Will Libertarians ever get their foot in the door?

Great Debates
1

Ok, I’m not a big follower of politics (hence why I’m starting this thread) but I do try to keep my eyes and ears open as much as possible. This is basically what I see:

Republicans are in favor of big business, they’re mostly religious, against abortion.

Democrats are against guns. In favor of the environment. In favor of higher taxes I think (or is that the Republicans? Or is it both?)
They’re both against drugs. They’re both in favor of big government. They both want to continue making new laws instead of repealing or at least rethinking some of the ridiculous laws in effect right now.
Now Libertarians, on the other hand, seem to be for the people. From what I can tell they believe in a constitutional government of the people, for the people, and by the people. They believe in lower taxes. They believe in the garuntee of all civil rights. They believe in ending the ridiculous war on drugs (I don’t do drugs but I’m tired of paying for other people to get in trouble for them.)

So why don’t Libertarians get any votes? Is it a lack of money? Do they have a downside I’m not seeing? Is it just a simple lack of awareness? Will things change in the foreseable future?

2

Assuming you’re talking about the Libertarian Party, there are lots of reasons. These are some of them in my opinion:

[ul]
[li]Money — big business does not support the LP because the LP advocates the elimination of corporate welfare[/li][li]Image — for whatever reason, LP candidates (with the exception of Ron Paul) have always come across as poofy intellectuals[/li][li]Incompetence — they don’t know how to run a political party[/li][li]Republicrats — the two major parties use their power and money to effectively block out third parties from serious consideration by enacting legislation that makes ballot access difficult and sometimes nearly impossible; they also control the major debates[/li][li]Media — the media perpetuate the notion of a two-party system by selective coverage[/li][/ul]

3

Well, just to throw it out there, perhaps Libertarians don’t get the votes because the voters don’t like Libertarian ideas.

No doubt the structural problems cited above do artificially depress Libertarian vote totals and electoral success, but bear in mind this is still a country where a considerable majority of the citizenry is demonstrably in favor of the continued criminalization of marijuana.

4

That’s entirely possible, Buck. You make a good point. Our inoffensive Noncoercion Principle actually frightens some people, who fear that they might fail if they had to live or die by their own decisions, unable to force others to carry their load.

After all, which is more appealing?

A. I’ll take some of Johnny’s candy and give it to you.

B. If you want candy, you’ll have to get yourself by fair means.

5

All I’m saying is, don’t fall into the fallacy of “If we could only explain it to them properly, they’d agree with us–if they don’t agree, our message just must not be gettting out!”

I think many of us know from personal experience how easy it can be to slip into that kind of reasoning (“Gee, if most people around here are Christians, it must be because they were brain-washed or something, or they’re just ignorant of all the ways the religion they’ve been spoon-fed is wrong”). There’s probably a nice Latin phrase for this.

6

Oh, no argument from me. When I said the idea frightens them, I did not mean because they don’t understand, but because they do.

7

The Libertarian Party can provide a useful purpose as a tiny splinter party, but that’s about it.

The Party supports a number of controversial proposals. Many of its ideas has some support and possible merit, but the collection of these ideas in total add up to anarchy and the combinations of one proposal included with others is a mix with virtually no political base.

The people that view the eliminatiion drug laws as desirable are either not interested in or directly opposed to such ideas as the elimination of minimum wage, social security, anti-polution standards or government aid to education.

The anit-income tax folks may support the elimination of subsidies, but are they likely to want no restrictions on abortions or porn?

And what’s the support for dropping protection of our borders and unlimited immigration in the light of 9/11?

8

Well, that’s combined with the elimination of welfare and withdrawal of U.S. armed forces from more than half the nations on earth.

9

Why doesn’t the LP get more votes? Because it’s composed of a bunch of whackos who’d rather talk about privitizing the roads than run a real election campaign. Instead of giving people who aren’t already diehard libertarians something to vote for, they ramble on about the noncoercion principle and not having various government sources - as we see on this board, one reason people get scared off is that the Libertarians generally won’t go into detail on how we move from the current system to what they advocate. Hell, the consequences of hardcore Libertarian views in action tend to scare even the most ardent supporters of the concept - take a look at the thread for an example of how quickly the whole non-initiation of force and absolute property rights concepts go out the door when you look at such a system in practice:Libertaria: Based on Coercion?

If you want Libertarian candidates to win elections, you pretty much need to scrap and redo the LP, because it’s not equipped to convince even sympathetic people to vote for it. What they need is a party that runs on a platform of what it will try to do while in office - don’t talk about privitizing the roads or other things your reps won’t be able to put into action anyway, talk about issues that will actually come up before the body and how you’ll vote for them. They also need to run real candidates, not just people who don’t object to being placed on a ballot - if your ‘candidate’ won’t turn up on TV to explain their position, and can’t be bothered to do voter surveys, you’re better off skipping that election. Then they need to shut up the nutjobs - don’t let anyone speak for the party who can’t make sense; all of the ‘well, here’s my vague and meandering philosophization of the day’ types need to be told to either shut up or stop using the party name. As an aside, that really includes candidates - if your candidate can’t articulate clearly what he’s going to do when in office, don’t run him. Finally, they need to accept responsibility and stop being such whiners - all of this ‘ohh, those wascally demopublicans weally wuined us’ needs to go, and a focus on ‘OK, we did well here, how can we repeat that’ and ‘OK, we did poorly here, what can we do to fix that’ needs to replace it.

