1. Biden won. Get over it, people.
2. It was a lot like 2016, in that a small number of votes in swing states made a difference. Trump had the luck in 2016, and Biden had the luck this year.
3. To me, the most important take-away is that highly-educated elites (HEEs) have lost touch with the country. I mean, if the Democrats had put up Elizabeth Warren, Trump would have won in a blow-out. Anyone who works at the NYT or the WaPo is hereby disqualified to comment on American politics.
2016 made it clear that the HEEs don’t speak to white working-class voters. 2020 made it clear that the HEEs don’t speak to minorities. Biden got the the crucial South Carolina primary because of Clyburn, and Trump got Florida because of how well he did with minority voters there.
4. The legacy of Donald Trump will be that he opened up key voting blocs for the Republican Party by running against the HEEs.
5. The Democrats have a problem. The HEEs are their base, and you cannot alienate your base. But if your base alienates everyone else, what do you do?
6. Libertarians have a problem. We’re mostly HEEs. The Democratic HEEs hate us and the Republicans need to run against us.
Good analysis and largely agree. Though few caveats
1. As Scott Alexander stated in 2016, be cautious with sweeping narratives that are based on few thousand votes here, few thousand votes there.
2. Biden prob gonna win popular vote by several million.
3. What are the final numbers going to look like with minorities? If Biden wins 85% of blacks instead of 90%, is that truly evidence of your position?
4. To what extent is Trump’s popularity amongst some of these groups, a personality / machismo thing? Does Josh Hawley get endorsement of Lil Wayne? 50 Cent? etc?
the popular vote isn’t a thing – if you started this election over without the EC there isn’t a person alive that could predict how it would play out.
Not so sure that a Biden-McConnell government is the best example of a rejection of elites. It’s a loss for *Twitterverse Woke* elites that spend their time fighting social media culture war against Trumpian Flight-93 populists, who *also* lost.
Neither Biden nor McConnell are culture warriors, nor populists, nor darlings of social media. They are both creatures of the institutional establishment. Most libertarians fall within the *institutional* elite. Institutional normalcy can be favorable for libertarians as institutions limit the pace of government activism. At the very least, it’s better than perpetual Flight-93 “fight or die” mentality.
A republican won Kentucky…in a stunning upset.
A man with the backing of the entire elite society and with a pandemic at his back that was supposed to win by eight points barely gets by in a (possibly fraudulent) squeaker.
Yes, it’s a win for elite libertarianism. Just like all those Hispanics on the Texas border voting in record numbers for the Built The Wall guy is an endorsement of open borders.
“Libertarians have a problem. We’re mostly HEEs. The Democratic HEEs hate us and the Republicans need to run against us.”
No offense, but no one cares about you. You are completely irrelevant.
So, go ahead and continue preaching to us about open borders, ending the drug war, police reform, free trade, blah blah blah, etc. No one gives a sh*t, so get over it already.
“Biden won. Get over it, people.”
Yes, this is correct. Trump had a royal flush in 2016. Expecting him to hold yet another royal flush in 2020 is just too improbable. Yet, I will be lmao if he somehow wins.
No offense, but unless you are a potential median voter, no one cares about you either. Get over that. (Unless, of course, you pay. Then they’ll love you forever, yes they will.)
In fact, libertarian voters have lots of opportunities to be the median voter. Hurray.
“In fact, libertarian voters have lots of opportunities to be the median voter. Hurray.”
Keep taking more bong hits as you to try to convince yourself that this is somehow true. You guys literally have nothing relevant to offer at this point. Open Borders? End qualified immunity? End the drug war? Blah blah blah. It’s all boring nonsense.
You libertarians were literally an insignificant rounding error here in Texas.
Your comments were more interesting when you focused on persuasion instead of insults. I can get hyperactive mud throwers anywhere, often with a better honed sense of humor and less repetition, which at least makes them entertaining to read.
@A leap at the wheel
Fair enough. So what do you guys have on tap for us? What if anything do you have to offer at this point?
If it’s just the typical libertarian faire (as noted above), then I’m out.
And, if you’re thinking that the legalization of shrooms in Oregon last night is a libertarian victory to celebrate, then I’m definitely out.
I don’t think movement-libertarians can offer very much to anyone at all, because they are just libertines and that never plays well. Reason et al running story after story about it is just, well, pathetic and juvenile. I distance myself from that at every opportunity.
So here’s what I would offer, as a classic liberal:
1) Fix the SC nomination process, and maintain the momentum that the Fed Soc has is spreading textualism/originalism among the HEE. If that’s too intellectual for you, how about “Don’t make anyone bake a cake they don’t want to.”
2) School choice. Black children are stuck in their terrible government schools in order to prop your political opponents, and conservatives are stuck sending their kids to progressive indoctrination camps. Vouchers, scholarships, et al are worth it even if they don’t improve a single test score.
Run on idea 1, and you’ll have more of a bulwark against the degradation of society that a fickle electorate can’t take away. You might have to give up on jurists like Alito, but you might get rid of the likes of Sotomayor and Bryer in the deal.
Pick up option 2, and you get to troll the libs by showing how much they fail at their own virtues. You want to help black and brown bodies, while they want to keep feeding them to the meat grinder. Importantly, you’ll likely pick up votes you never would otherwise. My kids go to a charter school, the fractures among the progressive parents is visible and wide enough to drive a wedge into, if any R was smart enough to do so.
Oh, and 3, where you and I might just see eye to eye. More tragic boating trips where valuable family heirlooms are lost on the same days we go to Home Depot and pick up 4 inch PVC pipes+desiccant, and then rent a backhoe. 😉
Trump got us Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and ACB. He did so without any direct input whatsoever from the libertarians. As far as I can tell, they are all originalists.
