himself could not write a more succinct argument for limited government and individual self-sovereignty than is self-evident in that awful truth.
I would prefer any of the three Libertarian Party candidates for the LP nomination over those two, but realistically our guys are not going to win. Gary Johnson is a CEO of a pot company; the Nevertrump conservatives can’t forgive the weed part and the Bernout communists can’t forgive the CEO part.
So one of the two old white people with higher unfavorable than favorable ratings is going to be elected and handed the levers of power that have been unjustly appropriated by Republicans and Democrats alike over the years. Everybody on the left who cheered King Obama’s decree on hourly wage exemptions can now look forward to King Donald’s decisions about the wages and benefits for the serfs. And everyone on the right calling for Apple to give up the master codes so NSA can suck the data out of our cell phones can imagine what sort of vindictive purposes Queen Hillary will find to use your own information against you. Always imagine the worst and you will never be let down by government.
Hillary says Trump’s gun policy is “dangerous”. What is dangerous is that she understands what his policy is on guns or anything else. That is some kind of psychic witchcraft at work — nobody else has the slightest idea what he is talking about, including himself five minutes later. With one of these two deciding which bathrooms we can use and whether or not we can vape and how much of our 401(k) they will swipe to fund their government, that second amendment is looking better and better all the time. I hope the Libertarians nominate McAfee at our convention — that boy’s gun policy is somewhere to the right of Ted Nugent and he knows where to buy copies of Hillary’s emails from hackers in Romania — faster than the FBI and cheaper too. It might bother some people that his wife was a prostitute, but I’m thinking it will be refreshing to have a retiree from the trade in Washington.
And speaking of Bernie Sanders, the college his wife ran went belly up this week. Can’t imagine why, with less than 200 students and $10 million in debt, Burlington College got rid of grades and course schedules, and offered majors in woodworking and media activism, among other course credits that would not transfer to accredited schools. It was on probation for lying about its enrollment, failing to pay property taxes, defaulting on its loan to the Catholic Archdiocese and breaking covenants for a Vermont government loan purchased by a “Peoples Bank”. The article written in 2014 about its impending doom did not say how many administrators it employed, but did mention that 25 had left recently — that is 25 less administrators for a school with only 180 students who paid $23,546 a year to listen to marxists professors lecture them about the evils of capitalism and the need for free education. That is why Trump University will not be an issue.
The commies at Burlington College had their chance to provide some free education and punted — they are taking unemployment instead of teaching for free. And the capital fund launched to pay off the debt taken on by Mrs. Sanders during her tenure as President only raised $500k, a pittance considering the deep pocketbooks of Sanders’ celebrity supporters, like Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon. The property will be sold to a real estate developer — a capitalist who will put it to good use after the Sanders regime proved that Venezuela was no fluke and ran it right into the dirt. …
So yes, in fact I do think that the average Walmart manager is smarter than our current Attorney General and the Democrats and Republicans at the city, state, and federal levels of government. That is why I am a libertarian; liberty is the absence of government in choice, government is the absence of liberty in choice, and tyranny is the absence of choice in government. Fix a bridge, arrest a bad guy, and then go lay by your dish. Just leave us alone and we all get along just fine.
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If I said (as I did here two weeks ago) that choosing between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton was like choosing between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in the 1930s, and readers could decide which was which, I would guess most readers would put The Donald in the former camp.
(Which may or may not be a violation of Godwin’s Law. Claiming Trump is a Nazi is wrong given that Trump is several million dead Jews and others shy of the Nazi standard of eliminating your opposition.)
I think most readers of this blog are intelligent enough to decide for themselves the validity of the opinion of former Republican (some call him a neoconservative; he calls himself a “liberal interventionist,” though I’m assuming he doesn’t mean liberal as the pejorative of today) Robert Kagan of the not-conservative Brookings Institution:
The Republican Party’s attempt to treat Donald Trump as a normal political candidate would be laughable were it not so perilous to the republic. If only he would mouth the party’s “conservative” principles, all would be well.
