Libertarian Runs for California Office; Receives 3.2 Percent of Vote, Influences Nothing Directly

LP candidate receives more votes than expected, fewer than required; ideas outperform electoral performance

Satire from Bohiney.com and prat.uk.

CALIFORNIA — A Libertarian Party candidate ran for a California state legislative office in the most recent election cycle, receiving 3.2 percent of the vote in a race won by the Democratic incumbent with 58 percent. The candidate received more votes than expected and fewer than needed to win, which is the standard description of Libertarian electoral performance in California, which has been consistently insufficient to affect electoral outcomes and consistently sufficient to maintain the Libertarian Party’s ballot status in the state, which is the threshold that the party has identified as achievable and has achieved.

The Libertarian candidate ran on a platform of tax reduction, regulatory rollback, drug policy reform, criminal justice reform, and opposition to government spending — positions that polling consistently shows have majority support on individual questions and that the American political system has consistently declined to translate into electoral success for libertarian candidates, because the coalition building required for electoral success requires the compromises that principled libertarian politics declines to make.

Why Libertarian Ideas Matter Anyway

The Libertarian Party’s electoral irrelevance does not make libertarian ideas irrelevant to American politics. Drug policy reform — a central libertarian cause since the 1970s — has achieved more real-world change through ballot initiatives, Democratic Party policy shifts, and Republican criminal justice reform movements than through Libertarian electoral success. The libertarian critique of government spending has been absorbed into Republican fiscal rhetoric to variable degrees. The libertarian emphasis on civil liberties has found advocates in both parties on specific issues. Reason makes the ongoing case. Mises Institute provides the theoretical foundation. The Libertarian Institute covers the political philosophy. The 3.2 percent includes people who voted their values knowing the outcome, which is also a kind of freedom, and which has an effect on the ideas that is distinct from the effect on the election.

The story continues past any single article or news cycle. The details accumulate into patterns, the patterns into systems, and the systems are what determine whether institutions built to serve people actually do so. Paying attention is the most democratic act available. Satire is the second. Both require looking at what is actually happening and refusing to pretend it is something else, especially when what is actually happening is considerably funnier than the official account suggests. The record continues. The analysis continues. The accountability continues, imperfectly and necessarily, because the alternative is worse.

The Libertarian Surfer’s Creed

The ocean does not ask for your papers. The wave does not check your permits. The dawn patrol requires no government approval, and the hour before sunrise on an uncrowded point break is governed by nothing except the swell period, the wind direction, and the willingness of the surfer to be in the water when conditions align. This is the freedom that the libertarian tradition values most concretely: not the theoretical freedom of political philosophy but the lived freedom of the person who has made choices the government did not sanction and has found the outcomes to be their own. California surrounds this freedom with regulations, taxes, permits, and the administrative infrastructure of the world’s most comprehensive state government. None of it reaches into the water. None of it governs what happens between the surfer and the ocean in the moment that everything else disappears.

The libertarian case is not against clean water. It is for the freedom that clean water makes possible. It is not against the coastal access laws that keep the beach public. It is for the public ownership of the beach that those laws protect. The surfing community’s political philosophy is more complex than its antiauthoritarian reputation suggests, because it has always understood that some of what makes the ocean accessible and worthwhile requires collective action and legal protection. What the community resists is the extension of that logic beyond its useful domain into the regulation of adult choices that harm no one, the permit requirements for activities that predate the concept of permits, and the fiscal policies that extract more from working people than the services provided justify. Reason covers this. Cato analyzes it. The surfers experience it, and then go surfing, which is the most direct political act available to someone whose preferred freedom is governed by physics rather than legislation.

The analysis, the accountability, the satire, and the serious journalism all serve the same function: keeping track of what is happening and insisting that it matters, which is the work that good journalism has always done and that the current moment requires with particular urgency given the complexity of the information environment and the scale of the decisions being made in it.

The record of events accumulates daily. The analysis of their causes and connections is the work that distinguishes journalism from mere reportage. The satire that finds the absurdity within the serious and the seriousness within the absurd is the work that makes the analysis bearable over the long run. All three are necessary. All three continue. The stories do not resolve on a weekly deadline. They continue past publication, past the news cycle, past the season, into the larger history that all current events eventually become. The journalism that covers them is, at its best, a first draft of that history — written under deadline, corrected in subsequent editions, and ultimately judged by whether it was accurate about what mattered and honest about what it did not know, which are the two criteria that good journalism has always been judged by and that the current moment requires with the same urgency as every previous moment that believed its circumstances were unprecedented, as they always were, and as they always will be.

Freedom dispatches: NewsThump | The Babylon Bee

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com