Let’s look at a concrete example: the Libertarian party in NC managed to put a candidate in almost every spot on the ballot in NC despite rather restrictive ballot access laws in this state. What they did not do, however, was put real candidates into most of those slots. As much as the LP complains about being left out of debates and not being treated as a serious party, maybe they should act the part overall. Sure, they got kind of shut out from the Senate coverage, but what about the lower-level elections? Several news stations asked for local-level Libertarian candidates to go on-air for a short ‘here’s what I stand for’ segment, but were turned down. The various surveys that newspapers and interest groups send out often had a ‘no response’ for the LP candidate, and occasionally some odball responses (ie “Why are you the best candidate for this position?” “I am not the best candidate for this position.”). Like I said, if you can’t be bothered to run an actual candidate, don’t be suprised if no one votes for you.

10

So, basically, you’re saying you agree with me?

11

I think that the Libertarian party in the U.S. has a chicken-and-egg problem: they’re not structured, and they don’t present themselves, as a serious political party because they’ve never won anything, and they’ve never won anything because they don’t act like a serious political party.

An instructive example is the Reform party in Canada: for years they were the lunatic right-wing fringe. Then, in one federal election, they took something like 50 seats in a 300 seat House of Commons, and would have been the Official Opposition had the Bloq Quebecois not beat them by one. Suddenly, their more absurd candidates were an embarassment: the ones advocating bring spanking back into schools, and criminalizing homosexuality, and reinstating the draft, and such. They realized that the first thing they had to do to remain a viable party was to excise the extremists who, formerly, were just there to pad the party membership numbers.

It was interesting to see that the Libertarian candidate for governor in Wisconsin got 10% of the vote. Someday, somewhere, a Libertarian candidate is going to win a governorship, or a significant number of seats in a legislative body, and then you’ll see a very fast maturing. The radical agenda will be toned down and expressed in more palatable terms (less government interference in people’s lives, less foreign intervention, less corporate welfare…). The suits will look nicer, the party organization will start muzzling the cranks.

Whether or not that’s a good thing for the Libertarians is a different question.

12

I share Riboflavin’s views.

The “platform” of the party in its entirety, the underlining principle of no government, is bizarre to the public and will usually only attract candidates best described as nut cases.

It’s really not possible to raise the quality of its candidates, because the Party concept is so implausible in practice.

13

Huh? “The underlining [sic] principle of no government”? Can you point that out in the platform? I didn’t think so. But I do agree with you that the concept is implausible for what the two major parties practice — deceit and coercion.

14

Not only does the Party promise less/no government for preceived problems, being a problem isn’t necessarily a requirement for a proposal.

They want to “revise Federal and state laws” so that all candidates will appear on the ballot. ALL candidates? Maybe like each member of your college history class. Is getting on the ballot an issue?

No telling how many candidates appeared on the final New York State ballot for governor, but the cnn website reported the top eight vote getters.

The last of the eight was the Libertarian nominee, receiving 9055 votes out of over 4 million cast. His main platform seems to have been the repeal of all laws restricting the use of marijuana, which may help to explain his self reported date of birth as 1/1/2000.

Number six was from the “Marijuana Reform Party” and received about 22,000 votes. We don’t really know who this individual is or how he wanted to govern the state, as he must have felt voters were not entitled to any biographical or political information, but hey, he’s the nominee, why not vote for him.

I hate to stick my neck out, but just maybe the problem is not a lack of candidates with this level of popular support on the ballot but perhaps too many.

15

Um… no. You mention incompetence as one of five points in an almost glossed over way, ‘Image’ could be part of what I was talking about but your way of phrasing it doesn’t hit on the real problem. Your stance on ‘ohh, people are scared because they can’t steal anymore’ seems pretty hypocritical - why not go to the threadLibertaria: Based on Coercion? and explain whether you agree with the bad results from Libertaria, agree that some coercion by your standards is good, or explain why I’m wrong in calling Libertaria’s solution coercive? (I started that thread with you in mind, but managed to start it right before you were off-board for several days, so I presume you never saw it originally).

Lets look at your points:

Money - What would the LP spend money on - I can’t see how they’re going to put together decent campaign ads when they can’t even use the TV appearances they’re offered now. And really, complaining about ‘we don’t have enough money because we stick to our principles’ is kind of hypocritical for libertarians; they should be out making money instead of complaining that they don’t get handouts. And if the libs can’t operate now because corporations don’t like them and choose to bankroll someone else, what’s going to check corporations from trampling all over people with that money they don’t give to the libs when the free-market revolution takes over?

