Years ago, and before his transformative weight loss, Penn Jillette was a guest on Real Time and was asked about his libertarian beliefs. He proceeded to explain that libertarians try to solve every problem by asking if it can be done with more freedom instead of less.
Penn Jillette schooled Bill Maher on what a real libertarian is once again just last week.
Bill Maher invited Penn Jillette back onto his show following a tumultuous week that saw numerous protests across the country against Confederate statues. Jillette opened by saying that if Confederate sympathizers wanted statues they should have won the war – noting that the losing side normally doesn’t get memorialized.
He followed up by correctly noting that Thomas Jefferson was against such idolatry and wouldn’t approve of a statue of himself. In sum, Penn Jillette proposed removing all such statues from public land – as it isn’t a proper responsibility of government.
After they got through the news of the day, Bill Maher got right back Penn Jillette’s libertarian beliefs. Of course, Maher started with the vote that Jillette cast for Hillary Clinton. Although Jillette did end up voting for Clinton in Nevada, he did say at the time that he “traded” his vote for at least ten votes for Gary Johnson in other states.
He explained to Maher that the only reason he voted for Clinton was because he personally knew just how bad of a person Donald Trump is from his time on The Apprentice.
It’s nice to have ambitious goals but I don’t see how this would play out. Suppose the Republican Party collapsed, all those voters would need a new party. Do we want them all in the Libertarian Party? Probably not, otherwise it would just be the Republican Party under a new name. Democrats and Republicans have changed their composition and ideology in times past, so if someone cobbled together a party from half of one or half of the other, the most likely scenario would be that it would go by the name of one of those two, and they would simply trade part of their coalitions between each other.
For example, Trump says he wants to make the Republican Party a “working people’s party.” So suppose that white blue collar Democrats would almost all move over into the NSGOP. In exchange, because the parties have to be roughly equal to balance each other, the “country club” and “sorta-libertarianish” types – mostly white, relatively well off – would become Democrats, and form a coalition with non-whites of all income levels within that party. That would be a lot of coalition rearranging, but wouldn’t open up any room for the LP to become a major party.
What I see as more likely and plausible for the LP is to make it just marginally bigger enough to elect some big city mayors and a handful of members of congress, maybe a senator or governor in a small state here and there. That’s substantially stronger than the LP is now but not out of reach – the Socialists, Populists, Progressives and Prohibitionists of roughly about a century ago were able to do that plus swing a few presidential elections, which was enough pressure to get a lot of their ideas into law.
And it doesn’t take any moderation of LP views to get there – just better organization and a lot of hard work.
“Had little to do w/ his name recognition. Trump was sputtering at 1-2% in the polls until he got in the GOP debates and started delivering up the raw cultural war read meat to the GOP base. It could have been anyone. The parts money and fame played with Trump is that his fame trained him to deliver his lines w/ a TV sense of timing and his money allowed him to go full blown racist douchebag(maximum cultural war appeal to his base) w/o worrying about repercussions to his political viability/career.”
Its absurd that it had little to do with his name recognition. It had a lot to do with name recognition. You obviously understand his money and fame played some role in his “success,” but you underestimate the role 40 years in the public eye living off this reputation as “businessman art of the deal” played in his election.
In any case, I’ll concede your point and tell you none of our neophytes and the skills born of money and fame that you properly credit to Trump. Find one that does and we can talk.
Your political science arguments, right or wrong as they may be, are quite besides my point, because I don’t want to stay a third party. I am for the LP to be one of the two major parties in a two-party system.
If I am misunderstanding them in some way, that’s fine. I’ll not buy the arguments of people smarter than me telling me they have a theory that leads to them to conclude that we should nominate the catastrophically unqualified.
Do I really have to explain to you that the CEO’s of large organizations, profit, non-profit, or otherwise, come to such positions with advanced degrees, substantial resumes, previous leadership experience, usually within the industry or the company itself? What are we even talking about here? Are you trying to tell me that anyone else at the Libertarian Convention in Orlando was as qualified for the actual offices at stake as Johnson or Weld were? That’s ridiculous.
Had little to do w/ his name recognition. Trump was sputtering at 1-2% in the polls until he got in the GOP debates and started delivering up the raw cultural war read meat to the GOP base. It could have been anyone. The parts money and fame played with Trump is that his fame trained him to deliver his lines w/ a TV sense of timing and his money allowed him to go full blown racist douchebag(maximum cultural war appeal to his base) w/o worrying about repercussions to his political viability/career.
Anthony, you proceed w/ two fundamentally incorrect political science presumptions:
(1) collective action is driven by the majority. Nope. It is driven by the minority.
[The Logic of Collective Action]
https://www.amazon.com/Logic-Collective-Action-printing-appendix/dp/0674537513
(2) third parties need to play a median voter theory game w/ respect to voter preferences. However, MVT at best applies to 2 parties w/ a voting population of single peaked preferences along a single dimension. It necessarily excludes 3rd party considerations. Once third parties are taken into account, represented by n>2 policy alternatives, MVT no longer applies.
[VIII. A Theoretical Problem for the Median Voter Model. The Median Voter Model]
http://rdc1.net/forthcoming/medianvt.pdf
I’ve pointed out your political science errors on several previous occasions, however, the facts(and they are the facts, here) don’t seem to register w/ you. That being said, I certainly don’t want to mitigate the importance of money and telegenic communication, however it is unclear why someone w/ those qualities(libertarian, the ability to self-fund, telegenic personality) would even bother w/ the LP in the event of a serious run.
RE:
Legally qualified for CEO is a made-up term. There is no minimum legal qualification standard to satisfy to be a CEO of anything, other than not being declared legally dead.