But of course the entire Trump phenomenon has nothing to do with policy or ideology. It has nothing to do with the Republican Party, either, except in its historic role as incubator of this singular threat to our democracy. Trump has transcended the party that produced him. His growing army of supporters no longer cares about the party. Because it did not immediately and fully embrace Trump, because a dwindling number of its political and intellectual leaders still resist him, the party is regarded with suspicion and even hostility by his followers. Their allegiance is to him and him alone.
And the source of allegiance? We’re supposed to believe that Trump’s support stems from economic stagnation or dislocation. Maybe some of it does. But what Trump offers his followers are not economic remedies — his proposals change daily. What he offers is an attitude, an aura of crude strength and machismo, a boasting disrespect for the niceties of the democratic culture that he claims, and his followers believe, has produced national weakness and incompetence. His incoherent and contradictory utterances have one thing in common: They provoke and play on feelings of resentment and disdain, intermingled with bits of fear, hatred and anger. His public discourse consists of attacking or ridiculing a wide range of “others” — Muslims, Hispanics, women, Chinese, Mexicans, Europeans, Arabs, immigrants, refugees — whom he depicts either as threats or as objects of derision. His program, such as it is, consists chiefly of promises to get tough with foreigners and people of nonwhite complexion. He will deport them, bar them, get them to knuckle under, make them pay up or make them shut up.
That this tough-guy, get-mad-and-get-even approach has gained him an increasingly large and enthusiastic following has probably surprised Trump as much as anyone else. Trump himself is simply and quite literally an egomaniac. But the phenomenon he has created and now leads has become something larger than him, and something far more dangerous.
Republican politicians marvel at how he has “tapped into” a hitherto unknown swath of the voting public. But what he has tapped into is what the founders most feared when they established the democratic republic: the popular passions unleashed, the “mobocracy.” Conservatives have been warning for decades about government suffocating liberty. But here is the other threat to liberty that Alexis de Tocqueville and the ancient philosophers warned about: that the people in a democracy, excited, angry and unconstrained, might run roughshod over even the institutions created to preserve their freedoms. As Alexander Hamilton watched the French Revolution unfold, he feared in America what he saw play out in France — that the unleashing of popular passions would lead not to greater democracy but to the arrival of a tyrant, riding to power on the shoulders of the people.
This phenomenon has arisen in other democratic and quasi-democratic countries over the past century, and it has generally been called “fascism.” Fascist movements, too, had no coherent ideology, no clear set of prescriptions for what ailed society. “National socialism” was a bundle of contradictions, united chiefly by what, and who, it opposed; fascism in Italy was anti-liberal, anti-democratic, anti-Marxist, anti-capitalist and anti-clerical. Successful fascism was not about policies but about the strongman, the leader (Il Duce, Der Führer), in whom could be entrusted the fate of the nation. Whatever the problem, he could fix it. Whatever the threat, internal or external, he could vanquish it, and it was unnecessary for him to explain how. Today, there is Putinism, which also has nothing to do with belief or policy but is about the tough man who single-handedly defends his people against all threats, foreign and domestic.
To understand how such movements take over a democracy, one only has to watch the Republican Party today. These movements play on all the fears, vanities, ambitions and insecurities that make up the human psyche. In democracies, at least for politicians, the only thing that matters is what the voters say they want — vox populi vox Dei. A mass political movement is thus a powerful and, to those who would oppose it, frightening weapon. When controlled and directed by a single leader, it can be aimed at whomever the leader chooses. If someone criticizes or opposes the leader, it doesn’t matter how popular or admired that person has been. He might be a famous war hero, but if the leader derides and ridicules his heroism, the followers laugh and jeer. He might be the highest-ranking elected guardian of the party’s most cherished principles. But if he hesitates to support the leader, he faces political death.
In such an environment, every political figure confronts a stark choice: Get right with the leader and his mass following or get run over. The human race in such circumstances breaks down into predictable categories — and democratic politicians are the most predictable. There are those whose ambition leads them to jump on the bandwagon. They praise the leader’s incoherent speeches as the beginning of wisdom, hoping he will reward them with a plum post in the new order. There are those who merely hope to survive. Their consciences won’t let them curry favor so shamelessly, so they mumble their pledges of support, like the victims in Stalin’s show trials, perhaps not realizing that the leader and his followers will get them in the end anyway.
