Why Voting Libertarian is Not a Waste of Your Time

During every presidential election year, many news organizations do a certain standard story. The title of that feature might be this: Why would anyone bother voting for the Libertarian candidate? Isn’t a Third Party a quaint waste of your time, as sure a way to dispose of your vote as not bothering to show up at the polls?

So the story runs, a few people are mentioned; perhaps you hear the candidate interviewed – once – on NPR (as if they dropped out of the race the day after). And then we forget about this Third Party nonsense until the next election cycle when someone dusts off the old, worn scripts, and the Libertarians make their return appearance as a useful, quirky space filler on a slow news day.

This morning I decided to vote for Bob Barr, the Libertarian Party candidate for President. I did it because I decided that a vote for either of the “major” candidates would be the real waste of my time. Let me tell you why:

I have voted for Democrats in every election since the first year I was allowed to vote, which was 1984. If the candidate was the Democrat, I automatically picked them. If there was more than one Democrat involved, I researched which was likely to cause the least damage and I voted for them. If there were no Democrats, I wrote in something derogatory about the Republican who was about to re-inherit his power without a challenger.

Why did I vote for Democrats? The reasoning shifted around a bit, but in the end it always boiled down to the same thing: The Democrat was not a Republican.

So far as I was concerned, the Republicans’ swing to the far right involved an idea of government I found morally intrusive. Without fail, the Republicans were openly espousing a frightening brand of intolerance born of pandering to the extreme conservatism of the so-called Religious Right.

Nothing of cultural value was safe from these people – they demanded the ability to legislate what art I could see (or make), which books were fit for sharing in a public setting, what ideas were “dangerous” and “un-American.”

They wanted to tell women what they can and cannot do with their bodies. They wanted to tell men and women whom they could love and how, and imprison them if they disobeyed or discriminate against them if they did not adequately conform.

They demanded that the land be remade in the image of some vague thing they came to call “Wholesome Family Values.” And they had no wish to bring in this reform by using rational arguments and evidence – they simply wanted to put people into office who would rewrite the laws to suit their tastes and place judges on the bench who would enforce their interpretation of the laws.

In short, they wanted to legislate their personal morality without offering so much as a good explanation as to why I was supposed to think their ethical code made more sense than any competitor’s – that is, aside from the baseless claim they infallibly understand the mind of the Deity.

And the Republicans had this habit of making certain their cronies were served, that their wealthy contributors’ pockets were well-lined with government assistance of all sorts. No, they would not spend money on the poor; instead they redistributed taxes to the rich instead of having an open, honest discussion about just what the responsibilities of a good government might be and the proper use of taxes. Just as many see the Democrats as the party of irresponsible social welfare, I saw the Republicans become the party of equally irresponsible corporate welfare.

To my mind, the Republicans, with the advent of Ronald Reagan, were the more dangerous of the two parties – dangerous to the spirit of The Constitution and the hopes of the Founders. So I always threw my vote to the Democrat – as a protest against everything the Republicans stood for.

I also had a certain conviction: That the Democrats tended to cause less damage when in office than the Right Wing Republicans. My thinking went, since the Democratic Party was an umbrella party, they had a certain incapacity to easily agree about anything or readily cooperate. The outcome was (I thought) government that worked very slowly with little that was very extreme, one way or another, emerging at the end of the day. Liberalism in our country had gone out of favor, so this limited the power of anyone who leaned to the left so far as to be dangerous.

The point is, I saw the Democrats as a “safe” choice. I didn’t vote for their candidates because I liked any of them – I have yet to vote for a politician with whom I feel wholly comfortable or a platform with which I wholly agree. I never picked my candidates on the basis of personality – it was always with a hope that he or she would cause less damage than the Republicans seemed capable of inflicting.

Over the past 8 years, I have found myself increasingly faced with the probability my assumptions about the Democrats were wrong. I watched them roll over and give away our personal freedoms to the Bush Administration in the name of some illusory thing they called “safety”; I watched them help expand the power of the executive branch while surrendering the responsibilities of the legislative branch.