Charter schools remain just as much of a conservative issue as a libertarian issue.
Bottom line: I don’t see anything compelling from the libertarians vs. standard conservatism.
I feel embarrassed whenever I have to visit Home Depot here in North Texas. We are like the only ones without a pickup truck, so we have to rent their trucks whenever we have a non-standard load. Face palm! We prefer to invest our heirlooms on other silly things like AR-15s.
I appreciate your reply and rest assured that it made me chuckle. Thanks for that :).
Funny you should mention those three. All three were a part of the list put together by the Federalist Society, which is a fusion of conservative and legal thinkers. ACB and Goresuch were our picks, and Kav was the pick of the conservative faction of the group.
There would be no Fed Soc without libertarian lawyers, and there would be no list without Fed Soc, and I think its pretty likely that there would be no president trump without the list. You can disagree if you want. There’s no way to know. But I know a lot of HEEs who would never vote for Trump when his best pick for the SC was his sister and promptly changed their minds when they saw the list. They would rather have another Kagen than another Roberts.
And yes, charter schools are a plank in the conservative platform. But, for strategic reasons, it should be one of the loudest planks that gets pounded in campaign season. Its not. Trump didn’t run on the issue. None of the local R’s in my Blue-Maybe-Purple state ran on it, and our charter system is under concentrated attack right now.
“No offense…”. Hmm. Pardon me, but I think offense was intended.
Fact check: TRUE
sorry about that!
“No offense, but no one cares about you. You are completely irrelevant.”
“So, go ahead and continue preaching to us about open borders, ending the drug war, police reform, free trade, blah blah blah, etc. No one gives a sh*t”
And yet somehow ‘ending the drug war’ won in states across the country. And the Supreme Court just did this. I suspect Trump’s trade war is going fade out pretty quickly too. Libertarians aren’t expecting L candidates to win, we’re hoping libertarian ideas do though. And they’ve actually been doing pretty well (even in California — California! — this time around where ballot proposals again rejected racial preferences, left Uber & Lyft drivers independent, and failed to raise property taxes or impose rent control). Here in Michigan, we just passed a proposal that will require a search warrant before accessing a person’s electronic data. As a small-l libertarian, I’m feeling like Tuesday went about as well as it could have.
So, go ahead and pat yourself on the back all you’d like. Yeah for you!
Reality check: the propositions in California got passed due to conservatives and moderates. Libertarians (both upper and lower case) were a rounding error and always will be.
You can of course argue that none of these items would have seen the light of day without the keen ideas of libertarians, but that’s just an interpretation and not a fact. I would love to see the data on this.
However, congrats on getting magic shrooms passed in Oregon. Humanity thanks you. This is just what we needed!
Nobody really cares (or should care) how people identify beyond the extent that it’s informative. I don’t care if some Californian calls himself a conservative, a populist, a moderate, or a guelph, if he votes against rent control, tax hikes, and affirmative action and for marijuana legalization, it indicates a greater inclination toward libertarian policy positions than I would’ve expected, or than either major party. That’s all that matters.
Yes, that’s right. But, I don’t want any of you libertarians roaming around my city or state when it comes to open borders, police reform or drug decriminalization. Go f*ck up some other state first with your silly ideas. We don’t want you here. Got it?
The libertarians love to claim that they have this magical “secret sauce” that somehow differentiates them from the conservatives. The problem is that when you actually take a whiff of that secret sauce, it smells off, even rancid. I have no interest in partaking in what you have to offer.
You can dismiss me as a feeble minded conservative if you’d like vs. your HEE status. That doesn’t bother me one iota.
You sure seem to get your panties in a knot over a simple rounding error! 😀
Regarding (1), I’ve been more focused on the Senate race–a split government strikes me as a win for all parties (even if they don’t see it).
Also, in MI, WI, and NV, so far it looks like the difference in outcome between Biden and Trump may be the votes cast for the Libertarian candidate. If so, how do you reassess (6)? Doesn’t that mean Republicans need to run for you?
Split Senate and House was what I was hoping for too. I didn’t care as much who won presidential race. Will be nice to be able to discuss policy again with my more progressive friends instead of how much they hate the guy holding the office.
I also like it when the libertarian covers the spread between the Democrat and Republican, but I would never assign all the votes to one party or the other. It would probably be spit, and some wouldn’t have voted for either. It’s amusing that the losing party always assume every libertarian vote would have been cast for their candidate.
That wasn’t the point: I’m not assuming that if there were no libertarian candidate how would these people have voted between Biden and Trump.
In response to Professor Kling’s assessment that Republicans need to run against libertarians, I’m posing a question that perhaps they need to run for libertarians.
If Trump were more libertarian, would some of the folks who voted for the libertarian candidate have voted for Trump instead?
That seems plausible and, in this election cycle, perhaps a reasonable inference, as otherwise normal republican voters may have opted for the never-trump route of voting for a third party candidate.
I didn’t mean to imply you were. I was just commenting about how most people view the votes for third party candidates.
I’d also love for either party to adopt more libertarian positions, but the trend lately in my circles has seemed to view libertarians more as the enemy then an ally.
Thanks, and agreed.
The Libertarian vote in the US rounds to zero. Conversely, a lot of Trump voters aren’t too keen on libertarian policies.
