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Thoughts on libertarianism and voting

The anarchist argument against voting in democratic elections is that participating in the immoral system of determining right and wrong that is democracy (mob-rule) gives your tacit consent to the outcome of such elections; by voting, you demonstrate that you agree that mob-rule is a valid and just way of running society, so even if your candidates didn’t win, you agree that the winner was determined justly and therefore has a right to rule. The only way you can truly object to the criminals who get elected and to the whole democratic-Statist system, they say, is to refrain from participating in it altogether.

Perhaps you’ve encountered this analogy, which does not violate Godwin’s Rule. In Nazi Germany, Jews were kidnapped, enslaved, tortured, and murdered solely because of their religion. Determining that some people are evil and need to be punished unmercifully and then exterminated simply because of the religious community they were born into is a monstrously evil way to decide anything. Therefore, if you objected to being kidnapped and murdered, because you were not a Jew but a Christian, you have used their criterion (religion) to avoid punishment, which means you have consented to their method of deciding who should be kidnapped and murdered. The only moral way to object to their decision to send you to a concentration camp would be to persuade them that you have harmed no one and their actions are wrong, and not mention religion at all. Right?

The point is that if you’re forced into an objectionable situation, playing by your captors’ rules and trying to improve your situation and that of others by allowable means is not necessarily evil. That alone doesn’t make voting in any and all democratic elections moral, but it makes it understandable. The problem is that voting in democratic elections, even for candidates who are (practically) anarchist and who have no chance of gaining control of the State, doesn’t tend to improve anyone’s lot; furthermore, it’s possible that increasing voter turnout by our participation in election day can actually harm others (or everyone), and improving your lot by doing harm to others is not permitted under libertarian morality.

It is argued that high voter turnout harms everyone because it strengthens the notion of the legitimacy of democratic elections in the public’s minds. This reminds me of what Herbert Spencer said. The Statists will use any excuse they can muster to maintain and expand their power over us, and will misconstrue any action on our part as representing our consent to their rule. If we vote, even for an anti-establishment and anti-State candidate, then they misconstrue that as our agreement that the election was the right way to choose our masters and therefore we must agree to live under the rulers chosen by that method. If we don’t vote, they take our apathy as a lack of objection to the democratic system, so we have no right to complain about the result the mob forces on us.

I’m not sure that high voter turnout increases the legitimacy of democratic elections in the minds of the public or in the minds of the professional criminal class; I’m pretty positive low voter turnout doesn’t decrease the feeling of moral superiority and legitimacy that our masters in the State feel. They are so consumed by moral indignation and elitism that they would hardly be humbled by being empowered by only 10% of the populace as opposed to 50%. How many people freely voted for Josef Stalin, Kim Jong Il, or Saddam Hussein, over numerous alternatives? I am skeptical of the libertarian claim that if voter turnout decreases to an embarrassingly low level, politicians will interpret that as a rejection not only of their platform but of the entire mob-rule system, and work to reform their ways so as to allow humans to govern themselves.

I guess it’s possible that if voter turnout decreased to 10% or 20% in a presidential election year, a major outcry from the media and politicians and activists would lead to discussions and analyses of the disillusionment that led to such low turnout, and a few libertarian perspectives might be discussed, so this would provide an opportunity to popularize the libertarian message. Especially with the internet. Not so much the mainstream media.

But the goal of the agorist movement is not to get a majority of people to vote for Harry Browne and Ron Paul, and continue voting in libertarians who will decrease the size of government gradually until our government is so minarchist that anarchism seems feasible, desirable, and obvious. The real agorist ideal, which all libertarians should subscribe to, is to live and work outside and above and around the State to such a great extent, and augment the black and gray markets to such a great extent, that large numbers of people become impractical for the State to govern and individual secession becomes feasible.

I’m not sure which route to freedom is faster or easier, but there don’t seem to be many reasons to keep our hopes resting on the first one.

The best reasons I’ve heard for libertarians to vote are, first, as an active protestation against the corrupt and immoral government that insists on deciding things by mob-rule. (This is as opposed to the passive protest of non-participation.) I suppose the only ways to claim moral superiority in this case would be to vote for someone who obviously has no chance of winning, who wasn’t expected to win by his supporters, and who only represents a protest-vote, an anti-vote; or, to vote for someone who opposes aggressive force of all kinds and therefore endorses the elimination of the State altogether, both in his jurisdiction and across the world. (Note that this second type of candidate is, in reality, automatically also the first type of candidate.)

I don’t buy the argument that the anti-establishment candidate and the protest-vote constitute an endorsement of the mob-rule system, just as I reject the idea that avoiding the Nazi concentration camp based on your religion is an endorsement of the religious-discrimination system of Nazi Germany. The problem is that our masters in the government and their myrmidons in the public take voting as implied consent to the mob-rule system. Not that they need our consent to see it as legitimate, seeing as how our philosophy of peace, liberty, and individual sovereignty are so far off their radar that they would take our opposition to mob-rule as evidence of its correctness.