I heard the Democrats complain about the president and his policies, but at the end of the day I watched many of them bow down, unwilling to take a consistently principled stand of any sort on any issue, unable to ask any of the questions that needed to be asked about The Bush Doctrine, about The Patriot Act, about the National ID, about torture. They were pragmatists; their sole objective was to remain in office.

I have just watched a Democratic Congress sit around while the nation’s economy went into a slow motion train wreck over the past couple of years. They took no meaningful action, did nothing worthwhile, seem to have exercised no more oversight on this issue than they have with other issues of national importance.

And then the Bush Administration shoved the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 (The Bailout) across their collective Congressional desk and demanded they get out the rubber stamp one more time and sign off on a huge shift of power and a tremendous redistribution of wealth to… a gang of irresponsible wealthy people.

As of today, both Houses of Congress approved this bill and President Bush immediately signed it into law.

I have just witnessed the Democrats and the Republicans cooperate to re-make our government, spend our tax money, lard up the bill with very questionable tax breaks, all without adequate time to examine the proposals in the bill or clearly think out the ramifications that will only become apparent as the months pass.

Certainly we civilians did not have an opportunity to educate ourselves and properly perform our role as holding the first office in a Democracy: Citizen.

Both candidates for president from both of the major parties, being senators, voted exactly the same way on this bill and never questioned it in any meaningful fashion… other than half-hearted swipes against President Bush to score a few points.

So I have had to re-think my vote, which was solidly for Obama. At this point, I have asked myself a serious question: Is my strategy of supporting Democrats against Republicans really doing much more than perpetuating the very situation I oppose?

After this episode in which both parties cooperated to expand the power of the executive branch in unimaginable and unknown ways one more time, I am afraid I have decided the answer to my question is, “My votes have done little more than contribute to the loss of the possibility of any real change in our country’s perilous situation.”

The Republicans and Democrats have written the rules to favor themselves, concentrate all institutional power in their hands. As long as no one opposes them in the name of ideas that vaguely resemble the values that inspired the Founding Fathers, voting for one of them is nearly the same as voting for the other.

Each is more than happy, when hard choices must be made, when crises must be faced, to attempt to legislate their way out of the difficulty. And there will always be hard choices and crises – that is why we have government. But as long as the two parties can count on getting my vote, neither has to radically re-think its motives or really consider anything as impractical as ideas and principles.

They are wasting my time.

So I have decided to vote for the Third Party candidate, the Libertarian, Bob Barr. Again and as usual, it has nothing to do with his personality and charisma. But this time it does have to do with principles. I do not wholly agree with the Libertarian Party platform – but, then again, I’ll never wholly agree with many groups in this world.

But I absolutely agree with them that the Founders created a country based on the idea that no one in government should be allowed to have very much power, because politicians can’t be trusted to use power wisely outside a system of strict checks and balances, and outside The Constitution and the laws. I firmly agree that, ultimately, the most important force in a nation is its citizens, and that it is only by the citizenry choosing to be responsible, educated, and ethical that a just government and a proper society can be created for future generations.

I agree that it is not the government’s business to tell me how to live beyond a certain minimal level necessary to keep peace and promote a proper sort of tolerance. I agree that many things need to be re-examined in our nation, our values, our beliefs – and that politics cannot achieve this. If this is to be done at all, it must be done as free people thinking for themselves, using social, not governmental, institutions to achieve as many of their aims as is possible and reasonable.

Will my vote be wasted? Quite the contrary; I am voting for a better future. I have decided to cast a vote to show I am through playing the rigged game the two major parties have set up for me, the one in which I surrender my will and my judgment and slave away to provide the tax money for whatever “project” or whatever restrictive “law” these people decide to concoct. All while ignoring my letters and phone calls… and yours too, perhaps.

I am casting a vote for a different game – the one the Founders agreed on, the one that respects my value as a rational human, the one that limits, not expands government, the one that keeps theocrats and tyrants of all sorts from improperly affecting the laws. I’m going to vote for the Libertarian Bob Barr, not because I like him, but because I cherish these ideas, and because the Republicans and Democrats don’t care about these things at all in practice, regardless of what they may preach.

Evidently, the Libertarians are asking for an opportunity to show me they will act on these principles. I’m going to support them till they show me otherwise.

There are worse ways to spend your time and vote.

Richard Van Ingram

3 October 2008