A 55 year old guy who lost his good factory job 12 years ago isn’t going to want to hear about the benefits of free trade, ending the minimum wage, entitlement cuts, and open borders. He wants someone like Trump saying he’ll bring those jobs back, but will settle for Trump kicking sand in the face of those he holds (rightly or wrongly) responsible.
Religious conservatives won’t show up to vote for a candidate who isn’t pro-life.
Hey, that’s not fair! It rounds to 1!
Libertarians got a lot more votes in 2016 than 2020.
Actually a good Green Party spoiler candidate would have put Trump over the top easily, like Jill did in 2016.
While it’s certainly true libertarians could have put Trump over, losing like 75% of your performance from 2016 to 2020 is pathetic.
People seem to like pot referendums though. Isn’t that what it was always about.
If fairness, Jo Jorgensen also seemed a bit woke, which probably didn’t help her cause. Woke voters were either going to vote Dem or Green, and people even considering Trump generally are allergic to wokeness.
In any case, it’s always a tough call to try to appeal to a group that typically gets 1-2% of the total vote if there’s any risk of losing your base or independents.
Libertarian policies did quite well in referenda in most places. It’s not clear Jorgensen’s performance was a referendum on libertarian policies; more likely the perceived stakes of the election. People were willing to vote for third parties in 2016 because they assumed Clinton would win easily.
A split government seems almost necessary given the degree of division in the country.
If you want reform that will prevent the country from tearing itself apart, it probably wouldn’t be getting rid of the electoral college or adding seats to the Supreme Court or Voter ID laws. It would need to be someway to guarantee that at least a portion of one branch of government is controlled by the losing party.
Better still, a restoration of the role of the federal government to something more like the Founders envisioned, with a lot less federal law, and a lot less federal control over state law through such devices as conditions on grants to states. With a lot more variation among the states, people could more easily find a congenial place to which to move.
Problem is that nobody’s willing to give The Other Guy that kind of choice. Since the essence of progressivism is economic redistribution, they’d rebel at the thought of high-income people moving out of high-tax big-social-programs jurisdictions. But conservatives aren’t exactly exempt from this kind of thinking—walk into a small-town cafe in Iowa and suggest that the national ethanol mandate should be eliminated and fuel-content standards be left to the states…
Yeah I’d take much greater federalism too.
My idea when I ran as Libber candidate (CA ’86 & ’88) was that, if the Libber gets more votes than the difference between the top two Demopublicans, it’s far more likely that the losing one will accept the most popular Libber policy so as to win next time. And the winning guy might even offer that policy, to co-opt the Libbers. (I’d prefer to call them Libs, but that’s too confusing with Liberals.)
The differences between the parties seem bigger to me, now. So, now I’m a low tax, deregulation Rep.
Ready to accept Trump losing, but think it’s still a bit early to call, sadly.
Biden’s first rattle out of the box will be to raise corporate income taxes. The incidence of corporate taxes is born by workers in the form of reduced wages. This will weaken the white working class and make them more susceptible to government hand out bribery. It is also red meat for the insecure sinecured and tax-exempt HEEs anxious to preserve their status against working class gains. Biden also will double down on critical race theory directed against red state whites. Libertarians jumped on that bandwagon a long time ago so they will have little trouble maintaining their very low profile and being generally ignored outside their little cocoon.
Correction, make that “vegan tofu” instead of “red meat.”
“Biden’s first rattle out of the box will be to raise corporate income taxes”
Can he do that without a Democrat control of the senate?
47 – 47 at the moment. I assume Democrats control after the runoff.
And if not Dems can always rely on establishment Republicans like Romney and Collins to do as they are instructed.
I dunno. McConnell has shown he’s pretty good at obstruction:
“If I’m still the majority leader in the Senate think of me as the Grim Reaper. None of that stuff is going to pass.”
The anti-Romney hatred among Trump-supporters is impressive in its sheer irrationality. Romney is a pretty thorough-going conservative. He voted for Barrett, he’s never given any indication of wanting higher corporate taxes, why would he? He’s a ‘chamber of commerce’ Republican. He’s more of a Republican than Trump is.
Even Collins, though certainly a moderate, voted for TCAJ, and without Trump as a foil, it will be *harder* to appeal to moderate Republicans.
Betting markets currently give Republicans a better chance of retaining control of the Senate (90%) than Biden winning the presidency (80%). Works for me.
Thanks. Your positivity is appreciated.
Sorry, Arnold, I disagree with all your points. But before going to points 3-6, a comment on the first two points. You may be right that Biden has won, but the final EC outcome will depend on how many fake votes Dems can count as good in the next few days and on the reliability and relevancy of the evidence that Trump’s campaign can get about the mail-in voting fraud to challenge the outcome. Even if Bidens wins at the EC, he will pay a price for the voting fraud. Dems may laugh at how easy was to steal the election, but there will be consequences. To reduce the problem “to a small number of voters in swing states” amounts to ignore the several attempts to depose Trump in the past five years. Even if some Republicans are willing not to defend Trump, all Republicans have taken note that the Dems and their radical leftist mobs are willing to rely on anything to grab and keep power.
I have been late to write about points 3-6 for two reasons. First, I still don’t buy your first two points, and reading about what is going on confirms my impression that you shot too early and missed (even if Biden wins the presidency, he’s will be a Pyrrhic victory). Second, I spend time laughing at Tyler’s linking to a post he wrote just after the 2016 election (see https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/11/coalition-diversity-whose-diversity-diversity-just-win.html ) in which he speculates about diversity based on his intuitions about what many Americans think. Indeed, a typical Tyler’s post to entertain a variety of readers with no knowledge of social sciences, in particular economics, as if he and his colleagues knew what they are talking about.
