A Vote for McCain Was More Wasted Than a Vote for Barr

More from this crucial article that highlights the internal problems Libertarians face before we can get down to political business. This one's a real nugget that I want to delve into:

(For their part, Barr campaign workers blame Obama, or at least McCain's ability to frighten right-leaning voters of him so much that even if they liked Barr better, they felt they had to tactically vote GOP.)

I know numerous people right here in Pennsylvania who (claim they) would have voted for Barr except they felt like they had to vote Nobama (i.e., McCain). That's fundamentally broken, for several reasons.

1. The point right now, at least in a presidential election, isn't to win; it's to create and consolidate momentum. You claim you're 'wasting your vote' on Bob Barr, but what do you call it when you vote for a candidate you don't even support, just to stop an even less desirable candidate from achieving power? If everyone that claims they liked Barr better than McCain had voted for him, Obama would have won the election in a major landslide... and Bob Barr might have polled upwards of ten, twelve percent of the country at large. Obama would have become president, and the Libertarian Party would have become a national sensation, positioning itself very well for the future. People must be made to see this.

2. There is effectively no difference between Barack Obama and John McCain. They both will attack every conceivable problem in exactly the same way all Republicrats have for 100 years: By making the government bigger. By taking away, inch by excruciating inch, more and more personal freedoms (and more and more personal money). The only difference between Democrats and Republicans at this stage in the game is where they spend the money they forcibly rob the people of: Democrats like to waste it on social bureaucracies, and Republicans like to waste it on military/intelligence bureaucracies.

The Libertarian Party as a whole--Barrites and non-Barrites--massively failed to pound this into the national consciousness. What's more, I can't see that we really even tried.

3. John McCain was, from day one, doomed. He never had a single solitary droplet of a chance. The Republicrat media did a wonderful job of pretending, and tricking the populace, into believing the election was in doubt, when in fact it never was, not for a moment. There were a handful of individual states where one could justify voting for McCain as an anti-Obama measure--Missouri, Indiana, North Carolina--but mostly what we had was Libertarians or Libertarian sympathizers in places like Pennsylvania, where Obama won by 12 points and it was obvious for months he was going to win by 12 points, voting for McCain because they were afraid of Obama. It makes no sense. Voting for McCain was wasting your vote every bit as much as voting for Barr, in most states.

By the way, consider: Why do both major parties benefit from everyone believing the election is close? Because if people know the election isn't close, many more of them are going to be inclined to vote for third parties. If every non-hardboiled Democrat in the country knew Obama was going to win in a landslide no matter what they did (which was true and was always true), more than five percent of them would have voted for Bob Barr.

You see, one of the primary reasons the media spent months lying to us about the closeness of the election was specifically to keep the Libertarian Party down.

I'm going to write more on this later, but the Republican party is in deep trouble. I mean, deep trouble, trouble that's going to threaten its existence in the years to come. And we need to be the hyenas circling around and waiting for the right chance to jump in and kill it. A lot of us aren't comfortable with that, but the Republican party is where it is today because its leadership has betrayed its voting masses, stabbed them in the back. And we're the ones that need to be telling them about it. I don't feel bad about killing the Republican party, and you shouldn't either. The country is looking for a reminder of what 'conservative' means--IT MEANS SMALL GOVERNMENT, STUPID!--and if we don't show them, no one will. Ever.

I'll stop there since this is turning into something of a manifesto, and continue fisking this important article in the near future. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Ending the Libertarian Civil War

This article, entitled "Where Did the Libertarian Party Go Wrong?" serves nicely as a beginner's primer to the challenges the Libertarian Party must solve before it can move to the next level of public consciousness and become a real player in politics. To wit, the first major challenge is: The party as a whole needs to want to move to the next political level. Believe it or not, there is a large, noisy faction of the party--and more, they're the Libertarian Party's old guard, the original Libertarians, and they aren't shy about telling you about it--really would prefer to remain at the party's present level, best described as Tiny but Vocal Minority. They like the idea, you see, of being the only people who really get it while everyone else just accepts the Matrix.

