Paul Frankel: Disrupt, Did You Say?

On July 30, 2014, Time ran an article entitled “Third-Party Candidates Could Disrupt 2014 Midterms“, which accused Libertarians of “threatening [the] GOP bid for control of the Senate”. Independent Political Report editor Paul Frankel (above) issued this response:

Typical establishment propaganda. Aside from using loaded and false terms like “disrupt, spoil,” and “leech” to belittle legitimate opposition, the article also repeats the common – but contradicted by real world evidence – assumption that Libertarians are on the right and draw exclusively or primarily from people who would otherwise vote Republican.

Actual evidence from many states and years is that we draw a large segment of our vote from people who would otherwise not vote at all, and the rest would otherwise split their votes about evenly between Republicans and Democrats.

In some races we actually draw more from the Democrats, like Virginia last year where polls show we earned (not “stole”, “siphoned” or “leeched”) twice as many votes away from liberals as from conservatives, NC where polls in a past race in 2010 included 8% support from self-described liberals, 6% of moderates and 4% of conservatives, and many others.

One look at the World’s Smallest Political Quiz and you can see we are neither conservatives nor liberals, neither left nor right; it’s just is more convenient for the establishment to cubbyhole us into one of their two little permissible boxes of thought.

Or their one dimension of thought which excludes the dimension of human freedom completely, with the only permissible debate being which parts of government grow fastest….military and corporate welfare, or bureaucratic institutionalization of poverty and government employee union pensions?

Police and prisons, or increasingly prison-like government schools? Domestic espionage or taking money from poor people in rich countries to give to rich people in poor countries? “None of the above” should be the obvious answer but is completely impermissible in the system of false choices they seek to stick us with.

I’m glad they are at least acknowledging that we are having more of an impact – even though they completely distort the direction of that impact!