Your analysis in points 3-6 reflects, as Tyler’s old post, too much intuition about the undefined HEEs. I know how difficult is to make sense of what happens in large groups of people and in particular in the U.S., but long ago I learned that relying on vague concepts is a waste of time. My learning parallels yours because it’s largely based on my experience with the application of national-account macroeconomic analysis of countries of all sizes and a great diversity of populations over time. Frankly, relying on HEEs leads nowhere, and I was surprised you didn’t distinguish clearly individuals, political parties and factions within parties, and your HEEs.
Your point 6 reflects my surprise. Libertarians are supposed to be a group of people with some (perhaps many) similar positions about morals (individual behavior) and especially ethics (social interactions), but it’s a useless abstraction because they do nothing together (they just talk to each other), and therefore irrelevant in social life. Why should any political party pay attention to any of them while competing for power? Take the case of Bryan Caplan: his excellent analysis of some issues cannot be ignored by serious social scientists, but his positions on public issues are of interest only to the few people that share them and to the extent that BC can provide novel arguments to support a position (note: BC never makes clear what a world order of nation-states implies for international and domestic politics, and appears to deny such an order as if one could ignore humanity’s dark side).
More on point 6. I have just read this post and the comments
https://www.econlib.org/a-good-night-for-libertarians/
and I laugh at how much some libertarians are happy to live with the crumbs. I wonder when a coalition of crumbly libertarians will fight the Woke political zombies.
It looks like a narrow Biden win.
There may or may not have been fraud in the mail ballots of urban areas of swing states at 4am when it was needed. I find it very strange Trump wins Ohio by a bigger margin then 2016, but whiffs on its neighbors. Eventually a judge will decide, and since most judges don’t like Trump, I think we know how they will rule (ruling against fraud may or may not correspond with reality, I can’t say).
I am shocked its this close. Hillaries polling error was within reason. Before the night began I said to people that if it was even close then the entire polling apparatus has been engaged in massive fraud. Not mistakes, just flat out fraud. I considered it inconceivable that every single polling company could be involved in a conspiracy to be that off, but here we are. This is my biggest shock of the night, I thought Biden was going to do way better. I’ve downgraded my view of the professional class to an all new low. No integrity.
It’s clear that without COVID it would have been a Trump blowout. Anyone but Biden would have been a blowout. Perhaps there is someone out there that can pick up the mantle of Trumpism while improving on Trump himself.
It’s remarkable how well Trump did in every single demographic group. Hispanics obviously (not just Cubans), but blacks and asians as well. Even women of every race came to his aide, including white women. He basically lost because white men didn’t back him up as much, white men in his base no less.
https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2020/11/politics/election-analysis-exit-polls-2016-2020/
Trump is what minority outreach looks like.
P.S. Prop 16 went down hard and republicans are doing well in most of their elections.
“Prop 16 went down hard…”
It got completely annihilated and this cannot be overstated. All of the money, political endorsements and sympathetic media exposure could not convince the average voter to overturn the 1996 reform against racial discrimination.
I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a politician so celebrated for losing. Also, what evidence is there for fraud? It was widely accepted long ago that late counted ballots were probably going to be disproportionately for Biden. The ‘blue shift’ this morning wasn’t in any way surprising.
“I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a politician so celebrated for losing.”
I don’t think I’m celebrating Trump so much, who after a result like this clearly lost with a winning hand. Rather I’m celebrating Trumpism, which was pretty much validated tonight. I had given up but others hadn’t. I’m more hopeful for the soul of this country after tonight. Bluechecks may be even less decent than I thought (literal fraud in polling), but the people are alright.
“It was widely accepted long ago that late counted ballots were probably going to be disproportionately for Biden. ”
By the same people that had Biden +8 with a +/- 2 95% confidence interval?
I’ll leave it up to others on this. Voter fraud happens and there is history on this. I don’t believe for a second that every single place in the country could count its ballots on time *except* deep blue urban political machines in swing states. And that results in the few states that mattered didn’t match the pattern we saw in neighboring states with similar demographics.
I’m not claiming that fraud happened with 100% certainty (that would take investigation), but its certainly not an outlandish claim.
“By the same people that had Biden +8 with a +/- 2 95% confidence interval?”
By everyone who paid attention. It’s well established that mail-in ballots are disproportionately registered Democrats. Moreover, in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, Democratic centers like Detroit, Milwaukee (and Madison), and Philadelphia were slow in counting. Or was that also fabricated? It went the other way in Montana and Nebraska, where Trump did better later on.
“I’ll leave it up to others on this. Voter fraud happens and there is history on this.”
So? There’s history on lots of things that never happen anymore. That’s meaningless.
And Michigan and Wisconsin going the same way as Minnesota, Nevada and Arizona going the same way as Colorado and New Mexico? How is any of this inconsistent with neighboring states? I assume you also accept that Maine’s 2nd district was stolen by Trump then? And I’m pretty sure it’s long been the case that large, urban districts report their results later; this is especially since they have the most mail-in ballots which they’re still receiving, which, as I mentioned, came mostly from Democrats (especially in urban areas, where many people predictably don’t want to huddle into a crowded gym for a couple hours in the middle of a pandemic).
So yeah, the claim of widespread voter fraud is pretty farfetched and would require more than hunches a long way away from Occam’s razor to be convincing.
[trying to tone down language–ed.]
“By everyone who paid attention.”
If they paid so much attention, how …were they off by that much. You’re claiming expertise of a group that just [messed] up royally. 2016 was an honest mistake. Every single pollster being off by 3x+ times their confidence interval is either a conspiracy or disqualifying incompetence.
