Six Reflections in Search of an Election

1. So many wonderful entertainers perished on the stage this Tuesday! And I will miss them all. Mark Udall, who pushed women’s issues so hard in his campaign for senator from Colorado that respectable people called him Mark Uterus. Martha Coakley, who ran for governor of Massachusetts with but one purpose — to make everybody laugh — and fulfilled it brilliantly. The two successive Democratic candidates for Senate from the state of Montana — a retired Army officer whose response to his allegedly traumatic service in Iraq was a mad career as plagiarist, and a math teacher who doubled as a far-left video blogger, specializing in inane satires of people she disliked. And is Alison Lundergan Grimes, former Democratic candidate for US Senate from the Commonwealth of Kentucky, still bound by professional ethics not to reveal how she voted? Will we be forced to guess whether she voted for herself on Tuesday, or bolted to Mitch McConnell?

2. The Clintons lost 31 of the 48 races they campaigned in.

3. When Carl DeMaio, an openly gay candidate, campaigned for Congress in a notably non-gay district, the 52nd in California, he received no national attention — because he’s a Republican. The votes are still being counted, but he will probably win. As I write, the results of this election are still in doubt, the 52% of votes that were cast with absentee ballots not having been counted. You know how efficient the government is.

4. All the political commentary preceding this election emphasized the extraordinarily large number of extremely close major races. Yet in most instances, Republicans won by margins ranging from the substantial to the stupefying. Are people lying to pollsters? If so, why? Are the polls weighted against the Republicans? Or is polling (perish the thought) not yet fully predictive, or even snapshot accurate?

5. Ask yourself what kind of role Barack Obama would play in a political system that had no effective checks and balances. What internal checks would keep him from becoming a dictator? None; none at all. We know that whenever he has been able to wield dictatorial power, he has wielded it; and he has proudly promised to do even more of that after the election. You can ask yourself the same thing about many of the people who have surrounded him as advisors, and about such elected leaders as Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid.

If nothing else, this election served the fundamental purpose of denying absolute power and apparent legitimacy to such people as that. You may feel intellectual contempt for Mitch McConnell and John Boehner — everybody does! But they notably lack the dictatorial temperament. And even if they didn’t, the victory of their party at both state and national levels means that dictatorial power has received a mighty check.

6. Albert Jay Nock, who is commonly regarded as a founder of libertarianism, wrote an autobiography entitled Memoirs of a Superfluous Man. Could today’s libertarians write similar accounts of our own lives?Certainly not. Libertarian ideas are everywhere in American society. They set much of the agenda of the two major parties, from legalization of drugs to reduction of taxes. The problem, of course, is that the ideas are inadequately distributed, that each of the parties has only half the libertarian agenda — Democrats, generally, the civil libertarian side, and Republicans, generally, the financial libertarian side — and that each of them fills the missing, nonlibertarian side with ideas so bizarre that one can only greet them with laughter (on one’s way to jail, perhaps).

So we libertarians are no superfluous people. But if the Libertarian Party were to write its autobiography, Memoirs of a Superfluous Org might now be an appropriate title.

In this election, most LP candidates drew, as usual, very small numbers of votes. In a handful of states, however, their performance was notable. As I write, Robert Sarvis, LP candidate for Senate in Virginia, holds (with 2.5% of the counted votes) the balance between the Republican and the Democratic candidates, who are separated by 0.5%. If you believe survey results (see above), Sarvis drew more from the Republican than from the Democratic side, and may, when all votes are counted, have cost the Republicans the election. Certainly this was what the Democrats in Alaska thought, when they helped out the LP candidate in an attempt to deflect Republican voters. Yet the polling about Sarvis and about Sean Haugh, LP Senate candidate in North Carolina, indicates a grab-bag of voters, holding views on virtually every side of every issue.

As readers of these pages know, I am a dedicated proponent of voting for the lesser of the two evils. If you don’t vote for the lesser evil, you increase the chances of the greater evil. So Libertarians who throw elections to the more aggressively statist of the two major parties, which at the moment is the Democratic Party, are voting for that aggressive statism. According to me. But everyone can see the fallacy of the idea, constantly urged, that the Libertarian Party wages “educational” campaigns. Throwing an election to a party you loath is not educational, and if you don’t even get enough votes to throw an election, how educational have you been?

By the way, I am a registered Libertarian.