American politics has devolved into competing colors of populism, with impossible promises and fear completely displacing substantive policy differences. There may have been a time when issues drove voter opinion, but team loyalty has pushed values and policy aside. Now the only relevant question for supporting a policy is whether the candidate or official supporting it is on the right team. Republicans will support gun control, trade protectionism, and farm subsidies if imposed by a Republican. Democrats will support deportation, mass incarceration, and corporate welfare so long as a Democrat’s in charge.

How should a libertarian, someone who wants peaceful people to be able to pursue their own happiness free from government interference, respond to this toxic political environment? Registering to vote as a Libertarian, joining and supporting the Libertarian Party, and being a Libertarian candidate for public office are three actions you can take that will have a positive impact on our political environment and move our society in a more libertarian direction.

Due, in large part, to the Cold War fusionism of conservatives and libertarians against the communists, along with lip service to libertarian principles by a few Republicans, there are loud voices who advocate that libertarians should not join the Libertarian Party. Their core thesis is that libertarians can have greater political impact in trying to change the Republican Party from the inside. If the experience of Ron Paul in 2008 and 2012 was not sufficient evidence that the GOP hates libertarians, the complete takeover of the GOP by a protectionist president should provide the final nail in the coffin of that theory.

This is not exclusively a Republican problem. Both of the two old parties are ideologically unmoored, making them completely unstable vehicles to advance libertarianism. In the same way that a few idealistic vegan fry cooks are not going to stop McDonald’s from selling meat, libertarians working inside the Republican and Democratic parties are not going to get anything that party leadership doesn’t approve of. Insurgent candidacies will be put down, committee appointments stripped, primary challengers supported. Just ask Justin Amash, among others.

Since we have evidence working within the old parties doesn’t work, why not decline to affiliate with any political party? There is a certain allure for an individualist in declaring political independence from any political party or tribe. By not declaring any political affiliation, one cannot be held to any standard of political belief or have to defend any politician or political position. This is the advantage of independence and its fatal flaw.

Being a political independent sends no clear signal. Some people are independent because they are too progressive for the Democrats. Some people are independent because they are too conservative for the Republicans. Some people are independent because they are too libertarian for the Libertarians. But to politicians, they all look the same.

Registering and voting Libertarian sends a clearer signal than any other alternative. While parties are coalitions and nobody knows why someone casts a vote, the Libertarian platform is clearer than any other national political party. There are only 34 planks and fewer than 3,000 words in the Libertarian Party platform.By comparison, there are 24,000 and 31,000 words in the Democratic and Republican platforms. If your vote is a signal, are you confident about what you’re signaling by voting for a Republican or Democrat?

The point has been made that Libertarian Party candidates don’t win as often as the candidates of the two old parties. That’s true, but a vote is not a wager. Unless you have a bet on the outcome of the election, there is no prize for predicting the winner or having your vote added to their result. A vote is an opportunity to send a message about what you want and what you don’t. The only person who loses when you vote for a candidate you don’t want is you.

The compromises made in joining the two old parties are not just a matter of moving slower in a libertarian direction, but actively move in an anti-libertarian direction. The decision of whether a compromise is acceptable is a matter for each individual’s conscience, but honesty requires one to acknowledge the effect of the other policies and positions that one is supporting by being part of either the Republicans or Democrats.

Groups like the Republican Liberty Caucus that exist inside the party have less leverage than a voting block outside the party. If you can’t walk away from the table, your negotiating position suffers. As a Libertarian voter, you have more influence on the positions of Republican and Democratic politicians than internal caucuses whose votes they can take for granted.

Many people still have issues with some of the positions or personalities within the Libertarian Party. So do I. However, political parties are made up of those who show up. If you are not happy with the quality of candidates or activists within the party, there is a much better chance of influencing the direction of a smaller party than a larger one. The fact that the smaller party in this case already aligns more closely with a libertarian’s political preferences is a bonus.

