Soho Forum Presentation: Why Libertarians Should Vote For Trump In 2020
https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2020-7-22-soho-forum-presentation-why-libertarians-should-vote-for-trump-in-2020
I hope that many readers watched my online debate for the Soho Forum this evening. Below I am posting a somewhat abbreviated version of my opening statement, together with some of my closing remarks. Note that I made some very substantial deviations from this text in the actual oral presentation. I understand that the full debate — including the presentations of the other debaters — will be posted on the Soho Forum website within a few days.
From my opening statement:
Whom should a Libertarian vote for for President in 2020? The answer is obvious: Donald Trump.
The main reason is not quite as obvious. We have a two party system. Each of the two parties represents a broad coalition of groups and interests seeking to achieve sufficient votes and in the right places to win a majority of the electoral college in the election. Because we have a two-party system, if you want to participate meaningfully in a presidential election, you must join one of the two broad coalitions that effectively compete for the presidency. If you refuse to join one of those two broad coalitions, you are just voluntarily excluding yourself from any effective participation in the process.
The two broad coalitions are called the Republicans and the Democrats. And thus I submit that your only real choices are Biden and Trump. Between those two, the choice for a Libertarian of Trump over Biden is extremely compelling.
I will spend most of my time discussing the subject of why we have a two party system, and why therefore meaningful participation in the presidential election requires joining one of the two broad coalitions that constitute our two main political parties.
When I say “we have a two party system,” I suspect that many in the audience react with something like “There’s nothing inherent of fixed about that. Get rid of the two party system!” After all, really no other advanced democracy has a two-party system like ours. Look at the UK, or Germany, or France, or Canada, or Israel, or Italy, or Australia. They all have lots more than two parties in the fray. As smaller parties gain supporters and seats, their influence on policy grows. That’s what Libertarian should want. Why can’t we do it like that?
The answer is that our two-party system is a creature of the presidential election process set forth in our Constitution. The other countries have different processes. It’s clear that the people who put together the presidential election process in the Constitution did not foresee that our two party system was the inevitable result. But if you review the history, you will see that the two party system was the inevitable result.
When I talk about our presidential election process, what I’m talking about is the 12th Amendment to the Constitution. The 12th Amendment was ratified in 1804, and made some modifications to the text of the original Constitution that you are probably familiar with (President and VP run together as one ticket); but for the purposes I am discussing here, the 12th Amendment did not significantly change the original text. Here is the relevant text of the 12th Amendment:
“The person having the greatest number of [electoral] votes for President, shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed; and if no person shall have such majority, then from the persons having the highest numbers not exceeding three on the list of those voted for as President, the House of Representatives shall choose immediately, by ballot, the President.”
Although it doesn’t say so explicitly, what this effectively means is that if you want to elect someone to the presidency, you need to put together a coalition that competes for a majority of the electoral votes on election day. Unlike in other countries, you can’t get 40% on election day, and then after the election do a deal with the guy who got 12%. This practical consequence of this dynamic was not at first obvious, but became so over time.
In the first several elections after the 12th Amendment, there was little effective competition for the presidency. The crunch first came in the election of 1824. There were four main candidates, all calling themselves Democratic Republicans: John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay, and William Crawford. All four got electoral votes, but nobody got a majority. The election went to the House of Representative, which chose Adams, even though Jackson had had the plurality of both the popular and electoral votes.
Jackson then spent the next four years being the first guy to build a broad coalition to win the majority of the electoral votes. The Democratic Party that he created became our first modern American political party. His coalition included disparate elements that you might think were not natural allies at all: the southern slaveholders, yeoman farmers, frontiersmen, those who had distaste for the cities and for the financial elite.
In the election of 1828, Jackson soundly defeated the incumbent Adams 178 – 83 in the electoral college. But the next election, 1832, showed that Jackson’s opponents did not yet understand that they needed similarly join forces in a broad coalition backing one guy if they wanted to compete effectively. Three different candidates opposing Jackson, from three different political parties, got electoral votes. Together, they got 46% of the popular vote, but only 23% of the electoral votes.
Similarly, in the election of 1836, the opposition now were all calling themselves “Whigs,” but they did not coalesce behind one candidate. Four different Whigs competed and got electoral votes. Although van Buren got 51% of the popular vote to 49% for the four Whigs combined, he won the majority of the electoral vote easily.
The big change came in the mid-1850s, when the Republicans emerged as the anti-slavery party, but also put together a similarly broad coalition developed to challenge the Jacksonian Democratic coalition. Now the Republican Party brought together interests that again you would not think of as natural allies — abolitionists and civil rights advocates, but also northern businessmen and industrialists, advocates of hard money and high tariffs; while the Democrats after the Civil War remained a coalition of the old south, segregationists, farmers, and advocates of low tariffs and soft money. In the remainder of the 19th century, the Republicans won most of the elections.
