With another Election Day rolling around, and a couple close Senate races already forecast to be affected by Libertarian Party (LP) candidates, some finger-waggers are already loosening their knuckles up in case a GOP candidate loses to a Democrat because (and under a pretty big presumption) the LP candidate siphoned off votes for the Republican. It’s a rehash of the wasted vote argument many of us who’ve voted third party in the past have been subjected to (harangued, blasted, denounced, ranted at) by those who think that getting power out of Dem hands is and should be the prime objective. Not only the prime objective, but sufficient for fixing what ails the nation.
I won’t go into the latter point here, other than to note that the GOP has been part of the problem for decades and that more-of-the-same from that party won’t right the ship. It’s the former point that interests me today.
Many people, among them political commentator Ann Coulter, think that libertarians are merely republicans who want to smoke pot, so when LP candidates draw votes, those people presume those would have been Republican votes. Others believe that libertarians have far more in common with republicans than they do with democrats, so libertarians should stop screwing up elections, ignore or subordinate the differences they have with republicans, and vote GOP. Libertarians, in other words, should “take one for the team” so that the “bad guys” don’t win.
The differences between libertarians and republicans are, of course, far more numerous than pot legalization. They differ on many major issues, including militarism/foreign policy, gay marriage, immigration, the drug war and other consensual crimes, abortion, domestic surveillance, civil liberties, militarization of police and corporatism. Some republicans pay lip service to some of these issues, but so do some democrats, and to think that the GOP is more likely to follow through on that soft-peddled lip service ignores both the fact that the Right is farther from libertarians on some of the other issues than the Left and the lessons of history.
Republicans nevertheless want, expect and demand that libertarians vote for their candidates, and argue that voting third party or not voting at all is harmful to the nation (the possibility that a libertarian would vote Democrat plays like a no true Scotsman bit:
you can’t possibly be a libertarian if you’d vote ‘D’ over ‘R’
But, they want libertarian votes without really offering libertarians any incentive. All stick, no carrot.
So, the question for republicans and the Republican Party is – what’s in it for us? What policies and platform planks will the GOP “concede” to libertarians in order to attract our votes? Will the GOP prioritize, nominate and support candidates that genuinely embrace some of our ideals? Will the party, should it regain the majority, push things in a libertarian direction on one or more of the major issues on which we differ with “traditional” republicans?
Or, will the argument continue to be the other guys are the problem, and if you don’t give us power, that makes you part of the problem? Is this going to be (yet again), a one-way street?
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