A great number will simply kid themselves, refusing to admit that something very different from the usual politics is afoot. Let the storm pass, they insist, and then we can pick up the pieces, rebuild and get back to normal. Meanwhile, don’t alienate the leader’s mass following. After all, they are voters and will need to be brought back into the fold. As for Trump himself, let’s shape him, advise him, steer him in the right direction and, not incidentally, save our political skins.
What these people do not or will not see is that, once in power, Trump will owe them and their party nothing. He will have ridden to power despite the party, catapulted into the White House by a mass following devoted only to him. By then that following will have grown dramatically. Today, less than 5 percent of eligible voters have voted for Trump. But if he wins the election, his legions will likely comprise a majority of the nation. Imagine the power he would wield then. In addition to all that comes from being the leader of a mass following, he would also have the immense powers of the American presidency at his command: the Justice Department, the FBI, the intelligence services, the military. Who would dare to oppose him then? Certainly not a Republican Party that lay down before him even when he was comparatively weak. And is a man like Trump, with infinitely greater power in his hands, likely to become more humble, more judicious, more generous, less vengeful than he is today, than he has been his whole life? Does vast power un-corrupt?
This is how fascism comes to America, not with jackboots and salutes (although there have been salutes, and a whiff of violence) but with a television huckster, a phony billionaire, a textbook egomaniac “tapping into” popular resentments and insecurities, and with an entire national political party — out of ambition or blind party loyalty, or simply out of fear — falling into line behind him.
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Two unusual anniversaries in rock music today, beginning with John Lennon’s taking delivery of his Rolls-Royce today in 1967 — and it was not your garden-variety Rolls:
Ten years to the day later, the Beatles released “Live! at the Star-Club in Hamburg, Germany, 1962,” which helped prove that bands don’t need to be in existence to continue recording. (And as we know, artists don’t have to be living to continue recording either.)
Meanwhile, back in 1968, the Rolling Stones released “Jumping Jack Flash,” which fans found to be a gas gas gas:
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Nora Kelly profiles the three candidates for the presidential nomination of the Libertarian Party and the likelihood of challenging Hillary! and The Donald:
To the uninitiated, which is to say, most everyone, the Libertarian Party has been a political nonentity. Sure, voters might know a few of the top-line principles—limited government, limited economic regulation, a lot of individual liberty—but chances are they have not given much thought to a party that has never put a candidate in Congress. Or nominated a presidential contender who is truly competitive nationally.
After a hostile primary season on the Democratic and Republican sides, though, Libertarians hope that might start to change. Especially the three candidates with the most viable chance for the nomination at the party’s convention later this month.
“It’s really a mixed bag,” said Gary Johnson, the former two-term New Mexico governor who was the party’s nominee last cycle, on his reaction to Donald Trump’s presumptive Republican nomination. “Sorry for America,” but it could give “the libertarian nominee a real shot.”
A third-party candidate winning a general election is pretty unlikely. But there are some small signs Americans have grown more interested in the Libertarian Party since Trump has caught fire. The conservative Breitbart News has noted “spasms” among libertarian-leaning Republicans since Trump won Indiana, and it encouraged “PANIC” over an uptick in Google searches for the party. The Washington Examiner reported on Wednesday that the Libertarian Party saw “a drastic increase in new donors as the primaries started and it became increasingly clear that Trump would be the nominee”; and online applications to the party jumped once Ted Cruz dropped out after the Indiana primary. Those figures are small—in the hundreds—but for a small party looking to make national change, they must be encouraging. And Libertarians got at least one high-profile nod last week: The Republican strategist Mary Matalin switched her party affiliation to Libertarian on Thursday, though she refused to acknowledge a connection between her move and Trump’s shoe-in nomination.