A positive message of government doing less, better can break through the tribalism and force a discussion about the issues that the old-party candidates would rather not deal with. Avoidance behavior is real and politicians will avoid an issue if they can. When a group becomes more visible and more people join it, the ideas supported by the group become harder to dismiss.

There is always room for working together with politicians from any political party on specific policies, but doing so from our own solid ground as a distinct Libertarian political party provides the strongest position to make progress on setting the world free in our lifetime. As George Bernard Shaw said, “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

Now is the time for all good libertarians to be unreasonable men (and women) and join the Libertarian Party.

Francis Bacon said “nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.” For humans to survive and thrive, they must acknowledge reality, and their place in it, before they can determine and act on the things necessary to improve their condition. Likewise, in politics, we as lovers and defenders of liberty must acknowledge the facts before we can effect change. One of those facts is this: the system is rigged in favor of two parties.

In closed-primary states like Florida, being registered third-party leaves you voiceless in the primary, and in my own Republican-dominated county, the primary is the ballgame. You might not like it⁠—I know I don’t⁠—but it is a fact of reality. I’m not condoning it, or saying it is right, only that it is so.

Facts Are Stubborn Things

The electorate isn’t kind to third parties. The fact is, elected “big L” Libertarians are very rare birds, especially when you get into state and federal offices. To my knowledge, the highest-ranking elected official affiliated with the Libertarian Party anywhere in the country during the last decade was Laura Ebke in the Nebraska Legislature, and she got elected as a Republican.

Sen. Ebke switched her party affiliation to the Libertarian Party after being repeatedly bullied by the Republican governor⁠—a move I applauded from a principled perspective and cringed at from a political one. I was right to be concerned: she lost her re-election bid in 2018, and I’m convinced it had more to do with her party affiliation than it did with her or her voting record.

You see, I worked closely with Sen. Ebke prior to her being elected. She was the Secretary of the Republican Liberty Caucus for several years. She was everything you could ever want in an elected official: smart, principled, diligent, even-tempered, and humble. Her district was 51 percent Republican, 31 percent Democratic, and 18 percent non-partisan. She lost to her Republican opponent 56.32 percent to 43.68 percent.

Herein lie the second and third problems (facts): lazy voters and math. Most partisan voters vote their party affiliation straight down the ballot. In most places there are more combined Republican and Democratic voters than non-partisan voters. This makes it very hard, even impossible, to capture the majority if you’re running third party in the general election.

Wishing Won’t Make It So

In addition to the lazy voter and math problems, the Libertarian Party brand has been badly tainted during the last few cycles. While always beset by the “party of weed” image, it must now contend with the “naked guy streaking” image created by then candidate for Chair James Weeks at the 2016 National Convention.

While the former issue has become almost mainstream, and the latter could be written off as a stunt, the biggest issue the Libertarian Party now faces is that can no longer lay claim to its primary differentiator as “the party of principle”.

By putting forth the Johnson/Weld ticket in 2016, the Libertarian Party made clear it had lost its way ideologically, and for the first time that I can remember in my lifetime, defended candidates based on their ability to fund-raise and their “electability.”

Johnson failed the quintessential libertarian personal liberty test by insisting bakers should be forced to bake cakes for gay couples. Weld was a proven big government gun-grabber during his tenure as governor of Massachusetts, and when stumping seemed to have more in common with Hillary Clinton than with classical libertarian ideals.

The Libertarian Party I remember reading about when I was in high school wouldn’t have let these two into a convention, much less put them on a presidential ticket.

Some Days It’s Hard to Be a Republican

I’m not saying the Republican Party doesn’t have its issues. For a party that has traditionally proclaimed itself to be for less government, lower taxes, and more personal freedom, its record of delivering on said promises is spotty at best. Compromise on basic principles, cheating, cronyism, and outright corruption can be found at almost every level of the party. Those in power pull out all the stops to retain it.

