I have a friend who is a libertarian, verging on anarchist. (He actually used to be an anarchist, but backed off to a “minimal state libertarian.”)
He is all in favor of Trump.
How can this work? Yes, Clinton is a liberal, with all that entails. Easy to see why a libertarian would not support her.
But Trump? His proposals are all “big government.” Everything he says he’ll do would expand the power of the government. He wants to use the power of the Presidency to do…a whole bunch of things he never exactly specifies. He’s talked of using Executive Orders to require the death penalty for shooting a police officer. He wants to expand the power of Homeland Security to keep people out of the country.
How in the name of heck can a libertarian/anarchist support Trump?
(Phrased as a question, but I’ll state my debate point: Trump should be utterly anathema to libertarians, because his program of changes would vastly expand the power of the government, and specifically the Presidency.)
I’m going to be brutally blunt: American libertarians are some of the most retarded goddamned voters in the country. I saw this shit when Ron Paul was running. They were actually in many ways the inspiration for the Tea Party. Libertardianism is basically the radical republican party minus the evangelicalism.
Well, that’s one Libertarian for Trump. Don’t know if that makes a trend, however. It has been mentioned that Trump is anti-regulation, however, all Republicans are anti-regulation so I am not too sure what that has to do with anything.
Maybe, but telling disaffected Republicans that there’s a Republican-lite party, headed by 2 ex-Republican governors trying to recapture the fiscally conservative, socially conscious party of Ronald Reagan, has suddenly become a new pastime of mine.
It might be b*******, but I’ve had some successes in convincing some R’s to look at them.
Well, there is that. FTR, I have found few philosophies more inane, less workable IRL, than Libertarianism, and in the eighth grade I was a Communist. Seemed like the thing to do in '68. Note: I was 13.
Libertarians vote for Trump the same reason Greens vote for Hillary: they want improve the odds of candidate who’s more similar to their own view and has a chance to win.
I’ll expand on it, though: There are some number of Libertarians who are principled anti-government true believers who see the GOP as a lesser-of-two-evils proposition given the inherently two-party nature of our electoral system. This is still wrong on multiple levels, in addition to being factually incorrect, and I don’t know how many of them there still are given the marked drop in IQ evinced by the Republican Party’s candidates over the past eight years. Personally, I was done with the Republicans after less than one term of George W. Bush and I was a Democrat by 2004.
However, a nontrivial number of Libertarians are people who want to turn the clock back on Civil Rights and the First Amendment, and think they can do that at the state and local levels as long as the Federal government is kept small and ineffective. They’re less concerned about foreign policy (and note how Trump is blatantly self-contradictory on foreign policy, letting people read whatever they want into him) and the actual size of the overall government as long as their home state can institute a cozy little race-based theocracy with no courts or Federalized National Guard spoiling the fun.
It might be that simple, but it doesn’t add up for me. Trump has promised to rule by decree, just about the most opposite tactic possible to the libertarian ideal.
In the particular case of my friend…I can’t tell if he’s an idiot or not. He’s one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever known…but it took him twenty years to get over anarchism.
But how is Trump really “more similar” to their own view? Again, I can easily see why they don’t like Clinton, but how can they conceivably like Trump? He’s much more “imperialistic” than Clinton. He’s promised to rule by Executive Order. He doesn’t show any comprehension of the role of the Constitution.
How could anyone who thinks he believes in a small, weak, limited government conceivably favor Trump, who wants to be America’s Julius Caesar, if not our Augustus Caesar? The guy is Napoleon without the hat.
There are indeed thoughtful libertarianish types, but I would put them into the category of your 1980s and 1990s Wall Street Republican: pensive, intellectual conservatives who seek to minimize regulation and government intrusiveness, but who also reject oversimplification. What the hell ever happened to conservatives like William Buckley?
Trump has spoken out in favor of many aspects of the welfare state. He supports social security, medicaid, medicare. So it isn’t just the fact that he is anti-civil rights, Trump is also pro-welfare state.
He wants to eliminate the ACA, so maybe libertarians are attracted to that.
Libertarianism is purely and simply a religion. It has the same mindset of believing that the world would become a utopia if only everyone thought exactly like I do. And that everybody therefore should be forced to believe in exactly the same way.
If Libertarians hear Trump voicing some of those beliefs, it’s like a call from above.
In fact, he’s a William Buckley for our time. Buckley was a racist Catholic theocrat out of whose millions of words a few plain cries could be gleaned by the conservative movement, and those alone made him eligible for sainthood and even prophethood.
It’s not just deregulation that has Libertarians wetting their pants; it’s also the elimination of things like capital gains taxes, and lowering taxes on corporate profits that’s really giving wet dreams to people like the Kochs and their network of billionaires. Because too much money is never enough.
Chefguy: Good point about the attraction of lowering taxes and deregulation to rich libertarians, who (not entirely unreasonably) want to become more rich.
But what attraction could Trump have for ideological extremists who hate “government” in all its forms? Trump’s alignment with Putin should make him anathema to someone who hates big governments.
(My friend cheered the Brexit, and wants the entire EU to shatter. He believes the South should have won the American Civil War. He wants California to separate into five different states. He’s the most centrifugalist chap possible. I just can’t figure how Trump could appeal to that specific ideology.)
Trump has no interest in governing, as is easily seen by his rhetoric. He pays lip service to whatever demographic he’s speaking to. Hate big government? He’s does, too. Want more government? So does he. I believe that the only place where he is sincere is when he talks about things that will benefit Trump and those like him. It’s a cash and power grab by a ruthless thug.
Libertarians are all about oversimplification, because their philosophy provides a simple answer to nearly everything: Eliminate the government, let the Free Market sort it out. The only exception is that the less frothing ones think there’s a role for police and military, but only in a purely reactive, defensive capacity, and not in the “Department of Defense” meaning of “defensive”, either.
A number of them have the dogma that there is no crime unless you can point to a single, specific victim who was directly hurt by the criminal’s actions. This takes the “no victimless crimes” policy a few steps over the line into wackyland: A “victimless crime” is something like prostitution or pornography or pill-popping, and liberals/progressives are usually all about eliminating victimless crimes of that variety. However, the extreme Libertarian take on it would make it impossible to prosecute pollution: Nobody was hurt the instant the dioxin entered the waterway, and by the time someone does have cancer, nobody can be proven to be responsible. This is the implied stance of the Libertarians who think lawsuits can solve pollution, and therefore we don’t need the EPA.
It’s all a massive over-simplification, and what gets me is the people who claim it’s more adult than real politics. It doesn’t encourage personal responsibility, it’s a way to dodge personal responsibility until and unless you actually flip out and shoot someone or commit some other blatant act.
Buckley thought AIDS was the special curse of the gay community and during his time at National Review argued against the Civil Rights movement. People like him are the mainstream GOP.