The Libertarian Party will soon consolidate around a nominee at its meeting in Orlando, Florida, over Memorial Day weekend. Three candidates are considered front-runners. There’s Johnson, who first ran for president as a Republican in 2012, before switching parties mid-cycle. He’s often described as the presumptive nominee, which he does not deny. There’s also John McAfee, as famous for his antiviral software as he is for an admittedly “checkered” past, including his stint as an international fugitive. And there’s Austin Petersen. He owns a video and photography consulting company, founded a libertarian website, and once worked for the Libertarian National Committee and on a Fox Business show. If there were a contest for the best campaign slogan this cycle, two of these guys might be contenders. McAfee bills himself as “The Most Interesting Candidate in the World” (sans any mention of Dos Equis), while Petersen’s motto stays on message: “Taking Over the Government, to Leave Everyone Alone.” (Johnson’s slogan is the ho-hum “Be Libertarian With Me.”)
The Libertarian Party’s primary season is not entirely dissimilar to those of the major parties: It has a national meeting; debates, including one televised on Fox Business last month; state conventions, which candidates sometimes attend; and straw polls. Their version just happens to be smaller and cheaper (for better or worse)—and get far less attention. The field, though, is comparable in size to the once-huge Republican slate: The party officially recognizes 17 presidential candidates. One contender, though, does not meet all the federal criteria for a presidential run: He refused to file with the Federal Election Commission because, naturally, he does not recognize its “constitutional authority.”
As foreign as this alternate political universe may be to some voters, many of the race’s dynamics, and the way candidates style themselves, should not be. They have undoubtedly been influenced by the discourse around the Democratic and Republican candidates. As the Libertarian Party’s former nominee, Johnson has been named—or, in some cases, accused—of being the “establishment” guy; Petersen told me his opponent has the “trappings” of an incumbent. (Johnson, for his part, calls “bullshit” on the notion he is “establishment,” citing his pro-small-government record as governor.) Petersen considers himself “sort of like the Bernie Sanders of this race,” because of his individual campaign contributions. And McAfee willingly makes connections between himself and Trump—despite disagreeing with the real-estate mogul on nearly all the issues. Both are candidates who have never held elected office, who have worked as businessmen, and who have enjoyed great wealth, even if their respective finances are both currently murky.
The Libertarian Party’s key challenge is getting voters’ attention, and party officials see the general-election debates as crucial to that effort. Along with other third parties, the Libertarians have taken legal action to see the Commission on Presidential Debates change their qualifying criteria. Currently, per Commission rules, candidates must appear on enough state ballots “to have a mathematical chance of winning a majority vote in the Electoral College” and must get 15 percent of the vote in five national polls selected by the Commission.
Getting on state ballots might not be that difficult: National committee Executive Director Wes Benedict predicts the party will appear on 49 ballots this cycle, though it is aiming for all 50. But when it comes to polls, Johnson said, the party is in a catch-22. He explains the problem this way: Polling companies do not test libertarian candidates because mainstream media does not cover them much, and the mainstream media will not cover them much because they say, “‘You’re not polling.’” Of course, Johnson is not polling because “I’m not in the poll!” He did see some encouraging numbers in one late-March Monmouth University survey, in which he was the only Libertarian tested in a hypothetical contest with Hillary Clinton and Trump. Johnson got 11 percent of the vote. In the 2012 election, he received roughly 1 percent of the vote nationwide, a record for the party.
From the party’s perspective, the consequences of not debating are dire. “When people watch those debates, they think those are the candidates running,” Benedict said, “and others must not matter if they’re not in those televised debates.” The lack of polling and media coverage also makes it difficult to assess where the Libertarian candidates stand in the race. And the candidates themselves don’t even know how many delegates they will snag at the upcoming convention, because Libertarian delegates are uncommitted—or “squishy,” in Petersen’s words. Like Democratic superdelegates, they are not tied to any candidate.
The Libertarian candidates know they have high hurdles to vault, but they sense this cycle could be riper than usual for potential converts: Many voters are disenchanted with the Republicans and Democrats and want somewhere to turn. Even Johnson, who told me back in January that he had “no delusions of grandeur,” last week said yes when I asked if he was in the race to win the presidency. McAfee, known for his intense personality, took a harder line on his eventual victory: “I don’t have the time to waste on folly.”