The treatment of Ron Paul delegates in 2012 was disgraceful. The failure to repeal Obamacare in 2017 with Republicans in control of both houses of Congress and the White House was humiliating. The complete disregard for out-of-control spending and the national debt⁠—issues for which the Tea Party ostensibly gave Republicans the House and Senate to rein in⁠—is appalling.

What I am saying is that if we’re going to invest our precious volunteer time and energy, the return on investment on getting elected as a Republican can be big, if you can stomach the all-too-frequent disappointment.

The Power of One

During the course of my career, I have been involved in several trade associations with large boards. During my service on those boards, I have witnessed the lumbering power of inertia and groupthink, but I have also witnessed the power of the individual.

I can think of several occasions on one of those boards where some asinine, self-imposed regulatory measure had been proposed and appeared sure to pass. As an unabashed capitalist and a newcomer to the group, I frequently rose to speak in opposition in a room of 120 people.

I don’t know that my oratory was particularly brilliant on any of those occasions, but what I do know is that by being the first to stand, I opened the floodgates for anyone else that thought as I did but wasn’t prepared to go out on that limb solo.

Similarly, you can count on the fingers of both hands the number of Republican members of Congress that hold fast to the Constitution. But look at the impact they have on the party and the national dialogue writ large! Imagine a half-dozen Rand Pauls in the Senate, or a few dozen Justin Amashes and Thomas Massies in the House.

This is why I choose to work within the Republican Party. Not because I’m “compromising” or “selling out” as I’m so often accused of doing by Libertarian Party members, but because I’m playing the hand I was dealt; and that hand, if played correctly, could result in a real jackpot someday.

A Is A

As the great philosopher Ayn Rand once said: “you can ignore reality, but you can’t ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.” While I don’t begrudge those liberty lovers who choose to pursue their political goals through the Libertarian Party, I do believe them mistaken by ignoring the facts of reality.

The facts are, pursuing the third-party approach has resulted in minimal influence on public policy at best, and nothing but electoral losses at the state and federal levels for almost 50 years.

Legal experts sounded the alarm last week after the White House declared it was refusing to cooperate with House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump. Some saw a constitutional crisis—or at least the makings of one. Cato vice president Gene Healy concluded, “The categorical stonewall Trump just announced is clearly an impeachable offense.”

But none of this was surprising from a president whose contempt for the Constitution and democratic norms is exceeded only by his ignorance of them. This is a man with a visceral hatred for freedom of speech and the press, who sees dissenters as un-American and journalists as “the enemy of the people.” He’s an authoritarian by instinct who swoons over dictators and lashes out at the independent judiciary, rejects Congress as a co-equal branch of government, and fancies himself above the law. Trump’s daily assaults on core American values are genuinely too numerous to name.

Right-thinking libertarians understand this intuitively. Authoritarianism is the antithesis of a free society, and anyone championing a principle-based politics should resent a leader whose only principle is advancing his own self-interest. Trump’s policy agenda also stands against libertarianism on a range of issues, including immigration and multiculturalism, trade, and foreign policy. “No president has talked so much about ending endless wars in the Middle East while doing so little to bring home our troops,” Rep. Justin Amash (I-MI) recently tweeted.

But how should libertarians respond to this presidency at the ballot box? They sustain fundamental disagreements with Democrats on guns, healthcare, education, and the economy. They don’t agree with progressives on how to fight climate change or whether income inequality is a problem. And admittedly, these divides have only widened as Democratic politics has shifted to the left. But at this perilous moment for American democracy, as Trump retains the full backing of the Republican Party and some in the conservative movement flirt openly with “post-liberalism,” classical liberals’ first priority should be uniting with left-liberals to defend liberalism broadly defined—by voting Democratic in 2020.

The appeal of voting for the Libertarian Party is self-evident. It’s the path to ideological purity and a community of kindred spirits. Classical liberals aren’t ever going to feel entirely at home in either of the two major parties. But the Libertarian candidate isn’t going to be elected president next year. The simple truth is that either the Democratic nominee will win the White House or Trump will secure a second term. And if he is re-elected, the institutional GOP will be further emboldened to do what they’ve done for three years—support him every step of the way.

