Every four years, Liberty offers a forum in which the claims of the Democratic, the Libertarian, and the Republican presidential nominees are presented, along with a case for not voting at all. It’s a testament to the continuing diversity of thought in the libertarian movement, as well as the difficulty and urgency of finding a place in contemporary politics where individual liberty can flourish.
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For your consideration, here’s a selection of political headlines:
- Biden Calls for Smaller Government
- Dem Leaders Denounce “Toxic Masculinity” of BLM Protestors
- House Dems Insist: Remove 2 Trillion from Trump Budget
- Trump Seconds Teacher Unions: “Cancel Charter Schools”
- Harris Claims “No Need to Change”: “Almost Everyone Likes Their Private Health Insurance”
- Dem Talking Point: Private Property Is a Civil Right
- “Enough Is Enough”: Trump Bans Guns in Private Hands
- Trump Admin Mandates End of Gas-Powered Cars
- Trump Sponsors Nine-Point Reparations Bill: Would Mandate 25 New Gov’t Agencies
Preposterous? Yes. The likelihood of your ever seeing anything like those headlines is nonexistent. What you do see is the exact opposite.
And that’s the point. That’s sufficient argument to vote for Trump and against the Democrats.
But if you insist on more arguments, I’ll continue.
Obviously, Trump is an obnoxious braggart and boor. His business dealings are not beyond reproach. His manners, to people whom he doesn’t like (and they’re the only ones who count when it comes to manners), are sometimes shocking to observe.
Yet his organized political opponents are people whom libertarians — with good reason — hate and fear. When he talks about “the swamp,” when he denounces the mainstream media as purveyors of “fake news,” when he scorns Republican “moderates” as traitors, bores, and fools, he’s plainly right. And was about time somebody said it. It’s refreshing — and at this time, sadly, it’s also vital — for a president to pierce the veil of pomposity and privilege and to say the truth about the true evil of the political class.
The control group of that class is the Democratic Party and its billionaire backers. They are fanatical seekers of power who have chosen two egregious examples of their kind — Biden and Harris — to sell the boobs of America (that’s what they think we are) on what a poet called “spices for the few and fetters for the crew.” Biden and Harris are hack politicians carrying loads of angry entitlement that are heavy enough to crush any normal human being. But they are not normal human beings, and they are not the real players in this game. The real players are the Soros-Bezos-Disney-Silicon Valley class and the Pelosi-Schumer-Ocasio Cortez-Hillary Clinton-James Comey class.
These are people whose desire is always to control, never to liberate. Their idea of reducing violence by police is to increase control by social workers. Their idea of reparations is not to give black Americans money they can spend or invest but to swell the funding of government agencies allegedly ministering to the poor, and actually betraying them. Their idea of helping people of color is not to free them from stifling regulations but to lodge them safely in crime-ridden government housing and to raise the minimum wage so they can’t escape by getting jobs, meanwhile denying them charter schools and confining their kids to government slave barracks where they will be taught that they are victims of racism who can only survive by becoming vassals of the state.
When Trump talks about “the swamp,” when he denounces the mainstream media as purveyors of “fake news,” when he scorns Republican “moderates” as traitors, bores, and fools, he’s plainly right.
Every aspect of progressive “liberalism” was proven wrong and destructive long ago. Yet it survives and flourishes. It is taught in the schools, arms itself in the streets, and barricades itself in the impenetrable fortresses of the deep state. Why? Because the Democratic Party and its wealthy backers fund it, culture it, and isolate it from criticism by means of mobs, media, cancel culture, and blank obstruction and obfuscation. Trump spoke out against it, and what did he get? A continuous and ever-escalating campaign of hate against him and a host of humble supporters. A superbly well-funded industry of judge shopping, in which platoons of lawyers go from court to court, getting judges to enjoin Trump’s actions for any light or laughable reason they can find. A conspiracy between Democratic leaders and the “intelligence community” (i.e., secret police) to prevent Trump from taking office, and then to drive him from office with charges that he checked into a Moscow hotel where he paid prostitutes to cavort with him while urinating on a bed once graced by Barack Obama.
This is what Trump’s opponents are like; these are the things they come up with. But they didn’t stop with that. They impeached Trump for the alleged crime of firing a corrupt FBI director. When that failed, they threatened to impeach him again, and now that he has been hospitalized for — let’s face it — the flu, they aspire to turn him out of office as medically or mentally incapacitated. Do you get it? If they can do these things to him, they can — and will — do worse to you.
When Trump appointed judges chosen by the standard of textual originalism that is generally favored by libertarians, his nominees were hysterically smeared by the Democrats and their media. Not content with this kind of indecency, they condoned and often encouraged campaigns of violence directed not just at Trump, his supporters, and his supposed supporters, but at black and brown people who had the misfortune to live or work in the proximity of black and white looters and vandals, united only by their hatred of “Trump and everything he stands for.”
