TAMPA, April 12, 2012 — While the media continue to ignore compelling evidence that the Republican primary race is much closer than they are reporting, some Ron Paul supporters are nevertheless thinking about what they might do if Paul does not get the Republican nomination.
Throughout this election cycle, Gary Johnson’s name has been omnipresent as a libertarian alternative. There’s only one problem. Gary Johnson is not a libertarian.
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Wow, Tom, some folks out there really don’t like to hear the truth, do they? What I find most frightening is that their responses illustrate an inability to absorb self-evident statements of fact in context or to think critically. We should not be surprised at this, given the deterioration over the last several decades of not only our education system, but all of our civic and social institutions, institutions that at one time developed and encouraged these skills.
In reading further through the responses, I find myself wondering whether it’s a case of people clutching at straws or simply rejecting the possibility of REAL change. To put it another way, I really don’t think that most of the people responding negatively to your description of Johnson really want an actual libertarian president in the Awful Orifice. In fact, I doubt most of them really want to see the emergence of a truly libertarian society at all, their misguided enthusiasm for Johnson notwithstanding. Why not? Because the flip side of the “liberty” that libertarianism embraces, the other side of the NOP, is that each of us, and each of us alone, is responsible for our own life and destiny. Not many people today, including those who like to think of themselves as libertarians, really want that. Responsibility for one’s own life and destiny is a terrifying burden to have to carry, with too many unknowns to face; better to let someone else carry at least part of the load, whether they want to or not.
Even beyond that, and to a great extent related to it, I’m not even sure that the NOP is a very popular concept, at least not in its full application as committed libertarians understand it. Most people, I believe, prefer to apply it as a response to unprovoked physical (criminal) violence, and even then only if it is “unofficial” violence committed by individuals. They shy away from extending it to acts of official coercion by the State. After all, most people, even those who call themselves “libertarians,” are rent seekers in some form, benefiting at least indirectly from the State’s depredations against their fellow man. To repudiate this by applying the NOP would be to deprive themselves of (paraphrasing Bastiat here) “being able to live at someone else’s expense.”
The bottom line is that, based on the responses I’ve seen to your coverage of Johnson over several posts, most people either 1) wouldn’t know a real libertarian if they saw or heard one, wouldn’t recognize real libertarianism in action, and would hate it if they did; or 2) don’t really want to be a libertarian themselves, or live in a libertarian society anyway, preferring instead to “cherry pick” libertarian tenets that suit them while discarding those that are inconvenient. Needless to say, this doesn’t bode well for Amerika’s future as anything close to a free society.
I want to vote Libertarian like I did in 2008, and I probably will, but I’m hoping someone other than Gary Johnson running. In 2008 I did not like Bob Barr either. I figured we would have to be vigilant to keep the Libertarian party true and correct, but I thought it would be when we were close to winning, not when we are getting under 10% of the votes.