With the notable exception of Amash, who left the GOP in July to become an independent, libertarian-leaning Republicans in Congress are sticking with this president. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky has opposed Trump selectively, including on some foreign policy moves and the border-wall national emergency declaration, but nonetheless emerged as a key ally of the White House. (“He’s never let me down,” the president said last year.) Voting Democratic would send a clear message that rank-and-file libertarians don’t cosign this capitulation and that the GOP can’t take them for granted.

The future of the Republican Party also looks increasingly inhospitable to libertarianism. Consider 39-year-old freshman Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, a polished, whip-smart former state attorney general seen as a potential leader of the post-Trump right. Washington Free Beacon editor-in-chief Matthew Continetti calls him “a social conservative unafraid of government power.” Hawley takes “an explicitly censorious stance toward Silicon Valley,” as New York Times columnist Ross Douthat observes. Yet Reason’s Robby Soave notes the senator’s sleight of hand—using libertarian language to advance an anti-libertarian agenda:

Hawley clearly knows enough about libertarianism to cynically distort the language of freedom in service of his authoritarian populist designs. As he is likely aware, the libertarian tradition is about standing up to the most dangerous concentration of power: the one that results from government intervention and is maintained by the threat of government force. Libertarianism is against the efforts of central planners in Washington, D.C., who think they know better than individuals what kind of products they should buy and what kind of media they should consume. In effect, libertarianism means opposing Josh Hawley.

Opposing Republicans and voting Democratic in 2020 wouldn’t foreclose future third-party organizing or even a new fusionism with a reformed GOP. No realignment must be permanent. But the moral and strategic imperative for libertarians next year is to embrace the kind of “liberaltarianism” that former Cato vice president Brink Lindsey has promoted.

“The first, immediate task is to forge a liberaltarian alliance that can defend American democracy from the depredations of Donald Trump,” Lindsey wrote for Vox in 2017. “This ad hoc project requires no rethinking or blurring of existing ideological boundaries. Rather, it asks only that committed small-d democrats from the left, right, and center put aside their usual differences to stand together for basic liberal norms and institutions.” The time to stand together is now.

In his response essay, Matt Nye brings up the commonplace argument that libertarians, people who love liberty, are able to achieve more inside the Republican Party than they would be able to achieve as members of the Libertarian Party. This strategy is akin to getting a bunch of motivated vegan fry cooks to all get jobs working at McDonald’s so they can change it to a vegan restaurant from the inside. They will be disciplined or fired as soon as they stop making the food on the menu, because their goals are not the goals of the organization.

The strongest point of his argument is the reality that there are counties and districts that are so heavily weighted toward one of the two old parties that whoever wins the primary automatically wins the general election. If you want to be able to tell people that you voted for the winner not only in the general election, but also in the primary, you have to be registered in the dominant party. And yet, even in those districts people are registered to vote for the less dominant party. They know that their party’s candidate is unlikely to win the general election, but they don’t change who they are just to be on the winning team.



Mr. Nye and I completely agree about how great Laura Ebke is, and we are both disappointed that she didn’t win last November, but he edits out some important facts that raise more questions about his position than mine. 

Running as a Libertarian when you were first elected as a Republican is not a race for re-election in the traditional sense, because you need to form a new voter coalition. There is a name recognition advantage as an incumbent, but partisan voters don’t usually follow party switchers. Senator Ebke ran a great campaign, but crossing Nebraska’s governor comes at a high price, and the district was tilted in favor of the Republican.

 Which brings me to the more important point: Republican Governor Pete Ricketts bullied her for her libertarian views while she was still in his party. That governor was coming after her for standing up for her principles regardless of whether she stayed in the Republican Party or not. Indeed, libertarians in the GOP are attacked any time that they stand up for their principles.

