Aeon Skoble, one of my favorite correspondents and now a guest-blogger at Liberty & Power, asks, quite reasonably,
All of the reasons he gives for being dissatisfied with Bush are perfectly valid, but I don’t see why that implies voting for Kerry. Why not vote 3rd party, or just stay home that day? Bush’s shortcomings aren’t pluses for Kerry if Kerry himself is also objectionable, as Jacob notes he is.
Several people have said something similar in e-mail or in comments on other people’s blogs, all apropos my unenthusiastic statement of intent to vote for Kerry last week. (It was then a conditional statement of intent– conditional on Kerry not picking Gephardt. It’s now a statement of intent.)
I offer a quick statement of my own reasons for abandoning an uninterrupted habit of Libertarian presidential votes. This isn’t an attempt to persuade people not to vote Libertarian. A thriving LP seems to me a very good thing, and I’ll probably vote Libertarian for every downticket race in which there’s a candidate.
First, this is really the first presidential race of my adult life in which I’ve had a very strong commitment about which major-party candidate was the lesser evil. I’ve had leanings in previous races, but they were uncertain, and typically mitigated by a sense that both major-party candidates had crossed some threshold of unacceptability. This time, it seems very clear to me that the Bush Administration has failed basic tests of competence in policymaking and execution, and of trusteeship of long-term interests like alliances and trade negotiations and moral credibility. I expect to dislike an awful lot of John Kerry’s policies. But I don’t expect that kind of failure of the basic responsibilities of the office. Four or eight or twelve years ago, I guess I wouldn’t have known how important I found those considerations, as I hadn’t seen a president who had failed along those dimensions. Now I have, and I do.
Second, my LP enthusiasm is much diminsihed, both by inevitable third-party burnout and by a sense that the party never really came to terms with the Browne finance scandals. This is a very minor consideration, but it does have something to do with the absence of any LP fire in my belly.
Third, and most important: I find that this year I can’t actually will the universalization of an LP vote. That is, I don’t want Badnarik to become President. Casting a vote for him in the sure knowledge that he won’t adds some infinitessimal weight to the LP’s public cause and credibility, and that’s good. But I’ve always voted in good faith for the person I most wanted to be elected President (heretofore always knowing that they wouldn’t be, but still sincerely willing it). Contrary to what third-party enthusiasts sometimes say, those have been least-evil votes as well– not least because I knew I was trading off policy agreement for a radical lack of actual governing experience and probable competence. (Yes, I know that “lack of governing experience” is self-fulfilling, if one never votes for third party candidates because they’ve never held office. It hasn’t stopped me from voting for them, but it counts against them.) But, choosing among the available candidates, I was able to sincerely will a Libertarian win.
This year I can’t, partly because it turns out I do value governing competence pretty highly, partly because Badnarik is conspicuously inexperienced even as LP candidates go, but mostly because of this.
First, allow me to dispel a myth. People in the Middle East do not hate us for our freedom. They do not hate us for our lifestyle. They hate us because we have spent many years attempting to force them to emulate our lifestyle.
The U.S. government has meddled in the affairs of the Middle East far too long, always with horrendous results. It overthrew the democratically elected leader of Iran and replaced him with the despotic Shah. After making Iranians the enemies of Americans, the U.S. government gave weapons, intelligence and money to Iran’s mortal adversary, Saddam Hussein. The U.S. government also helped Libyan tyrant Col. Qaddafi come to power, propped up the Saudi monarchy and the Egyptian dictatorship, and gave assistance to Osama bin Laden.
Most Americans have forgotten these events. But the people of the Middle East will always remember.
It was because of American troops in Saudi Arabia, lethal sanctions on Iraq, and other serious violations of International Law that 3,000 innocent Americans paid the ultimate price on September 11, 2001.
The proper response would have been to present the evidence as to who committed the heinous act both to Congress and to the people, and have Congress authorize the president to track down the individuals actually responsible, doing everything possible to avoid inflicting harm on innocents.
A Libertarian president would not have sent the military trampling about the world, racking up a death count in the thousands, wasting tax money on destroying and re-building infrastructure, creating more enemies, and doing the kinds of things that led to 9/11 in the first place.
This goes beyond opposition to the war in Iraq. This amounts to a radical misunderstanding of 9/11, Al Qaeda, and the reality of radical militant Islamism. It’s an insistence that even the Afghan war was unjustifiable and unjustified. And it’s the kind of silly Panglossianism about politics that says, “Any wrong must be traceable to another wrong; if only we never did anything wrong, no one would ever do anything wrong to us.” That falls below my threshold of a responsible understanding of the state of the world right now. It’s out of the realm of policy disagreement and into the realm of a view of the world that I can’t responsibly wish the inhabitant of the White House to hold. Security, as Democratic leaders warned Dean enthusiasts last year, is a sine qua non in this election.
At some level this is silly, of course. I could vote for Badnarik in complete confidence that my vote wouldn’t put him into office, and I’d never have to worry about it again. But I do try to vote as if my vote would be decisive, irrational as that is. It’s always led me Libertarian in the past. Absent some radical unforeseen change in Kerry, it won’t this time. This time I’ve got a clear preference that the incumbent be turned out, and a clear threshold difference with the Libertarian. I trust Kerry’s basic competence, and trust his basic understanding of the security situation. Neither of those statements is high praise. But I need to be able to say them both about a candidate I can vote for in good faith.
Update:
I’m not sure I’d want to commit to this as a universal principle, but I quite liked the sound of the following from a commentator at Kevin Drum’s site: It’s better to have a big competent government that admits it’s big, than a big incompetent government that pretends it’s small.
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