How the hell can they count urban ballots on time everywhere else, but not in Philadelphia. Are Miami poll workers just that much better they can do it all that night but we are still at 70% in philly on Thursday morning? Scranton can count their votes but not Philly?
Mail in ballots are rife for fraud and shouldn’t be allowed.
Even my wife, who in theory dropped it off in person by having someone pick it up from her car, noted that she never saw where her ballot went and if it had been thrown out or altered she wouldn’t have a clue.
Mark Z: It was widely accepted long ago that late counted ballots were probably going to be disproportionately for Biden… It’s well established that mail-in ballots are disproportionately registered Democrats.
In Michigan and Wisconsin, there were more registered Republicans than registered Democrats who requested mail-in ballots.
Michigan:
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-elections/michigan-results
Wisconsin:
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-elections/wisconsin-results
A divided government may be the best possible outcome. Trump will not be there to galvanize the hard left, and Dems won’t be able to “fundamentally transform” the country as they are always promising to do.
I have always thought that the main appeal of Trump is that he is a fighter and especially a vicious counter-puncher. Romney–who is a fundamentally decent person–was absolutely savaged by the Dems and the media, and he did not fight back. Trump fights.
I’m certainly disappointed at times by Romney, but just Trump’s policies are more important than his character, and many flaws, Romney’s support on votes and policies.
He’s an elite Rep — a HEE Rep. (I like HEE as an acronym. Really. Good acronyms are hard to “coin”, just like good insults. Trump’s good at insulting others). He’s a decent guy of the “good loser” type.
yes, Yes on Trump being a fighter. The Reps need more fighters so as to have fewer losers, good or lousy.
Can we please just admit it already? Romney was nothing more than a noble loser in a long line of other noble Republican losers. If you wanna play with the Democrats, then you’re gonna need to go down to their level. Playing the role of the wholesome Opie Taylor ain’t gonna get you there.
Romney is more of a patrician than a conservative. The Bushes and McCain also fit as more patrician than conservative. They are products of wealth and status who expect deference and perceive themselves as serving to fulfill a noble duty. Conservatism is only a small part of that. Trump is a vulgar upstart with a cudgel in his hand.
On 6, though I think you may be right (and I’m not sure this is new; the GOP has always been less classically liberal than it appears, beneath the veneer of ‘neoliberal’ elites), but I’m tempted to invoke Condorcet’s paradox. Minorities may be just tacking rightward (or at least anti-leftward) in general. Obama may have been anomalous because he was black himself. Hispanic voters are likely increasingly identifying more as white people than as ‘people of color.’ It’ll certainly be an interesting trend to watch to see if they continue in that direction whoever the GOP nominee is.
Another thing I think you missed: a big win for markets and Hayekianism and a big los for experts and polling. Election betting odds well outperformed even Nate Silver.
Trump won. Get over it.
FAR too soon to say this. Now I think 60% false. (My prior was 80% Trump wins).
But there is a whiff of HEE snobbery in the “get over it” part from any Biden supporter / Trump hater. Somehow I feel it less from Trump supporters (like me), despite thinking Trump will lose.
Agree with everything except 6. Libertarians do indeed have a problem, but that problem is that nobody cares about us. People want their problems to be solved by the government, but only when the ‘right’ people are in charge of the government. So every four years we are back here.
Trump did indeed open the Republican Party for new voting blocs. And his administration was far more libertarian than people like to admit, even though he had some terrible totalitarian moments, like the TikTok ban. It’s for the best that he lost. The Republicans get to regroup, and come back with a stronger candidate that doesn’t stick his foot in his mouth, but at the same time recognizes why Trump was so popular.
“The Republicans get to regroup, and come back with a stronger candidate that doesn’t stick his foot in his mouth, but at the same time recognizes why Trump was so popular.”
The hundred dollar bill is on the sidewalk, but it will probably need another outsider to pick up. The GOPe will want to nominate a pleb hating true con in 2024.
Tucker Carlson? Not sure he’d even want to try, but it seems he might have crossover appeal between die hard Trump supporters and run of the mill Republicans.
I think Tucker is too smart to run for president. That’s actually the biggest problem our country has. You have to have something wrong with you to want the job.
Maybe, but one can hope (famous last words!) that the Republicans seem to have grown some spine over these four years and now fight back. The bigger problem will be the that there will be about 1000 candidates again next time around, and some Jeb! type may benefit from a split vote.
#6: I think the real problem the libertarians have is that typical voters only want half the program, the recklessly unwise half.
We’ve gone beyond “Bohemian” in BoBo. These people want to be Uncle Sam’s ‘Trustafarians’. They want to live by the double standard not by consistent principles – liberty and largesse for me and mine, not for thee and thine. They want to have the subsidy and protection of the Nanny State so they don’t have to be responsible for all the hard ‘adulting’ in life and can leave beyond their productivity and output without stressing too much about keeping a competitive edge in a cut-throat, dog-eat-dog world, but they also don’t want anyone to restrain their vices and self-destructive or antisocial impulses, or to tell them what to do, so they can take their drugs and have whatever whimsical sexual relations they want on a whim without being stuck in any long-term commitments.
So we see that drugs are winning big everywhere now. Some alarmingly hard stuff in Oregon, weed everywhere else, even South Dakota now.
But also popular is protection from foreign competition, also popular is unlimited spending (but don’t tax me!) and free money from the feds, also popular is the state is responsible for everything that happens because of the pandemic, etc. Give me everything, require nothing.
