Does it make sense to vote for Gary Johnson, the Libertarian candidate for president? Sure, as long as you believe two things. First, you have to believe that it makes no difference at all whether Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump moves into the White House — because one of them will. Second, you have to believe that America will be better off in the long run if we eliminate environmental regulation, abolish the income tax, do away with public schools, and dismantle Social Security and Medicare — which is what the Libertarian platform calls for.
.. Why are minor candidates seemingly drawing so much support this year? Very little of it, I suspect, reflects support for their policy positions. How many people have actually read the Libertarian platform? But if you’re thinking of voting Johnson, you really should. It’s a remarkable document.
.. But anyone who calls him a “populist” isn’t looking at the general thrust of his ideas, or at whom he has chosen as economic advisers. Mr. Trump’s brain trust, such as it is, is composed of hard-line, right-wing supply-siders — whom even Republican economists have called “charlatans and cranks” — for whom low taxes on the rich are the overwhelming priority.
.. Remember, George W. Bush lost the popular vote in 2000, but somehow ended up in the White House anyway in part thanks to the Nader vote — and nonetheless proceeded to govern as if he had won a landslide. Can you really imagine a triumphant Mr. Trump showing restraint out of respect for all those libertarian votes?
Where did Donald Trump get his racialized rhetoric? From libertarians.
The intersection of white nationalism, the alt-right and Ron Paul
Trump’s style and positions — endorsing and consorting with 9/11 truthers, promoting online racists, using fake statistics — draw on a now-obscure political strategy called “paleolibertarianism,” which was once quite popular among some Republicans, especially former presidential candidate Ron Paul.
.. it’s incredible how many of the same white nationalists and conspiracy theorists to whom Ron Paul once catered are now ardent Trump supporters. It’s because Trump and Paul speak the same language.
.. Mainstream libertarians have been agonizing over this legacy among themselves for some time, hoping that either the elder or younger Paul would definitively denounce the movement’s racialist past, but no such speech has ever come.
.. There had always been some sympathy for racism and anti-Semitism among libertarians — the movement’s house magazine, Reason, dedicated an entire issue in 1976 to “historical revisionism,” including Holocaust revisionism. It also repeatedly ran articles in defense of South Africa’s then-segregationist government (though by 2016, the magazine was running articles like “Donald Trump Enables Racism”).
.. Rothbard even published a chapter in his book “The Ethics of Liberty” in which he said that “the purely free society will have a flourishing free market in children,” although he didn’t specify the races of the children who might be sold.
.. Rothbard also invoked the “exciting” former senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin — not because of his economic views but because he was a brash populist prone to doing erratic things. Rothbard’s description of McCarthy seems eerily similar to the campaign that Trump has been running:
.. To solve the problem that few Americans are interested in small government, Rothbard argued that libertarians needed to align themselves with people they might not like much in order to expand their numbers. “Outreach to the Rednecks” was needed to make common cause with far-right Christian conservatives who hated the federal government, disliked drugs and wanted to crack down on crime.
.. the highly lucrative newsletters frequently stoked racial fears, similar to what Trump has been doing this year, though they went further — one even gave advice on using an unregistered gun to shoot “urban youth.” Another issue mocked black Americans by proposing alternative names for New York City such as “Zooville” and “Rapetown,” while urging black political demonstrators to hold their protests “at a food stamp bureau or a crack house.”
.. Rothbard’s call for “sovereign nations based on race and ethnicity” is very similar to beliefs Trump’s alt-right supporters express today.
.. After Rand Paul came to the Senate in 2011, and as he eventually began planning his own presidential campaign, there was some speculation that conservatives might be entering a “libertarian moment.” Things didn’t turn out that way. Instead, the American right seems to have entered a paleolibertarian moment.
How “Silicon Valley” Nails Silicon Valley
“Silicon Valley,” now in its third season, is one of the funniest shows on television; it is also the first ambitious satire of any form to shed much light on the current socio-cultural moment in Northern California.
.. “In the writer’s room, I talked a lot about how the founder of a company has a moral authority that no other C.E.O., no matter how accomplished, will ever have,” Costolo told me.
.. “That’s the first thing you notice,” Judge said. “It’s capitalism shrouded in the fake hippie rhetoric of ‘We’re making the world a better place,’ because it’s uncool to just say ‘Hey, we’re crushing it and making money.’”
.. “If someone is holding a document on the show, that document is written out, in full, the way that it would be in real life,” Dotan said. “We don’t think of it in terms of, ‘How little can we get away with showing on camera?’ It’s more, like, ‘Let’s go through the process of making the world as complete as possible and see if that process leads us to better stuff.’ Which it usually does.”
.. His answer was, ‘I think Silicon Valley is immersed in a titanic battle between the hippie value system of the Steve Jobs generation and the Ayn Randian libertarian values of the Peter Thiel generation.’
.. “Some of us actually, as naïve as it sounds, came here to make the world a better place. And we did not succeed. We made some things better, we made some things worse, and in the meantime the libertarians took over, and they do not give a damn about right or wrong. They are here to make money.”
.. By satirizing them, you’re holding up a mirror. Some of these guys look in the mirror and go, ‘Fuck, we look silly.’ Others look in the mirror and go, ‘Wow, I am so fucking handsome.’”
.. “The more I meet these people and learn about them, the more I come away thinking that, despite all the bullshit and greed, there actually is something exciting and hopeful going on up there.”
.. “I think it’s a combination of the pretentiousness of the people involved and their total market penetration,” O’Keefe said. “It’s no longer necessary to tell you what the product is. Now the goal is just to make you feel better about using it.”