I agree with Tim Carney; they seem to be running against conservatives more than in favor of liberty:
Weld and Johnson held their first post-nomination joint interview on Tuesday, on liberal network MSNBC. “We’ve never bought into this anti-choice, anti-gay…sense of the Republican Party,” Weld said, as his first comment to the national television audience.
The message was clear: We don’t need those backward Christian Right bozos as much we need as you MSNBCers.
Johnson has sent similar signals, suggesting that his love of liberty is second to his revulsion to religion. In January, for instance, Johnson said he would make it a federal crime for women to wear the Burqa, the full-body covering worn by women in certain strains of Islam. Johnson recanted a day later, while continuing his warnings about the threat of Sharia — Islamic law — in the U.S.
This spring, Johnson pushed aside freedom of conscience. When asked in an Oregon about laws and lawsuits requiring caterers to participate in gay weddings, Johnson took the big-government side — for coerced baking in the name of gay rights. When later asked about this anti-liberty view, Johnson made the standard liberal conflation between selling off-the-shelf cupcakes to a gay customer (which is straight-up discrimination against a person) and refusal to participate in a ceremony (which is a freedom of conscience issue, a freedom of association issue, and often a free speech issue).
The dress-code libertarianism and bake-me-a-cake libertarianism Johnson has embraced isn’t libertarianism at all — it’s left-wing social engineering enforced at gunpoint. Coming from Johnson and Weld, it reeks of raw identity politics. The only consistent theme is that religious people are bad.
Yes. It’s disgusting. This sort of thing is why I’ve never been a Libertarian, despite the fact that I’m generally libertarian.
Is Carney saying that, since Johnson isn’t pure, I should vote for Trump, with whom I have never agreed on anything, except that Washington could use a shake-up?
No, he did not say that, so far as I can tell. But I have observed for years the tendency of the media to hold third-party candidates to standards they never hold major-party candidates to, then focus on those issues – to the degree they cover third parties at all – while neglecting issues that might really resonate with voters.
Trump, Clinton, and Johnson. Whose budget would be smaller, by far? Who is most likely to stop DHS spying on citizens? Who is least likely to send troops to every corner of the globe. Who is most likely to pursue an end to a tax on income?
Come on, you know the answer.
FTA: “…and that’s why they conflate “socially liberal” with libertarian.”
You’re either for liberty, or you’re not, and it doesn’t look like these guys are. It sure isn’t inducement to lodge a futile protest vote, and give the office to HRC by default.
If someone was conspiring to persuade people not to vote at all, they couldn’t do a better job.
I couldn’t agree more.
” . . . they seem to be running against conservatives more than in favor of liberty. . . ”
That seems to be the problem with a good chunk of the libertarian movement, especially the ones gathered around REASON. I suspect it comes from a desire to be one of the Cool Kids. I admired Murray Rothbard, but one of the jokes about him among libertarians when he was alive was that he was always building one-way bridges to the Left.
The party we could use is a party running under the banner of ‘Independence’.
Not meaning “Break away from XYZ”, but meaning a party focused on individual independence as much as possible.
It is a solid chunk of what the dictionary definition of ‘libertarian’ should encompass, while jettisoning some silly aspects “Free from Hunger!” or “Free from Dirty Looks!” or “Free from Responsibility!”.
A food stamp program fundamentally aimed at “Eliminating -starvation- in America” organized under the ideal of ‘Maximum Independence’ is just completely different from one that merely gives lip service to the idea of making everyone ‘Free from Hunger’.
I can’t think of a term that both fits what I’m trying to express and doesn’t also have the overtone of ‘Let’s secede!’ in there.
Would “The American Self-Reliance Party” capture what you’re trying to say?
I put “American” in there to avoid sounding like “Let’s secede” but after hitting the “post comment” button, it occurs to me that this makes it sound like the party would be “America First” or similarly isolationist. So, maybe just “The Self-Reliance Party”.
