Yahoo Finance Opinion: Donald Trump goes after the libertarian vote
By Lawrence Solomon
On both sides of the Canada-U.S. border the Libertarian Party is stocked with utopian dreamers whose principled pursuit of freedom makes them hopelessly unelectable. Knowing this, American Libertarians have chosen as headline speaker to their 2024 National Convention the presidential candidate whom they are counting on to “advance the message of liberty”: Donald Trump, who addresses them Saturday.
Given the convention’s theme, “Become Ungovernable,” it’s no surprise that the Libertarians chose maverick Trump to inspire their troops. As the party explained, its theme “was chosen following the previous years of unconscionable authoritarian actions by the United States Federal and State governments, which saw citizens confined, indoctrinated, lied to, and inoculated against their will. The citizens of these United States must become ungovernable to regain their basic rights and freedoms.”
Given his positions on free trade and immigration, Trump may seem an unlikely libertarian, but “when it comes to lowering taxes and easing regulations on business, the party of the elephant is far more closely aligned to the libertarian philosophy than that of the donkey,” as Walter Block, founder of Libertarians for Trump, wrote in an election post-mortem for the Wall Street Journal, explaining how Libertarians may have cost Trump the 2020 presidential election.
Since 2020, when the Libertarian Party’s milquetoast presidential candidate, Jo Jorgenson, took a dismal 1.2 per cent of the vote, it has been taken over by its Mises Caucus, so named after Ludwig von Mises, iconic economist of the libertarian Austrian School of Economics. In a backlash against Jorgenson’s weak-kneed opposition to lockdowns and open borders, the Mises Caucus has moved the party Trumpward, aligning it with the pro-Trump positions of prominent libertarians elsewhere, most spectacularly Javier Milei, the newly elected president of Argentina.
The Libertarian Party has no illusion that the presidential candidate its convention will soon select can win. But it hopes that the hard-nosed Trump brand will generate the buzz needed to propel a smattering of down-ballot Mises Caucus candidates to victory.
As for Trump, some say his boosting of the Libertarian Party’s fortunes could backfire, since every vote that goes to a pro-Trump Libertarian could be one less vote for him. But Trump may be setting his sights far higher than simply grabbing a share of the 1.2 per cent that Libertarians garnered in the 2020 presidential elections.
According to a recent YouGov poll for the libertarian Cato Institute, 15 per cent of Americans consider themselves small-L libertarian, a largely untapped demographic the size of blacks or Hispanics. Although the Libertarian Party has never had the political savvy or financial wherewithal to capture a sizeable fraction of this electorate, Trump has both, along with a track record tailor-made for many Libertarian hot-button issues.
On defence, Trump has bona fide libertarian credentials. He was the first president in decades without a new war on his watch; he threatens to withdraw from NATO; he did withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal; and he opposes continuing to fund Ukraine against Russia.
On energy, he took the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Change Agreement, opposed subsidies to electric vehicles and renewable energy, and unleashed the free market in fossil-fuel development, making the U.S. the world’s largest oil producer, which helped cause energy prices to plummet domestically.
On the economy, Trump enacted record tax cuts and slashed regulations by unprecedented amounts, with credible promises to carry on at an even greater clip.
On the judiciary, Trump’s appointments have led to the first challenges to the administrative state since Herbert Hoover, with the Supreme Court’s Conservative majority now apparently ready to dramatically roll back the powers of regulators.
On the deep state, which relentlessly conspired to oust Trump from power and persuaded him to adopt COVID lockdowns — his gravest failing in the eyes of libertarians — no one doubts Trump’s resolve to exact revenge by diminishing if not destroying it.
A symbiotic Trump-Libertarian alliance also promises to leverage the Libertarian Party vote in Trump’s favour. In the 2016 presidential election, Walter Block counselled libertarians to vote Libertarian in traditional-party strongholds, where Libertarian votes wouldn’t be decisive, but to vote for Trump in purple states, where a vote for Trump amounted to a vote for liberty. You can bet strategic voting, which helped Trump in 2016, will be back big time in 2024.
Trump may not be a card-carrying, doctrinaire Libertarian, but if you’re a libertarian who wants to cast a meaningful vote in 2024 for a candidate who champions liberty, Trump is as good as it gets.
Financial Post
Lawrence Solomon (LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com) is a founding columnist of FP Comment.