This is the kind of infantilization by indulgence that is incentivized by any system of franchise-legitimized redistribution and which was long-predicted to be the endgame of democracies everywhere. What Tocqueville described as the road to soft “democratic despotism”. To the extent this immaturity overlaps with ‘liberty’ it is of course merely in terms of the childish libertinism and right to make all kinds of bad, irreversible decisions from which left-half types rarely bounce back.
This isn’t even half-libertarian. Citizens thus indulged and infantilized will always demand a big, powerful state to do more, protect more, give them more. Indeed, like actual children, they will actually need it, unable to fully fend for themselves, like animals born in captivity suddenly released into the wild without adequate preparation. If you kick them out of the nest, they will go splat, and so all focus reverts to making the nest as nice and fluffy and featherbedded as possible until we all go broke.
So true, so sad.
Childish freedom is freedom from responsibility, but with constraints on action.
Adult freedom is freedom to act, but taking responsibility – paying for bad results.
Libertarians want Freedom.
Good news (! ??)
So do voters, both types: Freedom to act AND freedom from responsibility.
Bad news
Somebody will have to pay.
Sometime, maybe.
Sci-Fi robot worker UBI paradise says maybe not.
Sex and Drugs and YouTube videos.
“I think the real problem the libertarians have is that typical voters only want half the program, the recklessly unwise half.”
Yep, that’s right – personal responsibility is always and unequivocally missing from the equation. And, that’s why I absolutely refuse to support libertarianism. Only a total sucker would fall for such a scam.
“And, that’s why I absolutely refuse to support libertarianism. ”
You missed the point. The median voter might want only part of the libertarian agenda, but libertarians themselves want the whole thing. But you take what you get. If you can’t get gay marriage, drug legalization, free-trade, smaller government, and more open borders, you’ll take the gay marriage and drug legalization and keep plugging away on the others. Ideas are not exclusively a package deal.
My perspective is precisely that libertarian ideas are much more attractive and better implemented in policy as a “package deal”.
Libertarians themselves usually argue in the sense of an implied package deal. If you say, “Reform X will cause bad consequence Y,” they will often respond, “Yes, Y is bad, but it only happens because of some other Z the state does and which it shouldn’t be doing either. If the state stopped doing Z too, that would be an improvement in itself, *and* it would mean being able to get X without worrying about Y!”
So, it depends what you care about. If you are fixated on the sole criteria of whether or not there is restrictive law, and don’t care about bad consequences, then any particular repeal of a legal constraint in isolation is still a positive development.
If you have other priorities, then it’s often the case that these moves are a net negative in the way they change the social equilibrium.
Here’s an example. You may say, “Let any adult buy and take as much of any drug he wants.” I say, “Well, ok, but on condition that I not be forced to be my junkie’s keeper. When his life goes down the tubes, I don’t want to be left holding the bag. If he overdoses and doesn’t have any money, them some voluntary charity might foot the bill, but don’t have the taxman make me pay for it, or force the hospital to treat him for free. If he is trying to squat on private or public property, he gets evicted.”
You see what I mean? The “whole package deal” of libertarianism is something that cuts the bitter of vice with the sweetener of self-reliance, personal responsibility, and insulation from other people’s bad choices. People will think twice about indulging in certain risky, self-destructive behaviors when they know they are now operating without Uncle Sugar’s safety net which he pays for by confiscating wealth from third parties.
It’s not just for libertarianism. Maybe you would be willing to give up your guns if you could be convinced that you could rely on the police and the criminal justice system to protect you in the majority of instances. That’s a “package deal” of a sort. (One silver lining to the cloud of 2020 is that we now know for certain that this is not the case and such reliance would be utterly foolish and naive.)
Here’s another salient example: fiscal prudence. There are certainly plenty of people out there who think paying lower taxes in an unqualified positive. But there are other people who might say, “Ok, I really want taxes to be lower, but not without doing something about spending, so to fund our own consumption we just borrow the money and force our descendants to sacrifice to pay it back with interest, or else, trigger a fiscal crisis. If you just lower taxes and don’t do the rest of the package deal, that’s no good at all, and in some ways worse than it was before with higher taxes.”
So, to be extra clear about my original point: I don’t think libertarians have it quite right about the nature of their political problem. I think the deeper and more subtle problem is that there is no good answer in the present political circumstances to the problem of being unable to reliably commit to these “package deals” for libertarian proposals for policy reform.
Thus, when such measures are considered in isolation, there will also be an unanswerable downside. What ends up happening is what Kling has described before as progressives treating libertarian intellectuals like a disposable mistress who fools herself into believing her lover will leave his wife and pick her instead. Instead, all you will ever get is a “libertarianism of convenience” (that is, currently convenient for progressive political purposes), but never any of the compensatory or mitigating libertarianism, all of which is a recipe for every ‘libertarian’ gain to just make things worse on net for non-progressives.
That’s not the kind of track record that makes for a winning marketing strategy. Quite the contrary.
Milton Friedman, always a Republican, would often talk at CA Libertarian meetings.
His example was Open Borders.
He was in favor of them ONLY without gov’t programs to help the new immigrants. All gov’t programs are funded by forced tax-collections.
Thus, he was against open borders until after ending tax-payer supported welfare for immigrants.
I continue to support Freedom With Responsibility, but see the college indoctrinated graduates looking for private gain, public risk bearing. Even in their own excessive loan commitments – nobody forced them to borrow money for college. Why should the gov’t force tax-payers to pay back their loans? Even if it might be overall good for the economy…
You may say, “Let any adult buy and take as much of any drug he wants.” I say, “Well, ok, but on condition that I not be forced to be my junkie’s keeper. When his life goes down the tubes, I don’t want to be left holding the bag.