But that’s really the rub here, isn’t it? If you join the Republican Party, and if you make it through a primary process that is designed to eliminate libertarian voices, over the opposition of Republican Party bosses, you may get elected to office, but you still can’t get any libertarian policy passed, not because of the Democrats, but because of your fellow Republicans. On top of it, if you don’t support all of the anti-libertarian policies of the Republican Party or the anti-libertarian president, you will be attacked by the Republicans again.


Is it worth it to be in office?



Mr. Nye says in his essay, “if we’re going to invest our precious volunteer time and energy, the return on investment on getting elected as a Republican can be big, if you can stomach the all-too-frequent disappointment,” to which I ask, “What return on investment?” 
When it comes to public policy, electing a few liberty-leaning Republicans has delivered absolutely nothing. And who could expect it to? When you have to fight your own party and the one across the aisle, it’s not surprising that the effort has failed to deliver results while also enabling anti-libertarian policy on trade, debt, foreign policy, civil liberties, immigration, and the racist war on drugs. 



Some suggest that the calculation may be different in particular states, and there are some good advances that have been made by a libertarian caucus within the GOP in New Hampshire, helping to protect gun rights and bucking their party platform on repealing the death penalty. While there are rare state-level policy successes, there are two reasons that libertarians should avoid that path even at the state level.

First, state and local races are the level where the Libertarian Party is becoming very competitive with the two old parties, with one of our 2018 candidates in Wyoming, Bethany Baldes, nearly unseating the sitting Speaker of the House. And she did it without changing her principles or her message or putting on a GOP label to play the game on easy mode.

But more importantly, supporting the GOP means carrying water for a lot of anti-libertarian policies. Even here in New Hampshire, arguably the most libertarian state in the nation, the state GOP platform defines marriage as “legal and sacred union between one man and one woman as ordained by God,” supports “the State’s Constitutional right to determine legal restrictions on possession of controlled substances,” and wants to take “any and all actions possible to protect against the implementation of any part of Sharia law in New Hampshire, including legislation outlawing Sharia law.” This is why Gary Johnson said joining the Libertarian Party was great for his back, since he didn’t have to carry around all of the GOP’s anti-libertarian baggage anymore.

Being a caucus in a political party that has a platform and track record of working against your principles is not only frustrating, it is counterproductive for liberty. And it doesn’t come with any leverage to change the direction of the party as long as the position of the caucus is to never oppose a Republican candidate. 



The GOP is happy to take the support of libertarians, but it provides nothing in return. Those who have been elected as Republicans either get frustrated with that situation and quit or betray their principles to support the party and keep their seats. The experiment of working inside the GOP has been tried and is an objective failure. When you look at the reality of the results, the juice just ain’t worth the squeeze.

In his lead essay, Nicholas Sarwark says a political party is made up of “those who show up” to excuse the quality and behavior of Libertarian candidates and party activists. If you don’t like what you see, he says, step up to the plate and make change. Yet for some reason, despite also being a political party, the Republican Party doesn’t fall into the same category. Instead, Sarwark compares the Republican Party to McDonald’s—a privately owned company—and those of us trying to do exactly what he recommends he casts as “vegan fry cooks.”

I agree that vegan fry cooks have little hope of changing the corporate culture or direction of McDonald’s; corporations aren’t meant to be operated from the bottom up. Political parties are, however. In his zeal to make a clever analogy while simultaneously belittling liberty Republican activists like myself, he eloquently makes my point about Big “L” libertarians failing to recognize reality: one of these things is not like the other. A corporation is different both organizationally and legally from a political party.

It’s about Having a Voice

In his next paragraph, Sarwark mistakenly implies fellow liberty Republicans and I participate in primaries only because we want to be on the winning team. While we all want to win, the candidates we recruit in the RLC aren’t the types to roll over and compromise their principles when the going gets tough. I’ve run for office twice and lost twice, but I never compromised.

The first time I ran was back in 2010. I ran for County Commission against an incumbent liberal tax-and-spend Republican. I was offered the support of some very heavy hitters if I would change my position on opposing government funding of economic development. I refused, and I ultimately lost that race. For the record, my failure to roll over was not the only reason I lost, but it was a factor.