In addition to that there's a simple philosophical disconnect between what I would call the Progressive Libertarians (represented by Bob Barr, and the group I myself fall into) and the Traditional Libertarians (whose views I do respect): namely, much of the latter group is fundamentally anarchist.

With all of that said, I strongly encourage you to read the article, and I'm going to take some time to fisk it here.

The folks who had dominated the party in those long, lonely pre-Barr years, [Barr staffer Shane Cory] said, “had changed it from a political party into a debating society. It was the church of Libertarianism. I’m not saying that in a condescending way. But we’re turning it around. This is a more pragmatic approach.”

I think he's slightly wrong; the party had always been fundamentally a debating society. Barr is the point man for a movement to turn it into a political party. This is a problem among the traditionals for a simple reason: The whole reason they're Libertarians is their loathing of political parties. Well, it's not quite correct to say the whole reason I'm a Libertarian is I loathe political parties, but it's pretty close, and I can easily grasp where they're coming from.

I do not like the world pragmatic in there; even if it's mostly accurate, it's not a good word to use. That word suggests, you see, that we're changing some things not because it's the right and proper thing to do, but because we have to water down our views to gain public acceptance. Well... that may be true, but we also should water down our views (as it were) because some of them don't work in the real world anyway.

Instead of getting bogged down in specific platform issues--which has been the very thing the Libertarian Party's been internally warring over the past few years--we need to remind both ourselves and the outside world that we are the party that stands for liberty. Everything else in our platform, which should be flexible enough to allow for minor deviations by individual prominent party members, needs to trickle down from that. It's time to put an end, EMPHATICALLY, to the Republican Party's lie that it's the party of individual freedom, and the Democratic Party's even more flagrant lie that it's the party that stands for the little man. We'll never accomplish that while we're bickering over our platform.

Well, for an approach Cory frames as pragmatic, it didn’t really work. It’s all over now, and Barr failed as both fundraiser and candidate to even approach those high early expectations. The total money raised was $1.2 million; total votes came in at 510,000.

Now, the backbiting and, as Barr media consultant Audrey Mullen put it to me last week, the intra-libertarian “circular firing squad” may begin.

It sounds to me like Barr media consultant Audrey Mullen is taking self-defensive shots at the traditionalists in the party through the writer of this article (and other media and quasi-media avenues.) Audrey Mullen: You're wasting your very valuable time and energy at this. If we can't solve our differences without using up our rare and precious media attention to take thinly veiled shots at each other, we're in serious trouble.

I heard plenty of anecdotal evidence describing hardcore LP activists so disgusted by Barr’s right-wing past (and, in their reading, present) that they sat out doing any volunteer work, providing donations, canvassing, or even voting for him; I heard some LP watchers assume that because of these anecdotes, Barr only got about half the straight LP vote that a candidate more congenial to the party's hardcore would have received, and that the rest of his votes must have come from right-wingers disgruntled with McCain.

There's no nice way to put this: If the progressives in the party (the "Barr people") maintain control of the party going forward, it's likely we're going to lose the traditionalists/anarchists, which is half the party. I think the notion that 'half' of registered and voting Libertarians voted for Barr is extremely exaggerated; I don't know the official figure, but I'd guess it's more in the 80% neighborhood (which is still horrifically low). This problem isn't going away; in fact, it's only going to get worse, and we'd better face it and overcome it now if we want to move forward later.

There are some problems with Barr's views, several of which (as we'll see shortly) aren't Libertarian at all. But to refuse to vote for the Libertarian nominee for president at a time when every single vote helps advance the party's core value--liberty--while the Republicrat tyranny is explosively growing is ill-advised and reactionary in the extreme. This infighting will doom not only us, but everyone, as it allows the Republicrats to achieve total domination while we keep bickering.

There's more, but we're going to hold it out for subsequent posts (one of which, as I type this, is already up, so check it out.)