Of the candidates seeking the Libertarian presidential nomination, Jacob Hornberger has staked out the most radical, uncompromising libertarian positions. We need voices like his to keep our party principled and sustainably libertarian. But a centerpiece of his campaign has been that there’s a big pool of voters out there just waiting for a radical enough message to vote for – that if we run an abolitionist campaign promising to separate health care and State, separate education and State, open the border, end Social Security, etc., we will get 10 or 15 percent of the national vote.
I wish this were true. And in some ways it’s admittedly refreshing to hear it, because there have been plenty of Libertarian Party leaders over the years saying the opposite, if not always in the lay-it-on-the-table way as Jacob – that if we just water down our message and sound more “reasonable” to average voters, there is a vast pool of people ready to vote for our candidates. I don’t think either of them are right. There’ve been enough campaigns in the party’s history of Libertarians running both more and less radical campaigns, not just at the presidential level, but at all levels, to demonstrate that neither radicalism nor moderation is any kind of magic bullet when it comes to getting libertarian votes. If there’s any evidence showing a correlation between the radicalism of an LP campaign and the number of votes it receives, one way or the other, after attempting to control for other factors, I haven’t seen it.
Could this change at some point? Yes. Argentina’s election of radical Javier Milei suggests that when circumstances get bad enough, a radical message can make the difference and inspire major support that would not otherwise have been there. Voters there had the choice for a more conventional, moderate anti-Peronist candidate, Patricia Bullrich. She’d served in a previous administration, had the credentials Milei did not. But the people clearly rejected her and went instead for the radical alternative, the libertarian candidate.
Unfortunately Jacob Hornberger has not made the case that we’re seeing that kind of moment in the United States, or that he is the candidate to capture it. One concern I have is that if he were to win, and after all his talk, the Libertarian ticket were to get it’s usual 1 or 2% of the presidential vote, it could discredit radicalism in the eyes of some party members and make them less willing to bet on it in circumstances where it might have a better chance. As far as I can see, he has offered no credible details on what’s going to make voters perceive the things he’s saying as different enough from typical Libertarian positions, in and of themselves, to suddenly prompt a big shift in their behavior.
Jacob’s stance towards his more impressive rivals reminds me of the famous New Yorker cartoon depicting the world as seen from New York City, in which everything beyond the Hudson River is viewed as a kind of vague, undifferentiated terrain whose distinctions don’t much matter. In his eyes, he is standing on the terra firma of libertarian principle, while clearly principled and thoughtful Libertarian candidates like Chase Oliver, Mike ter Maat, and Lars Mapstead are all just milling around over there in the benighted lands of statism, alongside the likes of Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy. As much as I appreciate his radical message, and would support Jacob in a heartbeat over opponents that I thought really deserved his characterization of them as wishy-washy reformers, I just don’t see it that way this cycle.
When it comes to discussing the conservative-leaning Mises Caucus leadership and their favored candidate, however, he is more persuasive. By allowing Trump and Kennedy to come speak to Libertarians without debating our candidates, he contends, they’re being grossly negligent at best, and their favored candidate Michael Rectenwald, if nominated, might well end up serving as Trump’s “wingman” in the election, a term used in this Washington Monthly article he cites – How Many Political Parties Can Donald Trump Intellectually Corrupt? | Washington Monthly. Rectenwald’s anti-immigrant stance, “culture war” focus, personal vote for Trump in 2020, and oh-so-what attitude toward the Trump invite sadly make the scenario he describes more than a little plausible: Trump wins reelection, people like McArdle and Rectenwald are given some minor posts in his administration as a thank you, and they and their supporters brag about it as some kind of victory. That would not be a victory, but a shameful co-option, a sellout of the LP and libertarianism which could set the freedom movement back years.
A 26-minute video in which Jacob Hornberger presents his take on all this is worth watching:
Love & Liberty,
((( starchild )))