The contenders are trying to draw major-party voters to their cause. Johnson and Petersen both made overtures to the anti-Trump crowd once Cruz dropped out of the race … and Trump’s nomination looked near certain. Petersen, who bucks his party’s platform by identifying as pro-life, has specifically reached out to Cruz voters on social media.
But it’s not just Republicans they are trying to lure. Benedict said the Libertarian Party sees a “surge” of Republican voters whenever the GOP nominates someone the base does not like. But this year, Democrats could follow that model, too, Benedict suggested. With Sanders’s supporters unhappy about Clinton’s Wall Street ties and “aggressive military stance,” they might be more disposed to vote Libertarian. Libertarians are typically against military intervention abroad.
Johnson said he and Democratic socialist Sanders “part ways” on the economy—which, it should be noted, is no small thing—but Johnson sees commonality on social issues like abortion, crony capitalism, marijuana, and immigration. McAfee said nearly the same thing in a recent Guardian interview, and Petersen suggested to me that Libertarians and the senator’s supporters can indeed find some common ground.
Just weeks away from the convention, Benedict is predicting the best-attended meeting in over a decade, with more than 1,000 Libertarians slated to be there. He does not sound quite as win-focused as the presidential candidates, noting that Libertarians run “to promote certain issues,” not for “a big payoff at the end of the election season.” He said they typically have more luck on the city or county level.
Win or lose, the party has had an effect on the country, Benedict said. “People laughed at us for many years” when Libertarians talked about ending the War on Drugs or legalizing same-sex marriage. But now, “those are becoming policy.” For the candidates, the challenge is to convert those successes into a place at the table in Washington.
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Sometime [last] week the signal went out to the liberal media ant colony, and the drones moved in unison to protect their queen. This report is directly from the Hill:
As the fallout from last weekend’s Nevada Democratic convention spreads, sharply critical pieces about the White House hopeful and his campaign have appeared in progressive outlets such as Mother Jones, Talking Points Memo and Daily Kos within the past 48 hours. …
The Sanders campaign has also taken hits from progressive CNN contributor Sally Kohn, who endorsed the Vermont senator from the stage at a massive rally in New York City just before the Empire State’s April primary.
Kohn wrote an article published Wednesday for Time magazine that was headlined, “I felt the Bern but the Bros are extinguishing the flames.” …
“The one thing I do keep wondering about is what happened to Bernie Sanders,” writer Kevin Drum opined in Mother Jones. “Before this campaign, he was a gadfly, he was a critic of the system, and he was a man of strong principles. He still is, but he’s also obviously very, very bitter. I wonder if all this was worth it for him?”
At Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall said he had been wrong to think that the “key driver of toxicity in the Democratic primary race” had been Sanders’s campaign manager, Jeff Weaver. Instead, he wrote, “it all comes from the very top”—from Sanders himself.
Homer nods: Kohn would be a soldier, not a drone.
There’s more. “Bernie Sanders is playing a dangerous game,” warns the Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson—whose earlier work helped guide the Internal Revenue Service in suppressing conservative speech: “If he and his campaign continue their scorched-earth attacks against the Democratic Party, they will succeed in only one thing: electing Donald Trump as president.”
“With a scorched-earth campaign against [Hillary] Clinton, Sanders is risking his party’s nominee, its coalition, and his message,” echoed Jamelle Bouie of CBS, writing in Slate. There’s that “scorched earth” again. These ants are nothing if not unoriginal.
One of the few liberal pundits not in a full-blown panic is Jeet Heer of the New Republic. “There is no reason to panic,” he insists. “After all, the Democratic primaries were much nastier in 2008, and yet the party won the White House.” Of course no one remembers that far back, so Heer offers a history lesson:
The problem in 2008 was the racial tinge to [Mrs.] Clinton’s last-ditch defense: that Obama was a doomed candidate because of his alleged inability to win over white voters. On May 8, she argued that “I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on,” and cited an article whose findings she summarized thus: “Senator Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.” The contrast between Obama’s base of black voters with the “hard-working” white Americans supporting Clinton, made on the eve of a primary in West Virginia, carried clear racial overtones. …
[Mrs.] Clinton’s rhetorical strategy of insinuating that Obama was too black to be president was echoed by her campaign. … Perhaps the most disturbing comment … came from Hillary Clinton herself, who in late May 2008 justified staying in the race by saying, “We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California.” This came after months of worry that Obama, as the first black candidate with a serious shot at the presidency, would be a target for assassination. Two weeks later, on June 7, she finally suspended her campaign.