This is what you vote for when you vote against Trump.
In case you’ve wondered, LOL! — Donald Trump is no libertarian. He loves government expenditures on “infrastructure.” He reduced some taxes but never tried to reform the tax structure. He is nearly oblivious to the enormous and constantly growing federal debt. His “stimulations” of the economy are the same childish stuff that earlier administrations played with, and very expensively (the Democrats angrily denounce him for not spending more). Unlike most libertarians, Trump is anti-abortion (though he has done no more than other Republicans to interfere with it). Unlike some libertarians, he wants to stop illegal immigration (though the apocalypse of deportations imagined by his opponents has never come close to happening, and the deal he offered to settle the DACA problem was refused by congressional Democrats). He likes the idea of protectionism but has done little to implement it, except with regard to China, and he concluded an excellent freer-trade agreement with Mexico and Canada. Like virtually all Democratic politicians, he wants to halt the trade in “hard drugs”; about marijuana — which is almost entirely an issue for the states — he appears uninterested. More important from a libertarian point of view, he constantly denounces foreign military involvements and attempts to reduce them. He is the most isolationist president in almost 100 years — and for this he is mercilessly censured by the Democratic leadership.
In every case in which Trump spent money, the Democrats attacked him for not spending more. In every case in which he lowered taxes, they attacked him — and yes, mercilessly again, because they are always merciless — for allegedly helping the rich and hurting the poor. In every case in which he ended or reduced government regulations — and here he has actually done a great deal to limit intrusive government — they have fought him determinedly in the media and the courts.
The Democrats have done us the favor of showing what is promised by a Democrat hegemony. In the economy, more regulations, more taxes and, of course, more debt. In education, a virtual end to charter schools, a government take-over of pre-schools, and a blanketing of curricula by socialist and “anti-racist” indoctrination. In the workplace, ever-present sexual and racial (actually sexist and racist) monitoring, with exclusive preferences and privileges for the fanatical and the cynical. On the streets, continued aid and toleration for roving or squatting mobs of cultural revolutionists, intent on intimidating people like you, whoever you are, and the chronic, deadly violence of the inner cities, exacerbated by the end of policing for “minor” crimes — such as the crimes against property that make life hell for aspiring blacks and Latinos — and the release without bail of people accused of major crimes. In civil liberties, the total indifference to rights that is routinely displayed by Democratic officials everywhere in alleged response to the coronavirus; and the swift abolition of gun rights by means of executive decrees and regulations imposed by “health” orgs of government, protected by Democratic judges. In government structure, a packed Supreme Court, new states devised to create a permanently Democratic Senate, and open borders designed to create insuperable Democratic majorities.
I submit that these are not favorable conditions for the growth or even the existence of liberty.
But if that’s what you want, be sure not to vote, or to throw a useless vote to the Libertarian Party, or to vote for Biden and Harris out of spite for something you don’t like about Trump. Trump has done many things that are important to the cause of liberty, but he’s not a libertarian, so this is your chance to ensure the victory of people who are fanatical opponents of anything like liberty as we define it.
If you cherish the fantastic delusion that when the Republican Party is defeated it will reform itself and become more libertarian, I’d advise you to print off a picture of Mitt Romney and tack it to your wall.
If those are the people and the policies you want, you know how to get them.
If they’re not what you want, vote Republican.
To put this in another way: if you’re a libertarian, I urge you — I beg of you — when you vote, use the same kind of logic that you use in the normal emergencies of life. When your house is on fire, you call the fire department. You don’t hesitate to do so because they’re getting too much tax money, or their racial balance is not quite right, or some of the fire fighters are big, loud, obnoxious guys with retrograde views on sex. You don’t wait and hope that the fire will go away. You don’t promise yourself an invigorating few decades of life on the streets. And you certainly don’t decide to teach the fire department a lesson by calling on the arsonists to come back and light more fires.
By the way, if you cherish the fantastic delusion that when the Republican Party is defeated it will reform itself and become more libertarian, I’d advise you to print off a picture of Mitt Romney and tack it to your wall. That’s who’s going to be ruling the Republican Party if Trump loses. The defeat of Trump would be the vindication of every elitist, power-sucking, corner-office, “my people will get back to you,” “I feel your pain,” lord of the manor, “moderate,” sell-out, dumbass RINO in the country. The next Republican candidate for president would be — guess who? – Jeb Bush. Or his clone. They’re all clones, really, and what they bitterly resent — what all these people bitterly resent — is the fact that Trump is not.