The problem with this logic is twofold. First, there is no chance society is going to start turning away people at the emergency room to have them die in the parking lot (nor should it). That’s properly a non-starter.
But second and more importantly, you imagine the drug war is making it less likely for people to become addicts and have their lives spin out of control. But under prohibition many lives are ruined by criminal records for drugs that would never have been ruined by addiction alone. And as a ‘bonus’ we get a police state, midnight SWAT raids, gang violence, asset forfeiture — all while NOT stopping either addiction or the drug trade. Organized crime depends upon and benefits greatly from drug prohibition (which should be completely obvious from our experience with alcohol prohibition but somehow isn’t). And then of course U.S. drug prohibition has had the side-effect of devastating Latin American countries with corruption and gang violence that they’re clearly much less equipped to handle.
@TomG
Bryan Caplan calls the minimal additional changes needed to fix bad side effects “keyhole solutions”, which often indeed constitute the compensatory and mitigating half of the “package deal libertarianism” bargain I am talking about.
The bigger problem I am taking about for the ‘movement’ is precisely the inability to credibly commit to any non-progressive-favoring keyhole solutions in the current political environment. It’s precisely the stumbling block that keeps these debates entrenched in an unproductive pattern and circling the same dead end cul de sac over and over. I have a proposal. But your proposal has a problem. I have a keyhole solution to that problem. But it’s not a solution if it’s impossible to implement concurrently. Well, that’s someone else’s problem, I’m just talking about my proposal, which should be enacted regardless, assuming the can opener of the keyhole solution will magically occur some day.
I think it’s rationable to see this like ‘pariah Beijing’s, as a species of bad faith argumentation and advocacy, which the progressives also do a lot of and which I wrote about a long time ago in “They Won’t Fix It First”. There can’t be a “Grand Bargain” (or more generally a basis for social peace) if at least one side is not agreement-capable and able to be trusted to keep their end of the bargain, after they’ve already achieved their aims in an irreversible manner.
After a generation of not getting getting out of the same dead ends and of potentially bad faith arguments about keyhole solutions needed for a package deal, it is not a big surprise that the movement starts to lose the last strategic reserve of strength in its already steeply uphill battle: specifically the deference given due to its reputation for intellectual firepower, rigor, consistency, fairness, and seriousness.
“Progressive Mistress Libertarianism” is none of those things, throws Conservatives under the bus, and makes people fed up, which, in turn is an unforced error which opens up opportunities for demagogic denunciation.
@Slocum:
Whether or not I agree with you about those aspects of the consequences and wisdom of the drug war was not the point. You are missing the forest for the trees, getting into the weeds on the details of a particular real-world controversy when the point was to pose a hypothetical with a particular scheme of preferences and trade-offs. This is unfortunately something that often happens whenever one tries to use an subject to make an illustrative example, people start arguing about the territory when the point was to show alternative paths on a cartoon map.
Now, as it happens, one part of your very argument is precisely the kind of corner into which libertarian advocacy paints itself. If you will consider a person for whom the emergency room issue is dispositive, your argument that there is “no chance” of this happening is precisely the reason one might reject the liberalization at issue. That is, instead of offering that person an attractive ‘package deal’, consistent with his subjective, idiosyncratic preferences and which he considers positive sum, win-win, thus in a zone of possible agreement, you are offering something that counter-party considers win-lose, negative sum. The price you are offering is too low to make the sale.
If you will consider a person for whom the emergency room issue is dispositive
Yes, I know somebody wielding the ‘my brothers keeper’ argument against drugs is BSing. Virtually none would use that as a pretext to ban alcohol again, or accept the state’s power to regulate their diet and exercise regimens or their enjoyment of risky activities like rock-climbing and motor-cycle riding under exactly the same ‘I’m the last-resort funder of your medical care so obey or face arrest’ logic. It’s always a smokescreen not a believable objection.
“You are missing the forest for the trees, getting into the weeds on the details of a particular real-world controversy”
The drug war is not just a random example — one of many similar controversies. There aren’t any similar controversies. Or do you have a list comparables?
+1
People tend to confuse “libertarian” (or Classical Liberal) with “Libertarian Party” (or LP).
The LP drew a tiny vote in California, a “deep blue” state. But look at the outcome of the ballot initiatives in California: those are Classical Liberal votes, not Progressive ones.
– No to increasing commercial property taxes
– No (resoundingly) to “affirmative action” or “reverse discrimination” by the state (i.e., the state constitution will continue to ban discrimination by the state on the basis of race, sex, national origin, etc.)
– No (resoundingly) to local government rent control (although state-level rent control remains in place – it wasn’t on the ballot)
– Yes (by a wide margin) to allowing independent Uber and Lyft gig workers to retain their independence.
– No (resoundingly) to requiring on-premises doctors at dialysis clinics (which would limit competition)
Progressives are not just extreme, but also loud, and politicians tend to overestimate their actual support, resulting in the very Progressive policies advanced by politicians in California (including recently voting to allow institutional racial discrimination by the state).
California’s citizen votes look a lot closer to those of Classical Liberals, than like those of “liberals.”
And where California goes…
Yes, thanks to all of the classical liberals (and conservatives and moderates) in California. Why you are still there, I will never understand. Most overrated state ever and was happy to have moved out in 2017. It’s one of the wealthiest places on earth, but yet it operates like a third world country.
I voted for prop 209 in 1996 (my only time ever voting in CA) and very happy to to see that it was not overturned by prop 16.
