Libertarianism

There’s a presidential primary race afoot in the Libertarian party, America’s third largest. In 2016, the Libertarians nominated former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson, and as his running mate, former Massachusetts governor Bill Weld. Their ticket received 3.28 percent of the national popular vote, the largest third-party vote share since 1996 and the best ever Libertarian performance. For 2020, party leaders hope to break that record. Dan Fishman, executive director of the Libertarian National Committee, says the goal is to crest 5 percent of the popular vote, the share above which a minor party becomes eligible for federal campaign funding. ‘The numbers could be even higher,’ Fishman said.

Here’s a shocker: people are more complicated than the caricatures disseminated by their enemies suggest. Witness the stupefyingly rich David Koch, who together with his brother Charles, presided over a business empire worth some $115 billion. David, who died on Friday at 79 after a long battle with prostate cancer, was at one with his brother in embracing a staunch libertarian philosophy of government and also in his belief in the power of philanthropic investment. When you control a personal fortune of $50 billion, you are in a position to distribute philos to many anthropoi. This the Koch brothers did, on a breathtaking scale. A lot of their money, and a lot of money they leveraged from other conservative donors, was siphoned to political candidates of whom they approved.

Sometimes in politics you win without actually winning. Barry Goldwater and George McGovern, two candidates who lost in blow-out landslides to Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon, are the obvious examples. Johnson won in 1964, but it was Goldwater’s campaign that indicated where American politics was heading in the next 20 years. McGovern lost in 1972, but the 'acid, amnesty, and abortion' ideology that held him back at the time became, in only slightly diluted form, the regnant social orientation of the Democratic party from his day to our own.More recently, Ron Paul lost his two campaigns for the Republican presidential nomination — in 2008 and 2012 — but won anyway.

My libertarian friends object to some of my recent writings — in particular, an essay for First Things proposing a moderate economic nationalism as ‘A New Conservative Agenda.’ The various intellectual factions on the American right are all susceptible to utopianism and dangerously wishful thinking when they dwell too much in their own minds: they all need the benefit of a look through someone else’s eyes once in a while, even to see their own concerns more clearly. In the letter below, I respond to some friends’ objections and summarize — tidily, I hope — a few vital questions to which libertarians offer inadequate answers.

If William Floyd Weld wins his primary challenge against President Trump, it will be the greatest political miracle since Jesus Christ intervened to advise Emperor Constantine before the Battle of Milvian Bridge. Weld has no fan base, no name recognition, no political machine. His brand of let-them-eat-cake libertarianism has zero traction in either major party. His complaint to CNN that ‘the President does not exhibit curiosity about history’ probably won’t resonate with the party’s base, given how quickly they took to demanding Trump imprison his opponent once he was elected.

A Republican comes within a hair’s breadth of winning a Senate seat — only to lose when the Libertarian Party candidate draws more votes than difference between the majority-party candidates’ numbers. Elsewhere, a Democrat is narrowly defeated when a Green Party candidate takes a few percentage points in a tight race where the Republican has less than a single point’s lead. These scenarios have played out a several times in recent elections, including on Tuesday. Only in the past 24 hours has Kyrsten Sinema, the Democrats’ candidate for Senate in Arizona, pulled ahead of her Republican rival by half a percent, as votes continue to be counted. The Green Party candidate in that race won 2.3 percent.