Ben Domenech points out that Libertarian Party faithful are white with rage over an Op-Ed in the New York Times demonstrating their counter-productive effects:
The folks in Oklahoma will have a Democrat governor for the next four years, however — and I’d personally like to know if Radley would’ve voted for Largent, or the Independent. Those national softwood lumber policy arguments don’t work in the OK election, and it’s clear the Indie vote made the difference there (he got 14% of the total after running ad after ad against Largent). Would Radley have broken off from the anti-tax pro-gun arch-conservative Largent because he’s a pro-life social conservative, as well?
The money graf from the Op-Ed (by John Miller):
Yet Libertarians are now serving, in effect, as Democratic Party operatives. The next time they wonder why the Bush tax cuts aren’t permanent, why Social Security isn’t personalized and why there aren’t more school-choice pilot programs for low-income kids, all they have to do is look in the mirror.
Radley joins Professor Reynolds, Robert Prather, and Clayton Cramer in attempting to dodge Miller’s empirical evidence by throwing up emotionally-charged anecdotes. I thought Cramer was smarter than that.
The arithmetic of third parties is inescapable as long as we don’t have a runoff system. Smart enough people who have views outside the two-party mainstream have recognized this, and formed a Liberty Caucus in the Republican Party to advocate for Libertarian ideas, and a Progressive Caucus in the Democratic Party to lobby for Green ideas. It’s especially odd, with not-too-bright Greens like Ronnie Dugger telling his buds to forget about Nader and vote Dem in ’04 (“Ralph, Don’t Run“) that the supposedly intelligent Libertarians are still throwing temper tantrums (as more than one of the comments on Radley’s site says) over the laws of arithmetic.
See this post for my take on the Libertarian Party’s electoral effects this year.
It has nothing to do with arithemtic. Do you really think that if Republicans had the four Senate seats Miller says Democrats won because of libertarian votes, we’d now have Social Security reform, school choice, and a reformed tax code?
That’s awfully naive.
Miller blames libertarians for the fact that we don’t have school choice or Social Security reform.
I think that’s a pretty ridiculous position to take, considering that Republicans are running like hell from both of those issues — even now that they control all three lawmaking bodies.
Give me one thing Bush has done that libertarians can take heart in. The tax cut, perhaps. But he’s more than made up for that by his cynical, political decisions on trade.
When it comes to rolling back the size and scope of government, there’s no longer a difference between Republicans and Democrats. In rhetoric, perhaps. But not in results. Libertarians aren’t to blame for that. Republicans are.
Gee Radley, I thought you understood how the system works, but I was wrong. Making sweeping changes in major social programs, such as the tax code, Social Security, and drug policy requires more than a razor-slim legislative majority, it requires a mandate. Even the Senate rules don’t allow bills to go forward (with the exception of the budget resolution) without 60 votes.
We were getting close to the 60 vote majority in 1996, but Clinton out-foxed us and we acted dumb. Christopher Hitchens defined terrorism recently as “asking for the impossible while holding a gun to the head of the innocent”. Libertarians and Greens are practicing electoral terrorism by this definition.
Push your agenda in the Primaries, and do the responsible thing in the General. That’s all we ask.
So now Libertarians are terrorists?
The trouble isn’t that Republicans are moving too slowly toward libertarian reforms. It’s that they’re moving rapidly *away* from liberty, toward more spending and more regulation. So fuck ’em. If they lose some races because the small-l libertarians bolt to the big-L libertarians, maybe they’ll learn to take our concerns into consideration next time.
That doesn’t necessarily mean bringing us radical libertarian change. It does mean not making things worse.
Post more often, will you?
This debate intrigues me. The Greens are obviously “spoilers” to the Dems because they are like the Dems, only more so, on a one dimentional scale. Back when I was a libertarian about ten years ago, I believed that I was outside that spectrum, to the left of Republicans on social issues, to the right of Democrats on ecconomic issues. So while it is natural to assume that a progressive would prefer a Democrat to a Republican, ten years ago it would not have necessarily made sense for a libertarian to prefer a Republican to a Democrat.
So what has changed in the last ten years that makes a “liberty” caucus in the Republican party seem like a more natural place for libertarians than a “free market” caucus in the Democratic party? Is the Christian Coalition THAT dead? Or is it that the libertarian two-dimential analysis was fraud all along and libertarians were always just right-wingers?
-Tim
I’m a regional director for the Republican Liberty Caucus of Texas, and I think Miller and his ilk need to understand that most pro-liberty voters already vote Republican. An article like Miller’s irritates a lot of people who already vote Republican without persuading the ones who don’t.
I still think that the individual candidates who have lost by less than the LP vote probably could have done something to spare themselves that fate. When I’m trying to persuade my Lib friends to vote Republican, it helps when the individual candidate gives me some material to work with. When John Thune decided not just to run away from Social Security reform but also to try to poison the well for future reform, he made it much harder for my equivalent in South Dakota to say to SD Libbers, “This Republican deserves your vote.” (Notice that Jim Talent took a much more courageous stand on Social Security and won his Senate race.)
Instead of scolding the people who decided to vote Libertarian, how about scolding the politicians who couldn’t bring themselves to make even the most minimal nods to pro-liberty sensibilities? Did Miller contact the Thune campaign before the election to tell them to take Libertarian voters seriously? Or is he just throwing his own temper tantrum after the fact?