Last Night's Presidential Debate Was Refreshingly Strange and Earnest

Chase Oliver, Jill Stein, and Randal Terry fiercely debated whether the government should get much smaller, much larger, or much holier.

Last night, three people who know they're not going to be president but are running for the office anyway took the stage in Los Angeles for a spirited third-party debate.

At the debate hosted by Free and Equal, Libertarian Party nominee Chase Oliver, Green Party candidate Jill Stein, and Randal Terry of the Constitution Party argued about whether the government should get much smaller, much larger, or be totally reoriented toward Judeo-Christian values.

Being the ideological gadflies that they are, the third-party candidates all made refreshingly undistilled cases for their contrasting visions of government.

Oliver did an admirable job laying out the basics of libertarianism and then applying them to individual cases.

"If you're not harming other people with your behavior, your behavior is perfectly acceptable and should not be regulated by the government or any other entity," he said last night, arguing that we should eliminate zoning laws to make housing affordable, cut spending, sell federal land to bring down the debt, and stay out of foreign wars.

The other two candidates offered some fresh perspectives that were at least interesting to hear, even if they are not all necessarily advisable.

Terry argued we should build a wall on the northern border to keep the Canadians out, drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to pay off the national debt, and eat raw broccoli to cure cancer.

Stein said building a wall on the southern border wouldn't stop drugs getting in from legal "portals of entry" but would devastate wildlife and natural ecosystems along the U.S.–Mexico border. She also perceptively argued we're stumbling into a wider war in the Middle East without any real acknowledgment or discussion.

The fact that everyone on stage knew they're not going to the White House opened up some room for productive agreement, particularly between Oliver and his two debate opponents.

The Libertarian nominee actively agreed with Stein that we should cut off foreign aid to Israel and nodded along to Terry's stirring anti–property tax rants.

One might think that the appeal of watching gadflies say wild things in a debate format would be diminished in a day and age when Donald Trump (who skipped last night's debate) is the Republican nominee.

Hardly. Last night's third-party debate managed to provide its own unique and refreshing brand of weird.

Whether it was the candidates offering nonmainstream diagnoses of widespread obesity, debate moderator Christina Tobin going on an extended riff about music's power to heal the psychological distress caused by "the system," or even just the sheer frequency of the musical guests (there was a musical break about every five minutes toward the end), the debate was all so delightfully strange.

With all that said, there were plenty of boring, awful, and false mainstream ideas that did get thrown around too.

Stein repeatedly argued that we could balance the federal budget by taxing the rich, cutting military spending, and passing Medicare for All. She called for emergency rent control and vacancy taxes to bring down the costs of housing. She said we could end mass illegal immigration by lifting sanctions on the socialist economies of Venezuela and Cuba.

In addition to being wrong, these ideas aren't anything you couldn't expect to hear from a progressive Democrat (or in the case of rent control and debt-reduction fantasies, a mainstream Democrat running for president).

Similarly, Terry dusted off the old Mitt Romney idea that millions of illegal immigrants could be made to "self-deport" if we made life miserable enough for them. His closing statement also ended with a call for the total destruction of the Democratic Party. One wonders why he doesn't just run as a Republican if he thinks one of the two major parties is that evil.

The silver lining of Terry and Stein aping Republican and Democratic talking points is it reinforced the notion that the Libertarian Party is the only real third party. Oliver wasn't representing a more extreme version of either mainstream party. He was presenting a unique message and a unique vision of government. It's a shame more mainstream audiences likely won't hear it.