Some of My Best Friends Are Libertarians.  No, Really.

by Ali Hassan Massoud 

Election Day has come and gone in America . The whole bloody process is over and done with. That is, for another thirteen months or so, before the whole damn thing starts up all over again. But I digress.

As it turns out, the whole thing came and went and ended with a whimper and not a bang. No raucous food fights, courtroom antics, shenanigans, or fast ones pulled on the part of the thousands of attorneys on retainer by the Democratic or Republican Parties.

No, the only real controversy remaining in the wee morning hours of election night was whether Bush would carry New Mexico and Iowa . But by the morning of November 3d, it hardly mattered because President Bush had already won both the popular vote and sufficient electoral votes to win the race. It was a done deal.

Cussed and discussed in all the partisan bickering on the part of pundits and political operatives on the cable news shows was the supposedly dangerous influence of independent candidate for president Ralph Nader and what are derisively referred to as “Third Party” candidates.

Now I’ll not be clinking champagne glasses with my friends come Inauguration Day this coming January. In the circles in which I move, the people largely don’t vote. Most of them are politically evolved enough to realize that elections on this scale with men of this sort will accomplish nothing they approve of. So most of them do not bother with it. Most but not all, I’m afraid.

Some of my friends vote. And I say that with the same heavyheartedness as if I was admitting that some of them smoke cigarettes, cheat on their spouses, drink too much, or spend the rent money at the racetrack. To me it seems at best an atavistic practice done only from habit, and at worse participation in a loony bit of foolish nonsense. Sort of like adults participating in Ground Hog Day ceremonies to see if we get another six weeks of winter or not. Yes, I really do think it’s that bad.

And some of them are driven by this media induced epidemic of mass hysteria into actually running for office themselves or participating in campaigns. And this is where to me it really seems a futile undertaking: Third Party voters.

Democrats win sometimes. Republicans win sometimes. Libertarians, Green Party, Constitution Party and the Socialist Workers Party candidates don’t win. Now that isn’t entirely true. Some of these parties elect a Parks Commissioner here or a Village Constable there. The mayor of New Paltz, New York is a Greenie. Jesse Ventura got elected governor of Minnesota on the Reform Party ticket in 1998. Rare and unusual exceptions, as we all know. Even a blind pig finds an acorn now and then, as my grandfather used to say.  

But to actually go out and register, and then stand in line and produce ID for inspection, all in order to choose a Dem or Rep is bad enough. But for a Lib or a Constitutionalist? Worse than futile, it is a waste of time and energy by people who should know better by now.  

But I have to admit that both their idealism and naiveté in continuing on with this practice impress me. Like someone who churns his or her own butter or learns to speak Klingon, to me, the accomplishment doesn’t seem worth the effort of achieving it.

But isn’t it just harmless fun, though? Isn’t it just like buying a lottery ticket? You could actually win the Lotto after all, and it’s only two bucks. And voting is free, at least since they abolished the Poll Tax, anyway.

No, I truly believe that voting is actively harmful to the continuing struggle for personal and social liberation from Leviathan and all her minions. For many people, who as I said before are evolved enough in their political consciousness and insights, it acts as a palliative or placebo. It gives the illusion of doing good in order to ease hopeless cases of suffering. And like a palliative, it only lessens the symptoms of the problem without really combating the disease itself.

On a Libertarian-oriented Internet forum, I noted this post the day after the election which I think will illustrate my point.

One fellow said this:  

“On a more positive note, an FSP’er and good friend of mine ran for state rep in MA. (14th Suffolk ) I was his campaign manager.  We ran 1 fund-raiser and made enough money to do 36 30-second commercials on the RCN cable network in the 6 days leading up to the election.  He got a couple of local press interviews after we sent out a couple of press releases.  That was it. All we did. No door-to-door stuff. No phone calls, no standing outside supermarkets, no yard signs, nada.  In a 3-way race against a 20+year incumbent and a Republican who declared at the last minute and campaigned hard, we got the following results:

Democrap incumbent: 81%

Republican 15%

Libertarian 4%

We're very happy with this -- and next time we'll do much better.”  

The concept of self-evident failure comes to mind here. As my gramps also said, “don’t pee on my leg and then tell me it’s raining.” This is a placebo for the illness that infects the body politic if I ever saw one.

Now in the above mentioned case, well . . . I guess you could say it really did no harm and maybe was kind of fun for the two guys. No harm, no foul. But that isn’t always the case.

