As I’ve noted ad nauseam on these pages, too many libertarians love, love, LOVE to denounce each other. More so, even, than their denouncement of non-libertarians of both the Left and the Right. It’s shallow moral preening, virtue-signaling, attention-grabbing, high-horse foolishness, and it’s a real problem for those of us who actually want to see things move in the direction of more liberty, rather than merely kvetch about how little we have and how the entire system is broken. So, I wasn’t much surprised to see a whole lot of Internet-muscle hate thrown at Austin Petersen, a prominent libertarian writer, political aspirant, and publisher of thelibertarianrepublic.com, after he wrote against all that a Biden presidency would evoke, no matter that Petersen’s been a big voice for the movement.
In times of yore, when politics is a typical seesaw between the two major parties, it’s not hard to declare “a pox upon them all” and cast a principled vote for your preferred third-party candidate.
That was normal politics. This election, however, is anything but normal. That’s not because of Trump, despite his bull-in-a-china-shop style and all the seething rage it and he have elicited from the opposition. It’s because the Democrats chose not to offer us a “return to normalcy,” a platform within the bounds of their history, and a message of civility and political decorum, but instead went gone down the path of leftist rage, socialistic lunacy, and raw, naked, unslakeable power lust, and put forth a platform well to the left of anything any previous Democratic candidate has ever proffered. These last few weeks of campaign season have highlighted this particular virulence on the Left and within the Democratic Party. Left unchecked, they will put the nation squarely on the path to thuggish, authoritarian, and unaccountable rule by a party that is willing, nay eager, to do everything possible to make permanent its hold on government.
Concurrently, we have witnessed the utter abandonment of duty by the Press, which has morphed from a Fourth Estate watchdog to a Pravda-esque propaganda mill, and a passel of “we know better” billionaires working to deny the public access to information and debate in order to tip the scales toward their preferred outcome. The deep irony of Democrats who screamed bloody murder at the Citizens United SCOTUS decision applauding Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg for censorious behavior would be funny were it not so sickening.
Many have thrown in with Trump not because they love him and his policies, but because the other side is so much worse. While I have cast that as a transactional position in the past, I now offer the idea that one can cast a principled “against” vote. In other words, one can put forth a principled rejection just as easily as a principled endorsement.
So, as a matter of principle, I urge you to reject the Democrats this election. Reject their agenda. Reject their hatred. Reject their race-baiting. Reject their radicalism. Reject their illiberalism. Reject their condescension. Reject their contempt for the principles of liberty and limited government. Reject their power-lust.
Trump is not a libertarian, nor is he a “traditional” conservative. His record of these past four years is mixed, and his behavior has often been abysmal, but he’s produced a healthy number of successes as well. Nothing the Democrats promise has any hint of liberty. Not their spending plans, not their regulatory plans, not their energy plans, not their taxation plans, not their social agenda, not their education plans, not their foreign policy, not their attitudes toward the press, toward speech, toward religion, toward gun rights, or toward the Constitution itself. We know what four more years of Trump will be about. It won’t be pretty, but there’ll be some good. I cannot see anything good coming out of the Terrible Tetrad of Biden, Harris, Schumer, and Pelosi, but I can see a whole lot of bad. If you have a desire to vote out of principle, vote to reject the radical Left’s takeover of the Democratic Party. It’s a FAR bigger threat to the nation than the Orange Man ever could be.
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