There’s no reason to panic at all. After all, it’s not as if the Democrats are about to nominate a candidate with a history of saying racist and disturbing things. Oh, wait. Uh-oh … To be sure, nobody will remember the things Mrs. Clinton said in 2008, unless perhaps Trump uses them in a campaign ad. True, Heer just reminded us of them, but who reads the New Republic anymore?
The trouble is that Mrs. Clinton is, was and ever will be a dismal candidate. “The conventional wisdom holds that Trump’s astronomically high disapproval numbers should make him unelectable,” Robinson writes. “On paper, this should be a cakewalk for any Democrat with a pulse” (metaphor alert). Of course that’s what the Republicans thought, and he dispatched 16 of them.
Still, if any Democrat is poorly positioned to beat Trump, Mrs. Clinton is. A new Fox News poll finds that Mrs. Clinton now outperforms Trump on the revulsion scale. As the Weekly Standard’s Chris Deaton sums up:
The former secretary of state is viewed negatively by 61 percent of registered voters in a new Fox News poll, up from 58 percent in March. Donald Trump, on the other hand, has a 56 percent unfavorable rating—dramatically better than his 65 percent measure in March—and a 41 percent favorable rating, the first time he’s cracked 40 percent in that measure. …
Other highlights from the poll include:
• [Mrs.] Clinton is viewed as more corrupt than Trump, 49 percent to 37 percent;
• Two-thirds of registered voters think Clinton (71 percent) and Trump (65) percent will say “anything to get elected”;
• and more registered voters say Trump is a strong leader than they do [Mrs.] Clinton, with 59 percent saying the designation describes Trump and only 49 percent saying it describes [Mrs.] Clinton.If the election were held today, a large number of voters would regard it as a contest between evils—a contest that, according to the poll, Trump would win narrowly, 45% to 42%. Of course voters could come to see one or the other candidate more favorably—likelier Trump than Mrs. Clinton, we’d venture, since they’ve known her for decades but are still getting used to the idea of him as a politician.
A new New York Times poll still has Mrs. Clinton leading Trump, albeit by single digits (47% to 41%). The Times observes that Trump is “saddled with toxic favorability ratings” and Mrs. Clinton is “widely disliked by voters.”
That “toxic” vs. “disliked” is more anthill behavior. From Russell Berman at the Atlantic last week: “The biggest warning sign for Clinton is that as toxic as Trump has proven for women and minorities, Clinton herself is nearly as disliked by white men.”
Meanwhile, you know who’s neither toxic nor disliked? Bernie Sanders—even though he’s a simple-minded exponent of monstrous ideas. That Times poll has him leading Trump in a hypothetical general-election match-up, 51% to 38%. Even in the Fox poll Sanders is ahead of Trump, 46% to 42%.
The Democrats ought to panic—not over Sanders but over Mrs. Clinton. If they want to make Donald Trump president, they could hardly do better than by going up against him with a nominee who makes Richard Nixon look like a Boy Scout and Michael Dukakis like a rock star.
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Two Beatles anniversaries today:
1964: The Beatles make their third appearance on CBS-TV’s “Ed Sullivan Show.”
1969: “Get Back” (with Billy Preston on keyboards) hits number one:
Meanwhile, today in 1968, Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithful were arrested for drug possession. (Those last five words could apply to an uncountable number of musicians of the ’60s and ’70s.)
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Dr. Jeffrey A. Singer applies logic to the choice of two horrid presidential candidates:
Although my personal political philosophy is libertarian, like most people, over the years I have surrendered to the binary choice our two-party system gives us when casting my vote in presidential elections. I almost always find myself settling for a “lesser of two evils,” but the “evil” is not so great as to prevent me from rationalizing what amounts to, by my vote, an endorsement or affirmation of the candidate.
