There’s an interesting discussion going on the comments at The Liberty Zone over the conference call with Governor Matt Blunt yesterday. This argument has played out many a times on the blogosphere and elsewhere. Nikki says:
My view is that if we continue to cast our votes AGAINST a contender, instead of FOR whom we want to see in the White House, we make easier for the major parties to continue their “business as usual” policies without giving them incentive for actual change.
The last time I was for a candidate was in the primaries when I supported Fred Thompson (who was out by the time the PA primaries came around). The time to get the person you want is in the party primaries. Everything after that is going to be a compromise if your preferred candidate doesn’t win. If libertarians (small l) eschew party politics, they are guaranteeing political irrelevance. One of the reasons the candidates pay so much attention to the religious vote is because they come out in hordes in the primary elections. Look what they did for Mike Huckabee last year. No one expected Governor Huckabee to do as well as he did, but he had the religious vote behind him.
Bryan Pick mentioned in one of his comments:
Like I wrote earlier, if you vote third party, you send a signal to the major parties about your preferences, about where they have to go to get your vote — assuming they believe your vote is gettable.
Who exactly are you sending a signal to? Primary voters aren’t going into the voting booth and thinking about keeping the coalition together, they are going in to vote for the candidate that most fits their individual principles. At best, by voting third party, you can influence candidates to run who think they have the right mix of ideas and principles to prevail in the primary. But once they’re thinking about that, you’re already dealing with compromises.
The only way to get a candidate that is aligned 100% with your views it to run yourself. Short of that, participating in politics at the local level, and promoting candidates who share your views the most is really the only way to change things on a macroscopic scale in the long run.
No single special interest has enough clout on their own to win an election. In our republican system, we form coalitions of interests into political parties, presumably comprised of people who hate each other less than they hate that coalition of other people. All politics involves compromise. It’s the nature of the beast. At what point that compromise becomes too much to bear is a different topic, and really boils down to inidividual choice.
But I do believe that libertarians have been too demanding of a place in politics, Republican, Libertarian or otherwise, that are far beyond their contributions to it. Perhaps there just aren’t enough libertarians out there to really have much of a place, but I don’t really believe that. In my view, the persistent problem libertarians have had getting any traction, has to do with their unwillingness to make any compromises or do any work within the party system.
This is a long battle we wage. It’s been raging for generations, and it’s not going to stop any time soon. Sometimes you get dealt a not so great hand. Sure, you can leave the game, or you can try your best to minimize your losses, and get yourself into a position to have a better hand next time. The left has put a lot of chips down on the O-man, and I’m a lot more interested in getting him to bust out, so we can stay in the game and avoid bleeding chips. In poker there’s a lot of luck in the draw, in politics getting a better hand involves working hard to make sure there are good cards in the deck. I’m working for McCain this election not so much because I like him, but because if he wins we can stay in the game. I work for the local endorsed candidates so that politicians who support gun rights have an incentive to run — they know I can help them get votes and support. That’s making sure the deck is stacked in our favor for when we draw future hands. It’s not fun work. It often involves holding your nose. Sometimes you have to put some deeply held reservations about some candidates aside in order to stay in the game. But if you don’t get in and do the dirty work, someone else will, and they will be the ones who decide the cards the rest of us get to play with. Personally, I’d rather help stack the deck in our favor.