Somewhat. Or ‘Yes, but I don’t like that name.’
The party I’m envisioning would consider a large number of things starting with ‘self’ as virtues. Self-reliance, self-discipline, self-sufficient, self-made… But the title runs into the same rock that the more extreme Rand/Objectivist crowd runs into. Summing it up as “Self-ish”.
But the word ‘Independence’ also brings the thought ‘Who -controls- this?’ to every policy decision. You have a “Social Security Account”. But you don’t -control- it. The exact same 12ish% shoved into “Bob’s Personal Individual Trust Fund” that’s legally ‘owned by Bob’, and considered ‘An asset of Bob’. Even retaining the restriction ‘Not until retirement, disability, or death-of-spouse’, the choices made are made from a different perspective. I’m not completely opposed to some of the redistributive effects either – but -structuring- it this way means we aren’t making 60-year promises. Instead, that redistribution would be happening immediately out of current budgets and releasing control of those funds to the recipients (and the banks they’re storing it in). Instead of just printing IOUs.
It is the difference between being an ‘independent capitalist’ and being ‘dependent on the whims of government’.
I won’t be voting for Johnson either. I listened to a radio interview with him recently in which he made it plain that he’s a hard-core open borders guy.
One of the reasons I left the Libertarian Party was that way too many of its adherents pretty obviously had, as their primary value, the alleged philosophical consistency of their creed rather than the liberty said creed supposedly promoted. One of the other reasons was that these “consistent” defenders of liberty would then turn around and shamelessly whore after established politicians to run on their ticket. Ron Paul was the first of these. The man is not a libertarian, he’s pretty much Captain America First, frozen in the 1930’s and thawed out again a half century later. Johnson and Weld are just the latest pair of such Faustian bargains.
I’m a life-long R who was really excited about voting L for the first time this year if Austin Peterson had got the nod. But alas, the convention was a complete mess which portrayed an utter lack of political discipline on the part of the party, and which resulted in a ticket that did more to drive away displaced conservatives than it did to draw them in. Now I’m not sure who I’ll vote for at the top of the ticket.
The Libertarians appear to have been taken over by the Libertines, for whom any suggestion of personal responsibility and law is repellent.
I dropped out of the Libertarian party some years back. Since I live in SoCal – aka Mex-america – the fact that they had virtually the same policy of open borders immigration as the Socialist left meant they were utterly unserious about restraining government power. My decision was validated when the Libertarian party in leftist Washington state was trying to use the courts to force Republicans off the ballot. They have been thoroughly penetrated by the SJW left and now operate as a kind of decoy to draw off votes from the more effective pro-liberty candidates. If you are serious about freedom but don’t want to vote Trump, you’d do better voting for Mickey Mouse than the Libs.
I was a member of the LP from the late 90s to the early 00s. I left after 9/11 because their kneejerk noninterventionism sickened me. I was firmly in the “nuke Mecca” camp. We should have done that on 9/12. Hell, the missiles should have been launched the minute the towers collapsed. I don’t care if the Muslims like us. I damn well want them to fear us.
A while back, a commenter at Ace of Spades offered what I thought was a pretty good explanation for the change in the LP. Apparently, when people like me, who were inspired by Ayn Rand, the Constitution, and free-market capitalism departed, the vacuum was filled by more left-leaning people who were mainly motivated by opposition to the war, legalizing drugs, and gay rights. The whole character of the party changed, and it is now more closely aligned with social liberalism than with economic or Constitutional conservatism.
Milton Friedman said many years ago that you can’t have open borders and a welfare state. The modern LP still supports open borders, but I don’t hear them clamoring for the abolition of the welfare state. That should be a precondition. Without a government safety net, open borders might work, since it would strongly select for immigrants who are independent-minded, can stand on their own two feet, and could make a positive contribution to American society. As it stands now, we’re just importing Latin American socialists by the millions.