Does this mean all of us can now start blaming all of our own personal problems on Biden?
I used to vote Libertarian, I’m used to not feeling the best policies won. But the tone of “get over it”, before MI is litigated or PA is called, seems still a bit early.
Did the Dems ever get over it from 2016? I don’t think so.
Reps don’t live for politics, so there won’t be riots over a Biden victory.
#2 COVID was a huge bit of bad luck for Trump. (Or was it a small scale bio-warfare from a lab in Wuhan? Nah, that’s as crazy as thinking the FBI would spy on a candidate! )
#3 2016 should have showed that HEEs (great acronym) are out of touch. But I don’t believe Warren, Harris, or Sanders would have been much worse – this was a close referendum on Trump. Yes or hate? The haters (prolly) win.
#4 For Rep demographic watchers, going against the HEEs will be their future path to victory.
Sad that you don’t mention the “magic wand” which Obama thought Trump didn’t have to bring back US mfg jobs: tax cuts, deregulation, enforce border laws, more fair trade agreements.
#5 The HEE problem will get worse as their promises of “more jobs. More union jobs” will likely be far far less than Trump was getting. Reps w/o the Presidency will certainly put the “budget deficit” back on the agenda.
#6 Libbers are winning the culture war of unrestrained personal freedom. Wait, they wanted responsible personal freedom??? Well, do you want millions more drug users or not? Victimless crimes are more available at lower risk of punishment than ever.
Balanced budget? Well, that idea has been a consistent Rep loser idea for decades. No balanced budget until after the next hyper-inflation or other huge financial catastrophe proves that there IS a limit on US borrowing, but the US going OVER the limit.
All borders need to be tested by children, with punishment, so that the kids know that there actually is a border. Or, all illegal spying by gov’t FBI will be tested by experienced CYA FBI agents, who will then be punished, so that the agents know that it actually is illegal.
Or maybe not.
RE: Libertarians
Isn’t it really obvious that the core of American politics is centre-right culturally, center-left economically. Not all of those issues fall on what you might think of as right/left (gig workers wanted to stay gig workers, people want marijuana), but as a general pattern that holds.
Trump did as well as he did because he tried to inhabit that nexus. Combined with nationalist over globalism. You might say a moderate version of….national socialism.
He was bad at it, and didn’t follow though, and ironically lost an election while only declining in a single demographic group from 2016 to 2020…white men. But the blueprint is there for someone that is better at it.
Of course that may seem like the opposite of libertarianism, but maybe libertarianism ought to look in the mirror. Popular libertarianism is libertinism, which is a self indulgent dead end. HEE libertarianism is Tyler Cowen screaming at people to be teetoler face burkha wearers that defer to authority. At least he admitted that one clear message from tonight is that people do not want another lockdown.
Maybe libertarianism should learn to love national socialism…it’s not that bad. Its deficits and excesses are probably no worse than most democratic ideologies. Its people are probably susceptible to several libertarian messages (most ballot initiatives). Wokeism is deeply unpopular. People like subsidiarity and federalism. School choice could be a winner. Libertarianism needs to find some new angle now that we’ve got pot (it won’t be defund the police or open borders).
“Biden won. Get over it, people.”
And how!
The Trumpist GOP has become the party of the yeomanry called for by Joel Kotkin in his “The Coming of Neo-Feudalism.” http://joelkotkin.com/the-coming-of-neo-feudalism/
The challenge now is whether the GOP can remain so without Trump at the helm . . .
Trump’s big second term agenda item was school choice? Is that not libertarian?
Trump’s big first term agenda included a giant deregulation push. Is that not libertarian?
Economist Casey Mulligan compared the Trump Administration to the Reagan Administration and basically said the Trump Administration adopted better libertarian policy on global trade. Despite Trump literally boasting “I am Tariff Man” and purposefully enraging many libertarian-leaning pundits, and despite Reagan being a hero among prominent libertarian-pundits, Trump’s policy choices were actually better.
#1 Biden won by cheating, WI and elsewhere. You’re stuck with a cheater, the USA Pres. elect cheated. “Get over it”
In losing WI, Trump got 200k MORE votes this year than 2016.
I don’t believe 300k more voters voted Biden this year than Clinton then.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2020/11/massive-voter-fraud-in-wisconsin.php
There were 3,684,726 registered voters in Wisconsin going into Election day. The total votes recorded in Wisconsin were 3,240,549. That would give Wisconsin a turnout of 88%.
5.5 standard deviations above the ~67% avg since 1960.
Trump supporters will always believe “Biden stole the election”.
I believe it. I hope Trump’s legal team provides enough preponderance of evidence to show cheating by the Dems, but won’t be surprised if it fails.
Arnold, let’s say you wanted Biden over Trump, but after looking at the evidence, you think the Dems actually did steal the election.
If YOU thought the Dems cheated, what would you do?
Getting over it is certainly an option.
In a strange funny way, unjustly losing with evidence showing cheating might well energize the moderate Reps to fight harder, tho also dirtier, for a big House win in 2022. Especially as more evidence comes out that Biden was accepting bribes from Burisma thru son Hunter Biden.
Few things energize (the WEIRD) as much as injustice.
Plus, the Dems won’t have Trump to kick around anymore (OK, he’ll still be around).
Altho this anti-woke anti-Trump idea failed with Bush Derangement Syndrome and the treatment of Kavanaugh, I can imagine many of worst Trump haters waking up and seeing their previous lies and hate and contempt were not very attractive. CNN’s election coverage was apparently much more factual, and far better than FOX. (I watched BBC and blogs)