If you are like me, you can’t see the value of picking the lesser of two evils. Do you want Republican “conservatives” to curtail your civil liberties, raise your taxes and start wars, or do you want Democratic “liberals” to? But that being said, Third Parties and the Ralph Naders, Ross Perots, and George Wallaces skew things and cause problems that thwart whatever shot the public has at getting any kind of positive results from the electoral process.

If Nader had bowed out and let Gore win, would we have an Iraq/Afghanistan war going on right now? Maybe, but it seems less likely to me, though. Leave Ross Perot out of the mix in 1992, and the whole Clinton era would not have happened, which is a good thing or bad thing depending on your view.

But even further, it skews election results in lesser races that have just as much impact on people’s lives. And all just to prove a point. I am not the only one who has noticed this phenomenon, either. Consider this excerpt from a post-2004 Election Day editorial in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:  

Limiting Libertarians

Of the nearly 60 percent of voters who approved the passage of Initiative 872 -- the "top-two" primary election -- many surely had it in mind to "stick it" to the political parties.

But one of the state's three major parties -- the Republican Party -- might well have been more successful in this general election had the top-two primary been in effect. That's because it would have eliminated another party's candidates -- Libertarian -- from the general election ballot.

In the governor's race, and in two hotly contested legislative races, the presence of Libertarians on the Nov. 2 ballot may have hurt Republicans.

Not all those Libertarian votes would have gone to Republican candidates. Indeed, some of those votes wouldn't have been cast had there not been a Libertarian recipient, but these voters' leaning is arguably more Republican than Democrat.

Had Libertarian Ruth Bennett's roughly 2 percent of the vote gone to Dino Rossi, it would have made him the clear winner. About 2.5 percent of the vote went to Libertarians in each of the two 26th District House races, and Democrats are headed toward victories of less than 1 percent. Libertarian votes could've made the difference for Republicans in those two seats.

Forget Ralph Nader. The top-two effect of bumping third-party candidates off the November ballots may have far more impact.”  

In the same way that many Democrats maintain a seething anger toward Nader for “causing” Gore’s loss in 2000, many, many Republicans feel the same way about the Libertarians and for the same reason.

But on the plus side for Third Parties and especially the Libertarians, they can and do add a Three Stooges-style comedy relief factor to what would otherwise be an overwrought and frankly boring political process.

 The Free Liberal, an online zine for those of us with a Freedomista world view, recounts a piquant and hilariously funny story of a local Libertarian Party’s travails and hassles with municipal sign ordinances, fundraising and related stuff. Not to give it all away, but one corker in the piece relates how after much struggle and effort, the LP’ers get some lawn signs put up in their neighborhood, complete with the party’s 800 number. Then they get the news that due to a fact-checking error on their part, they’ve printed the telephone number of a sex chat service and not the party HQ as they’d intended.

And who can forget the story of the Libertarian candidate for the US Senate from Montana in 2002, one Stan Jones? I never will. What was his claim to fame? Well, he “started taking colloidal silver in 1999” he said, “for fear that Y2K disruptions might lead to a shortage of antibiotics. And it turned my skin blue, irreversibly so.” I’ll never forget Stan, that’s for sure.

But aside from comic relief and giving Freedomista political junkies something to do, how much do these efforts really contribute toward the advancement of liberty? Not much, I’m afraid. Consider this final tally for the Libertarian Party’s 2004 presidential candidate Michael Badnarik, according to Reason, a non-party affiliated libertarian magazine.

“As of this writing, Badnarik's looking at a total of 377,940—in fourth place behind Nader (but only by 17 thousand votes, despite far less media coverage) but beating the next two ‘third parties’ (the Green and Constitution parties) combined.

Despite being hounded by accusations of kookdom over his stances on the legality of the income tax and drivers licenses (he doesn't think either are legally necessary), despite this being an even more highly contentious and omen-filled election among the two-partiers than 2000, despite spending only around a million (according to his staff last night—the last official report says only $749,248) to Browne's $2.2 million in 2000, Badnarik got almost identical vote totals (376,123 for Browne in 2000).”  

And so in the end, what does all this get us, besides a chuckle or guffaw now and then? Not much, in my opinion. Certainly nothing that is worth playing Don Quixote for a few months and spending all that time and money. The politician as he or she exists today are as Shakespeare’s Macbeth said, nothing more than  

“A poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing."

Leave it to the Bard to sort it all out. Poets, not politicians, have keener perception on these matters. They are more fun at parties, too.