Because at least rhetorically, the Republican party candidate promises a greater commitment to limited, constitutional government, entitlement reform, tackling the national debt, and a belief in the benefits of free trade, I have voted for the Republican candidate for president ever since Ronald Reagan. The Republicans repeatedly disappoint on matters of foreign policy, seeing the US as world policeman. But the Democrats fare little better on foreign policy—sometimes even worse. So foreign policy as a vote-determining factor between the two major parties tended to be a wash for me. I often profoundly disagree with the Republicans on many of the “culture war” and so-called social issues, but I have had confidence that our Constitution and judiciary will defend against any overreach by Republicans in that area.
So as a matter of practicality, I have tended to base my vote on the differences between the two major party candidates on matters of economic liberty and commitment to the principles of federalism and limited government. I recognize the politicians in both political parties have differing promises but similar results: bigger government, greater debt, less individual liberty. But I use the party platforms and the candidates’ rhetoric to help in my rationalization (some would say self-delusion) that I am voting for someone who will, at best, move things in a better direction or, at worst, be a lesser of two evils that I can live with.
Not so this year. The 2016 offerings of both major parties are so flawed, so authoritarian, so inclined to disregard the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and expand executive power, that even “pretzel logic” will not allow me to rationalize a choice between them.
I still wish to participate in the electoral process. Choosing not to vote is always an option. But I prefer to express my opinion in a less passive manner. Not voting certainly provides the satisfaction of knowing that I did not sanction or legitimize the offerings of the two major parties. But that satisfaction is only personal and private. I want to more actively make my views known. Using the following chain of logic, I have found a positive way to express myself through, what I believe, is the most effective allocation of my vote in November:
1) According to Professor Ilya Somin in Democracy and Political Ignorance, my vote has, on average, a roughly 1 in 60 million chance of being the decisive vote in the Presidential election. (It might be a great as 1 in 10 million in my relatively small state of Arizona. It would have a roughly 1 in a billion chance of being decisive if I lived in California.)
2) If I vote for the lesser of evils and hold my nose, my vote is blended in with millions of others—there is no way to register my dissatisfaction with the choices the two major parties have given me. There is no way to separate those who voted for a lesser of two evils from those who voted because they actually LIKED the candidate.
3) If I vote for the Libertarian party candidate, I am directly affecting the vote total of that candidate. Because that candidate will get fewer total votes than the major party candidates, when all votes are totaled up, I will have had a greater effect on raising the total percentage of votes for the Libertarian candidate. If the Libertarian candidate garners say, 5 percent of the vote as opposed to 1 percent, then my vote made a greater impact in making a statement than it would have if it was folded in with the 40 or 50 million voters who voted for a major party candidate.
4) If the Libertarian candidate gets say, 5 percent of the vote, then that clearly means that 5 percent of the voters chose a candidate that they KNEW had absolutely no chance of winning, rather than choosing the lesser of two evils. What’s more, they chose the candidate with the most pro-freedom, pro-Constitution, pro-Bill of Rights program. That sends a clear message.
Therefore:
5) By casting my vote for the Libertarian presidential candidate, my vote is actually more meaningful and makes more of a statement.
My conclusion: Voting for the lesser of two evils is statistically and strategically wasting my vote. I will vote Libertarian for president this year. This rationale does not necessarily apply to how I will vote in the down ballot races, where my vote has a greater numerical impact, I have a greater ability to directly communicate my views, and I might have less marked dissatisfaction with many of the candidates.
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Robert Eno demonstrates why Donald Trump is not a conservative:
[Tuesday], the New York Times reports that long-time Donald Trump advisor Roger Stone expects Trump to campaign to the “left of Hillary Clinton” on a variety of issues. This of course is not a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention to CR Editor-in-Chief Mark Levin. Levin has been warning about the progressive roots of populism for months now on his radio and television programs. The Trump camp has gone so far as to say every position Trump has taken up until now is just a “suggestion.”