Another understandable reason, in my mind, is to vote for publicity. Vote to increase the visibility of the general libertarian (even if it isn’t real libertarian) message. There are good points in opposition to and in support of this. In opposition to it is what I talked about above: increasing voter turnout, even if it’s for anti-Republocrat, anti-establishment, anti-State candidates, might increase the general air of legitimacy that the professional criminal class and, especially, the dumb masses assign to the democratic process. They won’t see this protest-vote as an actual protest-vote, unless they pay close attention to the actual issues, and they’ll just see the large number of votes for “alternative” candidates as proof that their beloved, rigged, two-party system does still allow for non-mainstream possibilities. Interestingly, however, the public’s widespread approval of mob-rule provides a particular argument in favor of promoting anti-State candidates. The public at large does not pay attention to, and in fact hasn’t the slightest cognizance of or interest in, libertarian philosophers or economists. They think that monster Hillary Clinton and that charlatan Barack Obama had significant differences in policy positions. They think those two dolts Hannity and Colmes represent the opposite ends of the political spectrum. They pay attention to electoral politics and presidential candidates! Introducing people to the libertarian philosophy in a very non-pushy way, a way that they see as more normal and acceptable—via support of or at least partial agreement with minarchist political candidates—is, I think, a good way to spread the message and increase the effectiveness of libertarian education. Better than sending your friends links to LRC columns or Proudhon essays, or getting into deep economic/philosophical discussions with them. Save that for later.

As an example of the potential effectiveness of spreading the libertarian message through semi-libertarian political candidates, ask yourself how many average but freedom-minded Americans had gotten up in arms about the Federal Reserve, one of the most insidious and destructive institutions of our corporate-state socialist system, before Ron Paul’s anti-presidential run? Compare that to how many average voters were converted to an anti-Fed, free-market-currency philosophy by Ludwig von Mises or Murray Rothbard. I’d guess not nearly as many, since we’re counting average American voters, not hardcore libertarian blaggers like you and me. I know two hardcore liberal Republocrats who took note of that issue and agreed with Ron Paul about it. It isn’t much, but I’d argue that his candidacy did a lot of good to introduce people to some issues they wouldn’t otherwise pay attention to.

Maybe I’m letting my fairly enthusiastic support of Ron Paul, driven largely by the LRC machine, bias my thoughts and excuse what doesn’t deserve excusing. I wanted more people to know that small government doesn’t have anything to do with the Republican Party, that the real anti-Republican in this presidential race was Ron Paul, not Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, and that if more people were exposed to a fairly popular and somewhat-almost-mainstream presidential candidate, then a few more people would learn something about the smaller-government movement in the United States.

For some reason, the LRC blag no longer has a blagroll, but back when it did, consider how easy it was for an uninformed conservative/undecided potential voter to search for Ron Paul and reach an anarchist left-libertarian web page. Someone hears how many young activists are supporting Ron Paul at rallies and on the internet, and they see that he’s around Rudy Giuliani’s or Mike Huckabee’s numbers in some primaries, and they notice the curiosity that he seems to be a “conservative” Republican who is staunchly anti-war, and so they search for Ron Paul news and commentary. They come to the LewRockwell.com blag, click on Roderick Long’s link in the blagroll, and after one search and two clicks they find themselves at the web page of a hardcore left-libertarian philosopher. One more click and they’re at either Charles Johnson, Kevin Carson, David Friedman, Gene Callahan/Bob Murphy, Arthur Silber, Sheldon Richman, Stefan Molyneux, or Agorism.info, the Center for a Stateless Society, or the Ludwig von Mises Institute. All anarchist libertarian sites. They might also click from Dr. Long’s blag to Reason’s Hit & Run, not real libertarianism but perhaps somewhat unfamiliar minarchist-civil-libertarianism.

So using the democratic-election machine to promote directly anti-democratic and in fact entirely anti-State ideals works some of the time. Maybe the bad offsets the good, though. Still, playing the Statists’ game and using their system against them is not wrong. People believe in the State and they pay attention to candidates and elections. If Ron Paul and Harry Browne popularized a watered-down version of libertarianism, and stimulated people to research, read, and learn about real libertarianism—which they did—then publicity for some broadly libertarianish platform is a perfectly just goal to shoot for. It is not saying the ends justify the means, and it is not saying if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

Libertarians around the internet, especially those who strongly advocate implementing agorism in practice, talk a lot about how this isn’t practical yet and we should still focus on the education phase of agorist libertarianism, to convert more people to the philosophy of freedom and increase the number of people we can trust and freely trade with, and increase the impracticability of being governed by the Leviathan State. So promoting and talking about, and sometimes actually voting for, mostly-libertarian political candidates is something I support and engage in for publicity and education purposes.

I think the best argument against libertarians voting for other libertarians is that it doesn’t result in any shrinkage of the State and only ends up watering down parties and candidates that had a chance to be truly libertarian (like the LP), and so gradually seceding and becoming ungovernable by the State will be more effective at achieving freedom than voting for less and less government until it is voted away. And that promoting the message of semi-libertarian candidates for educational and proselytization purposes in the meantime is unacceptable for other reasons. If you agree with my assertion that promoting semi-libertarian candidates (or even pure libertarian candidates like Mary Ruwart, as Roderick Long did) is an acceptable and effective way to spread the libertarian message to people who don’t want to hear about Rothbard or Tucker or your philosophy of the nature of human beings’ relationship with one another, then you can see why I excuse libertarians who endorse and even vote for minarchist candidates.

Call it my Statist indoctrination, but I am actually kind of disappointed there are no libertarian presidential candidates to vote for. If I learn that there are propositions in my state or district that I want to vote for or against (all to decrease the size and scope of government, of course), then I will probably write in my own name in the president section. No one is fit to govern me except myself.

This probably rankles many libertarians, but, I figure it’s good to be rankled every once in a while, especially by your philosophical allies. Maybe I should give myself agorist demerits à la Roderick Long.

Posted in Democracy, Elections, Minarchism, Philosophy, Ron Paul