Why Republicans Need Gary Johnson

The Progressive Party, the People’s Party, the Reform Party–third parties on the political fringe have long captured the imagination of the American electorate. When gridlock is the new norm and the two dominant parties seem bloated and corrupt, voters can’t help but don their rose colored spectacles and hope that a third party can turn the United States around. This election cycle, with both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton polling with record high unpopularity, is no exception. According to cue the Green Party and the Libertarians have emerged from the political woodwork hoping to market themselves as alternatives to a system they claim no longer serves the average American.

Voting for a third party candidate has traditionally been dismissed as effectively foregoing your voting power, or worse, voting for the opposition. But the uniquely chaotic situation in both parties has prompted many to ask if this is still the case.

The Democratic Party, though unsettled by the popularity of Senator Bernie Sanders, remains today ideologically coherent to an extent unseen on the political right. Voters on the left generally see the current social and economic order as damagingly unequal and believe that government intervention can be the most effective measure for remedying unfair disparities. From Hillary Clinton to Jill Stein, progressives agree that income inequality, racial injustice, environmental degradation, access to education, and affordable healthcare are all issues that justify government intervention.

Progressives further to the left of the Democratic establishment frequently attack the sincerity of the Party leadership’s commitment to these goals or the extent to which government intervention is required. They do not, however, attack the principles themselves–equitability, inclusivity, and collectivity–that underpin the party platform. The Green Party’s Ten Key Values — Grassroots Democracy, Social Justice, Ecological Wisdom, Decentralization, Community Based Economics, Feminism, Diversity, Personal and Global Responsibility, and Future Focus and Sustainability — fit closely with the Democratic Party’s moves to expand voter rights, nominate women and people of color to the highest political offices, redistribute wealth to mitigate inequality, promote diplomacy over intervention, and sign sweeping climate treaties. And while Jill Stein can with good reason protest over the inner workings of the Democratic Party, she cannot object to Hillary Clinton’s promises to reject the Trans Pacific Partnership, make college debt-free, overturn Citizens United, and create a fifteen dollar minimum wage.

The agreement on values among the American left makes the Democrat’s platform a fluid one. If progressives demand a more left-leaning platform during the primary, Democrats are willing to concede to their demands to win elections. We see this in the leftward shift undergone by Hillary Clinton under the influence of Bernie Sanders. To appease Bernie’s constituency, Clinton has taken harder left positions on student debt, criminal justice reform, and campaign finance. And though special interests and party politics often slow change within the party, progressives profit from an ability to call Democrats out on their commitment to their own purported principles.

When the Democratic party does not act in accordance with its purported values, other leftists can criticize them by their own standards. Because everyone is operating under the same framework of values, the Left’s discourse can focus on which policy measures can most feasibly achieve those values. The debate over college tuition is a perfect example of this phenomenon. The rising cost of attending college clearly violates the progressive belief in equitable access to education. When pressured the Democrats were practically forced to propose policy measures that addressed an inequality clearly out of line with their founding principles. The result, a plan to make college free for families making less than $125,000, offers a concrete proposal to square party values with policy. As such, progressives should content themselves to fight their battles during the primary when they can be most effective, not during general elections where they risk defeating those with principles more alike than dissimilar to their own.

The same cannot be said on the other side of the aisle. The internal contradictions the Republican party accumulated through the course of the last century have erupted under Donald Trump’s rise to power. Big business interests, religious conservatives, foreign policy hawks, anti-communists, libertarians, and disaffected blue collar workers came together in the Reagan Coalition as Republicans courted diverse voter blocks whose loyalty to the Democrats was waning. The beginning of the culture wars over social norms and the increasing integration of African Americans offered Republicans a chance to bring traditionalist blue collar workers and Southerners into the fold.

To appease all of these demographics, the modern Republican party has picked from across the ideological spectrum and now represents trade protectionism, aversion to LGBTQ rights, military aggression, militarized policing, and trickle down economics. Business leaders favoring free trade must compete with left-behind Rust Belt workers that reject deals like the TPP, and individualists that believe the government has no place in their private lives vote for the same party as Evangelicals who believe their very salvation depends on the government’s rejection of same-sex marriage and legal abortion.

President Obama can accurately claim “What we heard in Cleveland [at the Republican Convention] … wasn’t particularly Republican. And it sure wasn’t conservative.” If conservatism is taken as a counterpoint to progressivism’s faith that the government can be an agent of positive change, an ideology that champions the individual and despises the state, the party of Trump truly is no longer conservative. No party that believes the government should police people’s sexual and reproductive lives, conduct trade wars, use military force liberally, and emulate Vladimir Putin and Saddam Hussein can be said to be conservative in the use of its power. The divisions within the Republican party, then, are not matters of scale or authenticity, as within the American left, but divisions over the guiding principles of the party.