Which brings me to what for Libertarians has to be the most disastrous election in American history, the election of 1912. That’s the election where former President Teddy Roosevelt decided he wanted to make a comeback, but incumbent William Howard Taft wouldn’t step aside. Taft got the Republican nomination at the convention. Roosevelt decided to run again, and formed his own party, known as the “Bull Moose” party. The Democratic nominee, Woodrow Wilson, was a son of the south and committed segregationist. He had written books advocating that the Constitution was obsolete and what we needed was a government of benevolent experts with the separation of powers abolished. Roosevelt and Taft between them won the majority of the popular vote (51%) to Wilson’s 41% (the remainder went to the socialist Eugene Debs); but because of how the electoral college works, Wilson got 82% of the electoral vote, for an easy victory.
And thus we got, during Wilson’s presidency — the segregation of the federal service, the income tax, the inception of the “fourth branch” agencies outside the separation of powers, including the Federal Trade Commission and, of course, every Libertarian’s favorite, the Federal Reserve, not to mention U.S. entry into World War I. The failure of the Republicans to join forces led to an unmitigated disaster for the Party and for the country.
Since then, serious third party efforts have been few and notably without success. The most notable: In 1968 Democratic Governor of Alabama George Wallace broke from the Democratic Party to run on an explicitly segregationist and anti-civil rights platform. He won 46 electoral votes from five southern states (Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas) and possibly cost Hubert Humphrey the election. In 1992 Ross Perot, running on an anti-immigration, anti-free trade platform as a third party candidate, got 19% of the popular vote, but zero electoral votes. In this case, he probably cost George HW Bush a second term, but did not come close to making himself president.
In other words, third parties either barely make a ripple in the water — which has always been the case with the Libertarian Party — or, if they can get up to a significant percentage of the vote, their main accomplishment is to increase the chance that the party their supporters would like the least wins.
Today we have two parties that again represent broad coalitions of disparate groups that at first blush you would not necessarily think would be natural allies. The Democrats have put together the “coastal elites,” intellectuals, the media, academics, government workers, socialists and Marxists, together with ethnic groups perceiving themselves as outsiders, people at the low end of the income distribution, and those on the receiving end of government spending programs. The most important central theme is the desire to increase the size and power of the government. For the Republicans, the coalition includes equally disparate participants, such as entrepreneurs and small business people, people in the goods-producing and construction industries, religious people, people who consider themselves patriots and lovers of freedom, Libertarians, and also people who favor more law and order, also immigration restrictionists. The most important unifying theme is limiting the size and power of the government.
For both the Democrats and Republicans there are constant tensions between groups in the coalition who are not natural allies. As one example the Democrats’ coalition includes both blacks and the teachers unions — groups that you would think would be bitter political enemies.
For the Republicans, the alliance of Libertarians and other freedom lovers with law and order advocates, with immigration restrictionists, with religious people, also presents constant tensions. However, our system offers no better option than to join that one of the two coalitions that comes closer to advancing our goals. As much as any of us might prefer a Jo Jorgensen for President over Donald Trump, the fact is that Jo Jorgensen is not in a position to make a serious play for a majority of the electoral college. If we want to participate in any meaningful way in the election, we must choose between Biden and Trump.
Yes there are multiple things for a Libertarian not to like about Trump. For example, he is not a committed free trader, and he is an immigration restrictionist. But when you look closely at what he has done those issues, he’s not very bad. His restrictive actions on trade have basically come down to a few tweaks to existing trade agreements; except with China, where there have been genuine security threats that need to be dealt with. On immigration, it’s mostly only illegal immigration that he has tried to crack down on. Legal immigration continues mostly as before.
But as between Trump and Biden, consider these points:
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Trump supports tax cuts and has put a big one through. Biden actively supports tax increases, including raising rates across the board, raising the cap gains rates up to the ordinary income rates, plus new higher rates on “millionaires.” This is the single biggest issue going to the size and control over your life of the government over the long pull. It should be the biggest issue for Libertarians.
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Biden clearly supports increased government takeover of the medical care portion of the economy, and will clearly go along with anything on that subject that passes the Congress.
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Trump has pushed a de-regulatory agenda. Biden supports more and more regulations. Again, this should be a big issue for Libertarians. Biden explicitly supports using regulation to drive fossil fuel companies out of business and drive up your cost of energy.
