Who Deserves the Libertarian Vote?

Reason asks Democrats, Republicans, and Libertarians why supporters of "Free Minds and Free Markets" should vote for their candidates.

Katherine Mangu-Ward & David Weigel from the December 2006 issue

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Michael: I think the religion lite phenomenon is really consultant-driven. There are parts of the consultants telling the Democratic candidates, “Look, we have to be more religion friendly, so go out and use language that appeals to Christians.” I don’t really think it’s going to change the base of the Democratic Party, which is pretty much opposed to mixing church and state.

Both parties, to use the overworked metaphor, are big tents. They’re always trying to figure out where the center is, because that’s where many of the decisive votes are in elections. I think that’s all the religion lite phenomenon is about. If Democrats really want to talk to the center, they should understand that the center moves. My Depression-era parents with somewhat conservative cultural ideas were the center during the Reagan Democrat era. The sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll baby boom generation, my generation, is at the center now, and it seems to me that it makes a lot of sense for Democrats to be talking in Thomas Jefferson language to that center. The best way to protect your religious beliefs is to separate church and state rather than try to pander to the religious right, who are never going to join the Democratic Party.

Reason: What do you say to libertarians worried about the traditional Democratic reliance on identity politics?

Michael: If one of the bad parts about being a Democrat is that there are far too many reactionary redistributionist left-liberals in the party, one of the really horrible parts is identity politics. Democrats have appeared to the electorate as a party the whole of which is less than the sum of its cacophony of interest groups. I can’t really say to libertarians that there is a great deal of hope right now for getting rid of identity politics in the Democratic Party. But again, I’m a believer that you work inside a party to effect that kind of change. You can’t just stand outside and say how horrible it is. You have to move ideas inside this two-party political process.

The Democratic Party base is already libertarian on social issues. This is true of the base, not what is oxymoronically called the Democratic leadership, which has colluded with Bush on the war, either out of cowardice or because the neoconservative wing of the Washington-based Democratic Party actually believes in these hallucinations. So we’re already roughly halfway there inside the Democratic Party in pulling it in a libertarian direction.

That being said, I hope that libertarians who consider themselves Republicans will try to recapture the Republican Party from the very anti-libertarian religious right, and from the increasingly statist neoconservatives, who are making Lyndon Johnson look like a dime-store liberal with all their spending.

William Redpath

William Redpath is the newly elected chair of the national Libertarian Party. A member of the party since 1984, he has run for office three times, most recently as the Libertarian gubernatorial candidate in Virginia in 2001.

Reason: Why should libertarians vote for your party’s candidates?

William Redpath: Because we’re the Libertarian Party. They certainly are not going to find libertarianism in the Democratic Party. Beyond Ron Paul and possibly a few others, they’re not going to find it in the Republican Party. If they want there to be a viable libertarian alternative in the political process of the United States, they should support the Libertarian Party and vote for its candidates.

Reason: In a closely contested race where supporting the lesser evil could make a difference, are you throwing away your vote if you vote Libertarian?

Redpath: In a close race, if there is a highly libertarian candidate from a major party, I could see where one would make a tactical decision to vote for that candidate. However, I find so few libertarian candidates in the major political parties it seems to me that even in a close race if you want a libertarian society you should vote for the Libertarian candidate.

A big issue for the Libertarian Party is electoral reform, which would make us more viable. The spoiler issue could easily be taken care of through instant runoff voting, and that has real political legs. Beyond the structural reforms in elections, doing away with McCain-Feingold, giving more freedom to support particular candidates than what the law currently allows, would definitely benefit minor-party candidates. The campaign finance reform legislation that passed recently is simply incumbent protection.

The vote for the Libertarian candidate has the most impact when there is an entrenched incumbent who might have, in the past, talked the talk, but then when that person got elected, didn’t walk the walk of reduced government spending and respect for civil liberties.

Reason: In general, libertarian voters ally with the major party that is best on the issues that they care most about. Democrats are pretty good on social issues, and Republicans are pretty good on economic issues, right? Why not just vote on the issues that interest you more?

Redpath: This whole idea of settling for the lesser of two evils is not efficacious in the long run. I think that the concept of strategic voting is frequently overblown and ultimately does not lead to the end that that person casting that vote intended. There are just too many instances where a major party candidate wins and then very, very infrequently enacts libertarian policies.

The Republican Party has failed to be fiscally responsible in Congress. The Democrats have had lots of opportunities to work to end the drug war and to bring greater social freedoms through school choice, but they lined up solidly against that.

I think that it’s difficult at times for minor-party candidates to shape the debate. One of our roles is to bring up issues that the major party candidates don’t want to bring up. That doesn’t mean that we’re going to get them to talk about these issues. They’re going to go ahead and stick to their talking points. But it gets the public to start to consider some of these issues. Our real role is to bypass the filter of the major parties and take our message directly to the voters.