These divisions have made it more difficult for Republicans to win the presidency in recent years, a difficulty that will only grow as the American electorate continues its demographic transformation. The party has pursued an ideology that appeals disproportionately to white men without a college degree. Latinos are turned off by the party’s refusal to enact comprehensive immigration reform and its increasingly vitriolic anti-immigrant sentiment. Many women feel alienated by the Party’s attempts to restrict access to abortion and birth control. African Americans have had communities shattered by the Republicans’ continued support for the war on drugs, mass incarceration, and tough-on-crime policy. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people are alienated from a party that opposes same sex marriage, workplace discrimination laws, and enacts discriminatory bathroom laws. Young people by and large feel no connection to the “traditional values” that the Republican party purports to defend.

A more libertarian brand of Republicanism could extract the party from the demographic corner that it has backed itself into. The support for a path to citizenship would encourage Latinos to join the party. The Libertarian belief that government should interfere as little in the lives of private citizens would attract women that believe in their right to control their own bodies. Police reform and an end to the war on drugs would be meaningful step away from the discrimination endured by African Americans in the criminal justice system. LGBT voters and young people seeking to live free from the mandates of outdated codes of sexual, gender, and personal behavior could be attracted by the Libertarian belief in personal choice. The party’s problems with these demographics run much deeper than these handful of issues, but a shift in a more libertarian direction could begin a process of outreach the party desperately needs.

In becoming more libertarian, the Republican party would necessarily strain its relationship with the religious right. But, polling suggests that Evangelicals continue to vote for Republicans out of a greater fear of Democratic policies than any belief that the Republicans are the champions of their politics. And, as religious affiliation and social conservatism continue to decline, the number of voters for whom traditional values are a critical issue will dwindle. If current demographic trends continue the Republicans will eventually have to bite the bullet and distance itself from Evangelical politics–this election cycle, surely a defining moment for the Republican party, could be the time to do that.

The Republican party has consistently faced the problem of party unity. When more than a dozen candidates enter the fray of the primary, each representing a different conception of what the Republican party is, it becomes difficult for voters to unite behind the eventual nominee. Ted Cruz’s non-endorsement at the RNC and the tenuous support of establishment Republicans like John McCain and Paul Ryan highlight this difficulty: when issues are not resolved during the primaries they linger during the general election.

These unresolved debates about party values have created a situation where Republican self-definition is derived primarily through contrast its with the Democrats. It has spent the last eight years engaging in a scorched earth politics — the government shutdown, the refusal to approve judicial nominees, the refusal to vote on the most timid gun legislation — that have left it with a short list of policy accomplishments.

The Republicans cannot continue to run solely as an opposition to the Democrats. When faced with an opponent whose character they have not spent the last twenty years attacking, as is the case with Hillary Clinton, the lack of a positive message will prove disastrous. We saw this in the McCain and Romney candidacies. Both faced the daunting prospect of winning against President Obama and his messages of hope and change. The message of Libertarianism — that anything is possible for those who work hard, that our best attribute as a society is our love of liberty — is a message of positivity that can compete with Progressivism’s monopoly on inclusivity and social progress. It is certainly a more hopeful message than Trump’s slogan of “Make America Great Again” and its implicit message that America’s greatest days are behind it. Libertarianism would provide conservative voters with something to cast their ballot for, rather than against.

Though Libertarian Gary Johnson stands little chance of winning the general election, a vote cast for him would in many ways be a more effective use of the ballot than one for Donald Trump. Regardless of what one thinks of his policies, Donald Trump has shown himself to be temperamentally unfit to hold the highest office in the land. His expressed admiration for Vladimir Putin and disregard for democratic institutions would harm the liberties Americans cherish. His lack of knowledge of world affairs would make him a disastrous choice for the country’s leading diplomat and commander in chief. His recent clashes with the Gold Star Khan family has revealed both a disregard for military families and a habitual inability to recognize when he has made a mistake. In all these ways, Trump has shown himself to be antithetical to some of conservatism’s most dearly held beliefs and unable to be an effective advocate for conservative principles.

A vote for a Libertarian candidate would be a vote to stop the downward spiral of the Republican party. It would be a vote to purge the party of unsavory populism, nationalism, and sexism. It would be a vote to make the party something all Americans can take seriously even if they disagree with its politics. Ironically, conservatives stand the best chance of reclaiming their party in November by refusing to vote for it.

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Ian Miller is a sophomore studying philosophy.