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Biden has taken on AOC as his green energy advisor. On July 14 he made a big speech backing a version of the green new deal as devised by AOC, that includes massive new spending on pie in the sky energy schemes with no idea how they might work. He has promised to eliminate all use of fossil fuels, that provide about 80% of our energy. In the July 14 speech he said he would get rid of fossil fuels from the electricity sector of the economy by 2025. He has no idea how this could possibly be done, but would impose vast taxes and growth of government to do it. Also in the July 14 speech was spending new trillions to retrofit millions of buildings in the US, all to be done as a government project, and you have no choice whether to go along or not. He has vowed to ban fracking (which has driven the price of oil and gas down to about half of what it was during Obama’s presidency, and saved American consumers trillions), and is backed by the people who try to block every pipeline and energy development of every sort.
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Biden has called for the jailing of fossil fuel executives. Those are the people who provide the energy that is giving you air conditioning right now.
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Biden has called for a nationwide ban on the use of plastic bags. In another speech he called for a ban on the use of all plastics.
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Biden has called for the end of shareholder capitalism.
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And then there is the huge issue of corruption. Biden’s son Hunter got a $1 million/yr gig as a two-meeting per year director of Ukrainian oil company Burisma immediately upon Joe becoming point man for US policy to Ukraine. During the Yanukovich presidency, Burisma had somehow garnered all the valuable oil and gas leases in Ukraine, in a situation where no international oil major could seem to crack in. When Yanukovich was replaced and a prosecutor started to investigate, Hunter got the $mil/yr gig and Biden got the prosecutor fired. And then there’s China, where Hunter accompanied Joe on a trip aboard Air Force 2, and shortly after a Chinese government-affiliated bank put a billion dollars into the investment fund of Hunter and his partner. And then there’s Iraq, where when Biden became point man of US policy his brother James became Executive VP of a home building company that suddenly had a billion dollar contract to build homes in Iraq (funded by US aid).
Then there are Supreme Court justices. If you observe the Supreme Court, you know that the “conservative” justices have varying judicial philosophies, and often take different positions in high-profile cases. The liberal justices almost always vote as a bloc. Most important for a Libertarian, the liberal justices always vote as a bloc on any issues that involves a growth in the size and the power of the regulatory and administrative state. Biden would clearly appoint more of these people, and cement liberal control of the court for a generation or more. As another key example, the Citizens United case is the one that says that the government cannot restrict the free speech rights of corporate entities to participate in the electoral process. This case is a key bulwark that enables conservative independent groups to amass funds to counter what would otherwise be the unanswered voice of the liberal media in influencing elections. All liberal justices dissented, and RBG has indicated that this is her top priority to overturn.
And finally, there’s the ongoing takeover of the Democratic Party by the far far left. The people who run Minneapolis and Seattle and San Francisco and yes, New York, are Biden’s people. They all support him. They all expect a Biden presidency to provide them with one massive federal bailout after another to pay for their vast overspending on failed spending programs that only make things worse. The House already passed a bill indicating where this is going — every Democrat-governed city gets whatever they want to make sure that no member of a government union ever gets laid off — and only the Republican Senate and Trump stand in the way.
So, as much as many of us, myself included, find plenty of ways in which Trump comes up short, the comparison with Biden is not even close. Biden would be an unmitigated disaster. Libertarians should vote for Trump.
From my closing statement:
A commenter at my blog put it well a couple of days ago. Voting for Trump is like forcing yourself to eat broccoli if you don’t like broccoli. It’s somewhat distasteful. But voting for Biden is eating a gigantic dog turd.
The fact is that the best thing we as libertarians can do is to join the coalition that is closer to our values and work with it to get its candidates elected and our values furthered. That means voting for Trump. It also means doing everything we can to get Trump elected, and working within the Republican Party to get it to move further in the libertarian direction.
The Libertarian Party, and Jo Jorgensen as a candidate, is not an effective competitor for a majority of the electoral votes.
There is a worst case scenario here. That scenario would be a modified repeat of the election of 1912, and could occur even if Jorgensen only gets 1 or 2% of the vote nationwide. It would occur if the Jorgensen vote is enough in one or a few swing states to swing those states from Trump to Biden, and thereby swing the election to Biden.
As much as I think that Wilson was the worst President in US history, Biden could well be even worse. If you were kidding yourself that Biden was a moderate, that now has been completely disproved by the Biden-Sanders unity platform that came out a few days ago. This is the government takeover of everything, vast new spending, vast new taxes, vast new regulations, vast new energy costs.
It’s also the ascendency of the woke, who think that believing in freedom is hate speech and racism and white supremacy. And it means Supreme Court justices who will approve suppressing the speech of anyone who does not agree with the woke agenda. With Trump as President, there is at least some possibility of pushing back against the purges from social media, from academia, from the media of all dissenting voices such as yours. With Biden as president, and the woke in control, the move to silence libertarian voices will only accelerate.
Trump may not be our favorite. But he is our only option for pushing back against the malign forces for which Biden is the current figurehead and frontman. We need to vote for Trump. We need to get Trump as big a victory as possible, hopefully a landslide. Indeed, if we really care about libertarianism, this is our duty.
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