Anthony, there aren’t many people who could plausibly be called libertarians who’d come close to fitting your criteria, and out of the few who might, I don’t think that any of them are even interested in being on the Libertarian Party’s presidential ticket.
So given this reality, the Libertarian Party is not going to be able to nominate a presidential ticket that is plausibly libertarian, and that satisfies your other criteria.
I don’t believe that it is wise for the Libertarian Party to nominate candidates who stray so far from libertarian principles that a lot of people in the libertarian movement don’t even consider them to be libertarians, for the sake of fulfilling your experience/status qualifications.
Find a puritanical/radical libertarian with 100% name recognition who ran a 23,000 employee billion-dollar corporation and I’ll join you in supporting his run for office. Just understand from the outset that such a person, based on the historical record, may be sui generis, (especially so seeing his desultory record so far), and at the very least starts out with long, long, long odds.
Otherwise, the Trump situation is not comparable to our roster of political neophytes, who have zero or close to zero name recognition, have run no organization of consequential size, and given the fact that each of the Libertarian neophytes are, as I noted, suggesting some level of managed bankruptcy of the federal government, are probably going to be looked upon as requiring MORE not LESS experience in office.
Its a lot easier to be qualified to just kick the can down the road.
btw, I’m not qualified to run Google whether they accept applications or not, even though I am LEGALLY qualified to do so.
um, they just did….and he got in w/ just ~ 22% of registered voters, I believe.
btw, Google does not accept applications for CEO.
“Because those are the only three qualifications to run for president.”
Those are the only de jure qualifications. Given the size and scope of the federal government, and given the task that a Libertarian President would be mandated with (to some extent liquidating Leviathan, I can assure you that there are in fact many more de facto qualifications, both in reality, and from the perspective of the typical voter. I.E., they’re not going to listen to a political neophyte’s plans once in office, or the philosophy behind those plans, because they have no intention of ever turning the office over to such a person anyway. Why listen to what they have to say.
If I’m wrong, then I’ll take my leave of this site and head out to Mountain View, CA and fill out an application to be the next CEO of Google. After all, I am legally qualified for the position. I got my ss card and driver’s license right here!
“Gillette is not qualified to run for President”
OK, I’ll bite. Is it that he’s under 35 years of age, or that he’s not a natural-born citizen, or that he hasn’t resided in the US for at least 14 years? Because those are the only three qualifications to run for president.
I’d love for Jillette to run one day( Along with Teller as VP, if they live in different states) Think it would be a powerful ticket, and one I could certainly vote for.
I’d also like to see Kennedy from MTV run for something.
I’m radical myself, but LP memberhip trends have far more to do with prospecting & aggressive renewal programs vs. no prospecting & bad renewal programs than with radical vs. moderate messaging.
Well then, we know that there are a lot more people that identify with the LP than 30,000. There are at a minimum 500,000, but probably a lot more, because about half the states do not have an option to register to vote as LP and many people may identify that way even if that is not the way they are registered (perhaps they want to be able to vote in the other parties’ primaries, or they just haven’t bothered to change their registration).
In any case, there’s no concrete evidence that an LP which would strike the Bill Mahers of the world as reasonable would have 30 million supporters. They would still be subject to the “wasted vote” problem – Maher, for example, famously got down on his knees and begged Ralph Nader to drop out and not run. And they would also face the problem of not inspiring people to leave the parties they already vote for with their milquetoast proposals. If moderation were the key to orders of magnitude growth for the LP, why did the LP shrink rather than grow in the mid-2000s as it became more moderate? Why did it experience a mere doubling, rather than an order of magnitude growth or more in the Johnson era?
If you use pledge signing membership or voter registration rather than dues paying membership the growth has been more steady, but again there are no big jumps that correlate to the party becoming more moderate.
Members was the wrong word there. What I meant to say is “people who identify with a particular party” whether they donate or not. (Although actual members who donate come with the territory of increased identification.)
From that perspective, membership growth is not the relevant metric.
“…Jillette did end up voting for Clinton in Nevada” Does “vote trading” actually work? How does he know whether any of the people he “traded” votes with actually voted for the LP candidates?
“…Jillette again said that libertarians simply try to solve problems with more freedom instead of less, although the answer is sometimes no. ” When is the answer no?
Not mentioned in the article, but mentioned in the video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I4a4xpw8C0
Jillette says he finds very little to disagree with these days with either Glenn Beck or progressive Senator from Minnesota and former SNL comedian Al Franken.
Is this really the epitome of real libertarianism? Sure, he gets Democratic Party shill Bill Maher to say he is reasonable but then both of them did in the final analysis vote for Hillary Clinton and both of them did at one time call themselves libertarians, although Maher no longer does.
“this is basically how you go from 30,000 members to 30 million.”
Even the Republicans and Democrats have nowhere near 30 million dues paying members (not even a million in fact, as dues paying is not a big part of their membership model or fundraising strategy). The LP would do very well to double its dues paying membership to 30,000 but already has ~140,000 pledge signers and over 500,000 registered Libertarians. The LP’s peak dues paying membership, of a little over 30k, was also at the time when the party was overall more radical than at any time since then. The much more moderate LP of the mid 2000s on has shown no signs of any such astronomical growth.
Interesting exchange: No prattling on about the NAP, no description of an end-stage stateless utopia, Penn even sidestepped lecturing Maher on how the free market would handle food safety. Penn merely stated a general principle in favor of personal freedom, and went after the low-hanging fruit of stuff like crony capitalism that the seller (Penn) knew the buyer (Maher) would agree to.
End result? Mather says, “That all sounds reasonable.”
Gillette is not qualified to run for President, and surely doesn’t want to hold office anyway, but this is basically how you go from 30,000 members to 30 million.