Sarwark’s attempt to paint liberty Republicans as mindless, unprincipled “Team Red” automatons isn’t just insulting and inaccurate, it overrides his ability to understand the simple point I was making. I shall endeavor to try to make it again here.

By registering third party in Florida, I would have no ability to vote for a liberty leaning Republican over a left-leaning one. My district is predominantly Republican, and no matter how hard I might wish otherwise, the Republican will almost certainly win in the general. My choice is to have SOME voice as a registered Republican as opposed to NO voice as a no-party or third-party voter. Something is better than nothing. Two is better than one, and one is better than zero. This simple concept—known as math—seems to be lost on Sarwark and some of the commentators on my original essay.

Furthermore, the primary isn’t designed to eliminate libertarian voices, as Sarwark claims; it’s designed to put forth the most electable candidate for each party. Who determines electability? In Florida, that would be the voters. What Sarwark is really saying is that the voters don’t want libertarian ideas.

While there may be some truth there, I don’t know that I agree completely. If it is true, I suspect the condescending tone that oozes throughout Mr. Sarwark’s essay may have something to do with it. The job of a political party is to sway public opinion to get your candidate elected. This is hard to do when you are insulting and talking down to voters at every turn.

I frequently hear Libertarian Party members say things like, “Well {Name}, if you had studied this issue as I have…” at which point the person tunes out. How you say something is often just as important as what you say.

Methinks the Gentleman Doth Protest Too Much

Sarwark points to Nebraska Governor Pete Ricketts’ bullying of former state Senator Laura Ebke as proof that Republicans attack Libertarians for standing up for their principles. Newsflash for Mr. Sarwark—there will always be someone in a position of power that disagrees with you. There will always be people who are more concerned with power or money or prestige than principles. This isn’t a party phenomenon; it’s a human nature phenomenon. It’s called politics.

I’ve listened to Libertarian Party members defend Gary Johnson’s position on baking cakes for gay couples because he was “more electable,” and I’ve heard Bill Weld’s atrocious record on guns defended by those same Libertarians because he would be able to “raise a lot of money.” To try to hold the LP up as the moral standard when it comes to not compromising on principles is simply laughable.

The only practical role of the LP at the national level is to run presidential candidates that stick solidly to principles to have the opportunity to articulate them on the national stage. By putting up the Johnson/Weld ticket, the LP failed utterly and completely in that role in the one election cycle where America was most ready to hear the message.

Lastly, and contrary to Sarwark’s assertions, my experience here in Florida is that elected officials that hold fast to their principles and stand their ground regardless of party politics get re-elected by their constituents, “party bosses” be damned.

Something Is Better Than Nothing

Sarwark concludes that the libertarian Republican experiment is an “objective failure”. He says we have nothing to show for the last 28 years—no return on investment at all.

Ron Paul, Bob Barr, Rand Paul, Mark Sanford, Thomas Massie, Justin Amash—even his beloved Gary Johnson, who was the Republican Governor of New Mexico and ran as a Republican for President his first time around—all are complete losers that have contributed absolutely nothing to the public discussion and liberty movement according to Sarwark.

What, I wonder then, is the Libertarian Party’s claim to fame?

Sarwark failed to identify a single achievement in either of his essays. The LP has been around for almost 50 years and can’t name one success at the federal level. Not one. While I certainly wish we had achieved more within the Republican Party during the last few decades, my position is that SOME success is better than NO success. Or, to use Sarwark’s metaphor, an orange that produces a little bit of juice when squeezed is better than no orange and no juice at all.

The irrefutable fact is that liberty Republicans have advanced the principles of liberty in government more during the last three decades than the LP has in almost 50 years, and no amount of condescension or name-calling will change that reality.
 

In his essay, Graham Vyse makes a case that libertarians should support an as-yet unchosen Democratic presidential nominee as a way to show support for basic norms and institutions and as a rebuke to Donald Trump and the Republican Party that has debased itself and enabled him. We may agree on some of the problems, but his solution is flawed.