The Times article entitled, “Donald Trump Borrows From Bernie Sanders’s Playbook to Woo Democrats,” lays out a convincing case about Trump’s progressive bona fides.
On a range of issues, Mr. Trump seems to be taking a page from the Sanders playbook, expressing a willingness to increase the minimum wage, suggesting that the wealthy may pay higher taxes than under his original proposal, attacking Mrs. Clinton from the left on national security and Wall Street, and making clear that his opposition to free trade will be a centerpiece of his general election campaign.
As Mr. Trump lays the groundwork for his likely showdown with Mrs. Clinton, he is staking out a series of populist positions that could help him woo working-class Democrats in November. But in doing so, he is exacerbating the trepidation some Republicans already feel about his candidacy at a moment when the party typically rallies to its nominee.
The populist persona Trump has crafted for himself is in fact progressive. …
A look back at Trump’s 30 plus years of public life shows that he has been a lifelong progressive on many issues. Many of the positions he took this year are not positions he has held for decades. Many were carefully crafted for the primary campaign. Now that that portion of the campaign is over, he and his team are reminding folks that everything he has said are “just suggestions.”
This means all of his campaign promises up to this point are negotiable, and don’t actually reflect what he would try to do in office. That’s not a pundit saying this; those were Trump’s own words.
Trump’s longtime adviser, Stone, made it clear to the Times that Trump would take a punitive tone with banks, highly modeled on the progressive attacks from the left:
Roger J. Stone Jr., a longtime adviser to Mr. Trump, said he expected the presumptive Republican nominee to grow aggressive on the banks. ‘Who’s been tougher on bankers than Donald Trump?’ asked Mr. Stone, suggesting Mr. Trump could appeal to some of Mr. Sanders’s supporters. ‘He’s taken them to the cleaners. I think he has a healthy skepticism and deep knowledge of bankers and how they operate. He’s going to be tough on Wall Street.’ Mr. Trump has said that ‘the hedge fund guys are getting away with murder.’
Mr. Stone added that Mr. Trump will also have a built-in layer of defense as he appeals to blue-collar voters, because he will be less vulnerable to traditional Democratic attacks over Republican efforts to rein in entitlement programs. ‘Unlike all these establishment Republicans, he’s been adamant about never touching entitlements,’ Mr. Stone said. ‘You can’t run that play on Donald Trump.’
This is not an abandonment of conservative principles by Trump, in that he never had any to begin with. It is a shift, by the voters in the Republican Party, away from limited government to statist nationalism—a move that many in the GOP are lining up behind, with no questions asked. Take for example Newt Gingrich, who stood up for the progressive populist Trump just last week. Here’s what The Hill reported about Gingrich’s response to Ted Cruz’s non-endorsement of Trump.
‘I mean I just think — I don’t know what Ted was thinking of,’ Gingrich said. ‘To me, it’s pretty clear that this is over. Trump is the nominee. That’s why I disagreed with [Speaker] Paul Ryan [R-Wis.]. I thought that the moment to say, “OK, we have the leader of the team, let’s pull the team together, let’s go beat Hillary,” has arrived.‘You’re either for Hillary Clinton or you’re for Donald Trump. If you’re not for Donald Trump, you are functionally helping Hillary Clinton. I think it’s just that straightforward.’
The Republican power players are all telling conservatives that they have to either get behind Donald Trump or be labeled Clinton enablers. This is a trap that assumes there are only two options. It requires conservatives to choose a party over principles. That is something Newt Gingrich used to fight against.
It is becoming increasingly clear that Donald Trump is an amorphous populist who will adopt any position needed to gain unfettered access to the Oval Office. He has certainly, by his recent actions, proven Levin right. Populism is a building block for progressivism, and populists are ultimately progressives.
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Today in 1969, the Who released their rock opera “Tommy” …
… two years before Iron Butterfly disbanded over arguments over what “In a Gadda Da Vita” (which is one-third the length of all of “Tommy”) actually meant:
The number one British album today in 1970 was “McCartney,” named for you know who:
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 