Julian posits that libertarians ought to consider voting for Dean in '04, for reasons I partly agree with and partly disagree with.
First, he ticks off the reasons - mostly obvious by now - why the Bush administration has pretty much delivered everything libertarians oppose. Second, he makes the interesting, and pragmatic, point that a hypotheical Dean administration would have the ability to deliver much of what most libertarians want without being able to deliver what they don't want (socialized medicine, for example) due to the assumed persistence of Republicans in Congress.
Howard Dean, like Bill Clinton, may say he wants to dramatically increase government's role in health care. But with fewer vulnerable candidates than in the 2002 midterm elections, it's Republicans who are likely to have the final say on how and whether that happens. And while they've shown they'll happily roll over for Bush, who seems hell bent on delivering a prescription drug benefit, they'll be just as happy to deny President Dean a talking point when he goes stumping at AARP meetings in 2008.
In short Dean (or another Democratic nominee) has vices which are unlikely to translate into real policy. His virtues - opposition to an imperial foreign policy, greater support for gay rights, and even a qualified federalism, evidenced by his stance on gun rights - are more likely to be points on which bipartisan coalition building is possible.
But, why wouldn't we just vote for the Libertarian candidate? Here's where Julian's logic diverges from mine.
And if one is voting largely for personal satisfaction, that may make a certain amount of sense. Yet people's actual voting behavior indicates that our actual motives in the ballot box are more complex. If you were really going to vote on pure principle, you probably wouldn't vote for any party's candidate, since those candidates are always represent some amount of compromise. Instead, you'd just write in the name of the person you'd most like to see hold the office.
If we take a sufficiently long view, it could be argued that voting Libertarian "sends a message" about the electorate's policy preferences. And that may be. But the message we send is proportioned to the threat we pose.
Well, not necessarily. I vote Libertarian because I really do want smaller government, less regulation, and more freedom. And unlike writing in the name of someone who's probably not even running, when I add my vote to the tally of those who vote the same way I am sending to our leaders a clear and unmistakable message, the same one I have sent them the last two presidential cycles.
If you want my vote, you'll embrace policies like these guys.
Of course, the LP isn't perfect. But of the declared candidates on any ballot, they have a clear, definite statement of policies that most closely resemble the ones I would like to see enacted, in the areas that are most important to me.
But what if I read Julian's advice, thought it over, and voted for Dean? What message would I be sending there? I've argued before that libertarians won't get any respect until they cost someone an election. But doing it by voting for someone like Dean doesn't get us there either. A losing Republican or winning Democrat parsing the election returns, would never know from those results that failure to embrace a freedom-oriented platform decided the election. Coulda been the health care policy. Coulda been pacifism. Coulda been anything - but the least likely conclusion they'll draw is that it was liberty.
Contrast that with an upswell for a libertarian (big L or small L, using Republican Ron Paul as principled example of the latter). There would be no doubt about how to swing that 5, 10, or even 20% of the vote in the next election. And that's a message that voting for Dean could never send.
UPDATE: Over on Hit and Run, Mark Bahner comments:
If you didn't like [Libertarian Party candidate] Harry Browne, it WOULD be rational to write in "Ron Paul," if your ballot allowed write-ins for President.
That in response to Julian's idea of writing in the name of the person you think would be the best choice. Now, I dismissed that idea above, but I think Bahner's got a great point, for a couple of reasons. First, Ron Paul's views are well-known, through his principled votes in Congress and through his status as a former LP candiate for President. Second, as a member of Congress and a Republican, he's got credibility that Libertarian Party candiates sorely lack due to - how shall I say this - a perceived deficit of professionalism.
The only problem with the theory is that a write-in vote for Ron Paul wouldn't show up on the newspaper tallies the next day, as the LP vote totals usually do (albeit at the bottom). Of course, a "draft Ron Paul" movement (a la Clark) could address that problem.
Posted by wasylik at October 16, 2003 11:22 PM | TrackBack