Libertarian Ideas Are Great, Voting Libertarian Self-Defeating. By Roger L. Simon.
Jo Jorgensen, libertarian candidate in the 2020 Presidential election. Really? Never heard of her.
As of this writing, the votes separating Donald Trump and Joe Biden in the swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin are less than the numbers gained by Libertarian Party candidate Jo Jorgensen who garnered close to 1.7 percent of the popular vote.
As Joel Pollak wrote on Breitbart.com, “If Jorgensen’s votes went to Trump, instead of allowing Biden to win these states, the president would win re-election, with 289 Electoral College votes.”
Whether this is absolutely true is, of course, unknowable, but given the current leftward-lurching Democratic Party that seems about as libertarian as Chairman Mao, if push came to the proverbial shove, the majority of Ms. Jorgensen’s voters likely would have gone to Trump. …
If you are libertarian, influence the Republicans:
The more libertarian ideas are debated within the Republican Party, the more that party’s candidates will have to respond to them and, potentially, espouse them. They will have real world implications.
When you waste them on something as inconsequential as a fringe and almost entirely ignored Libertarian Party candidacy, particularly in something so hotly contested as a presidential election, you vitiate them and are ultimately self-defeating, not to mention, as we have seen, sabotaging the only viable candidate who best carries your ideas.
Trump is far from a pure, or even relatively pure, libertarian, but compared to Joe Biden — especially given what surrounds him from Bernie Sanders to Kamala Harris to AOC — he’s a veritable Ron Raul. …
Beware moral vanity:
Jorgensen, of whom, I admit, I was only tangentially aware … [ran a campaign that] seemed finally to be about her and not even about the ideas she so adamantly espoused.
With all due respect, and I mean this because I don’t know the woman, that’s moral narcissism in action. We see it everywhere.
Be libertarian as you want, but do it in a way that gets results. Otherwise, it’s just another charade.