As an individual voter, your vote sends a message. It may be a small message among the millions of others, but so are the price signals sent through the marketplace every time a person buys something. If enough people send the same small message, it is amplified to the point that even politicians can hear it.

What message do you send if you vote for a generic Democrat who, as Mr. Vyse concedes, are at odds with libertarians on “guns, healthcare, education, and the economy”? At best, it sends the message that you are opposed to the President. In practice, it will be interpreted as a mandate for all of the Democratic policies that the candidate holds and libertarians oppose.

This is not a new argument. In 2007, at the tail end of a Bush presidency that brought us torture, new wars, a massive expansion of government healthcare, and increased national debt, Democrats sought to persuade libertarians that they should vote for Obama as a temporary fix to send a strong message that what Bush and the Republicans had done was beyond the pale. They made the same caveats that Mr. Vyse does, that he didn’t have many libertarian positions, that many of his positions were opposed by libertarians, but this election is too important not to punish the Republicans for their errors.

Obama won and brought us more new wars, illegal surveillance, a massive expansion of government healthcare, and increased national debt. When there was pushback, he said “elections have consequences.” That wasn’t the message that libertarians were trying to send with their votes, but their message got drowned out.

If you vote for a candidate who most closely aligns with your own values, the worst thing that can happen is your preferred candidate loses. The vote totals will still send a message about the strength of support for that candidate and their positions.

If you vote for a candidate who does not align closely with your values because there is another candidate in the race who aligns with your values even less, the worst thing that can happen is that they win. Elevating something terrible because there was someone worse running perpetuates the cycle and sends a signal to the two old parties that they need only find candidates who are slightly less bad than the other one and then whip up fear.

There are Democratic candidates who hold libertarian positions. Andrew Yang wants to decriminalize all drugs. Tulsi Gabbard wants to bring American troops home from foreign wars. Julian Castro wants more open immigration. They should be praised for those small steps and encouraged to adopt more libertarian positions.

However, the Democratic establishment is pushing candidates who don’t hold any of those libertarian views as well as pushing gun control, trade restrictions, and expansion of government healthcare. Maybe Joe Biden is slightly less creepy or corrupt than Donald Trump, but that’s no reason for a libertarian to vote against their own values.

Your vote is valuable. It sends a message. Make sure the message you send is clear.

Or as our 43rd President put it, “There’s an old saying in Tennessee—I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee—that says, fool me once, shame on—shame on you. Fool me—you can’t get fooled again.”

Thank you to the Cato Institute and to the other contributors for making possible this enlightening discussion of where libertarians should focus their political efforts. While contentious at times, it is important to remember that we all want to bring libertarian ideas and policies into fruition and share a goal of a world set free in our lifetime.

While we can work on that goal within the Republican or Democratic parties, that is not the goal of those parties, nor of the majority of their members or elected officials. Quite the opposite. In contrast, the Libertarian party platform states explicitly that “[o]ur goal is nothing more nor less than a world set free in our lifetime, and it is to this end that we take these stands.” Individual candidates and campaigns may do better or worse at achieving that goal, but the goal is clear.

When those stances are taken by Republicans or Democrats, it’s due to pressure. Sometimes the pressure comes from within the party, but more often it’s pressure from without. The risk of losing voters who share libertarian goals can be a great motivator for candidates to adopt libertarian positions.

The political marketplace shares some similarities with the economic marketplace. Maybe this discussion convinced you to put the majority of your political investment into the Libertarian Party. Maybe you were persuaded that there are better returns in the GOP, or that the current crisis requires a temporary flight to the Democrats. No matter where you fall, diversification is as wise in politics as investing.

Becoming a sustaining member of the Libertarian Party is an easy way to show solidarity with our shared goals, even if you aren’t ready to break ties with one of the others. You don’t even have to change your voter registration. You can stay updated on our progress and help keep the other two parties honest. Competition makes everyone better.