The image problem for the LP is not that their candidates come across as poofy intellectuals, but that their candidates are either intellectuals who’d rather argue about the eventual utopia than about practical solutions today, or uninterested and unqualified ‘candidates’ who are just there to run a complete slate. It’s not a matter of being precieved incorrectly, it’s a matter of being precieved in an unflattering but correct light. Browne, for example, made a big deal about how he’d deal with OBL by setting a $100 million bounty on his head instead of launching a military campaign - but didn’t explain why a $100 million bounty would work when the current $25 million one didn’t.

Incompetence is the one I hit on, and it’s the broad bit that is the cause of all LP failings, not some Demopublican conspiracy. One I didn’t mention before is that the LP should really make a play in local politics before going after the big boys in national elections - having a few seats on the county commissioners or city council is far more achievable

As far as Demopublicans go, making ballot access difficult didn’t stop the LP from being on the ballot in NC (and various other states, I understand). Blaming Demopublicans for the LPs problems is just silly; ballot access may not be easy, but it’s certainly not impossible as my ballot last time around shows. I mean, despite all of the whining about how terrible NC’s ballot access laws are in various LP mailings, they were able to get more people on the ballot than they had candidates (aside from the 'we need someone to volunteer to run for these slots, you can tell it from the unwillingness of the ‘candidates’ to engage in even the most basic work in a campaign).

As far as the media (and debates) go, I can’t really fault the media for not wasting people’s time with a candidate who’s got no chance to win. In the big debates, they’d rather spend time on those who stand some chance of winning the race, and when they offer airtime to the LP in lower-level elections, the LP ‘candidates’ can’t be bothered. A bunch of LP candidates wouldn’t even fill out those basic (and short, we’re talking a page or two of print not a book) surveys that newspapers and various interest groups pass around - if writing a page or two on your position is too hard, it’s not really the media that’s denying you a voice.

I mean, come on - you’ve even named yourself after the philosophy/political movement yet when asked ‘if we put a Libertarian government in place, what will it do about X’ your response seems to universally be ‘the previous governement created the problem, so it should solve it, Libertaria won’t do anything about it’.

16

That’s not really the LP’s position, but the fact that you think it is illustrates that the LP does a horrible job communicating its position. While Lib argues for an anarcho-capitalist society (which would be ‘no government’), the LP advocates keeping the US government but reducing it so that it has a defensive military, a set of laws that only includes ‘prevent person A from initiating force against B’, a judicial and police force to enforce those laws and settle contract disputes, and not much else. As you’ve demonstrated, they don’t even get this much of a message out clearly (much less a ‘OK, that’s your goal, how are you going to vote once you’re in office?’ answer), in a large degree because the party leadership doesn’t set rules about who can speak for the party, which leads to the anarchists saying enough that people think that’s the LP’s message.

Like I said in my message to Lib, it’s an oft-repeated complaint by the LP, but doesn’t seem to be borne out by what happens in the real world. In NC, where ballot access is pretty difficult and requires some work (I saw numerous messages about it from the LP mailing lists I’m on), the Libs still managed to get people on the ballot who weren’t even running a campaign, at least by the standard of ‘a person running a real campaign can show up for free TV time and fill out those 1-2 page surveys that get sent out by newspapers and interest groups’.

17

Libertarian principles sometimes serve as a worthwhile touchstone for actual policy, but libertarianism itself stands no chance in any foreseeable future of becoming a real force in America. We like big government.

18

Aahala

I presume you’re retracting your lie about the LP platform, then, right?

Riboflavin wrote:

No, it wouldn’t. That’s a lie. What is it with authoritarians? Is it considered essential for their arguments to misrepresent and defraud?

Minty

You hit the nail on the head.

19

Good post Riboflavin

20

Well, actually, there have been a number of surveys that show that virtually everyone wants to cut down the size of the government by eliminating bloated, useless programs. The surveys also show, however, that virtually no one agrees on what constitutes a bloated, useless program, which makes cutting out all of those bloated, useless programs rather difficult in practice. After all, if one guy wants to axe most of the military but keep welfare going strong, and the other guy wants to axe welfare but keep the military going strong, the most likely compromise is to keep both, not to axe both.

And even when you get a significnat consensus that ‘program X is a waste of money’, the LP is not going to do much to attract those people because it doesn’t run with a sensible platform of ‘if elected, I will work to reduce or remove programs X, Y, and Z and to repeal laws A and B’, but on a platform of ‘since I believe in the noncoercion principle, if elected I will try to remove programs A-Z and repeal laws A-Z, even though there’s no chance of getting the rest of the legislature to go along with me’. If LP candidates had concrete platforms, people who don’t subscribe to the whole shebang could say ‘hey, this guy wants to cut X, Y, and Z, and I want to cut X and Y and don’t care about Z, I think I’ll vote for hem’ instead of the situation now where the response is more ‘well, he does want to cut X and Y like me, but I don’t think A or C should be cut, plus he keeps going on about privitizing the roads’.