The Strategic Libertarian Case For Supporting Hillary Clinton
The 2016 election season has been a contentious and divisive time for libertarians. Some have decided to side with Republican candidate Donald Trump as the lesser of two evils. Others are supporting Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson despite his long odds and shortcomings as a candidate. A few are turning to Constitution Party candidate Darrell Castle, despite his lack of sufficient ballot access to obtain victory. Some who do not understand or care about economic liberty have even suggested Green Party candidate Jill Stein as an option for libertarians. A significant number are disgusted with all of their options and plan to stay home on Election Day. What no one seems to have contemplated is the case for a libertarian to support Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, so let us explore that case.
Clearly, there is no straightforward, face-value libertarian case for supporting someone with the track record of warmongering, corruption, thievery, and deception that Clinton has in their quest to preside over the most powerful and dangerous state apparatus in human history. But almost all libertarians have decided to stop there in their consideration of Clinton and look to the other candidates. What can be argued that has not been argued thus far is a bootlegger’s case for Clinton, in which she is supported not for the ostensible purposes of granting her the Presidency, but because her administration will cause effects that libertarians can exploit for their purposes. The overarching theme is that the leftward drive of statism in general and democracy in particular cannot be forestalled by the means at hand, so the alternative is to push leftism even faster and farther than leftists had planned in order to hasten its collapse. It is this sort of case which will be made here.
The Goal of Libertarians
It may seem odd at first glance to speak of a unifying goal for all libertarians, as libertarians have all sorts of goals, some of which are at cross purposes with each other. However, the root of the word ‘libertarian’ is ‘liberty’, so it is reasonable to conclude that a libertarian has the practical goal of maximizing the amount of liberty present in one’s environment. Liberty is generally defined as the freedom to do as one wishes as long as one respects the right of other people to do likewise and commits no aggression against them. But liberty is meaningless without private property in which to enjoy it, insecure without rule of law to defend it, precarious without peace and justice to preserve it, and absent without freedom of association. If a state is present, it will fund its activities through taxation and civil asset forfeiture, take private property through eminent domain, and restrict the use of property through intellectual monopoly, zoning, and environmental regulations. Its officials and agents will choose the nature of the law and the enforcement thereof, meaning that they rule the law and not vice versa. Its enforcers will initiate the use of violence against people who are known to disagree with government statutes and acts upon their disagreements, thus presenting a constant threat to peace. Its agents are allowed to do that which is considered criminal for anyone else to do, and the system is set up to keep them from being held to account. It will force people to associate with it regardless of whether they want to use or pay for its services. For these reasons (and many others), the maximization of liberty requires abolition of the state.
Abolition Requires Revolution
Unfortunately, the state will not abolish itself; the control and maintenance of the state apparatus is too valuable to give up for those who benefit from it. Those who bankroll political campaigns receive a far better return on investment than they would receive from any free market use of capital, and if they did not make such donations, their business rivals would. Wielding political power causes the same biochemical responses as drug abuse. There are people who carry weapons in the name of the state for the purpose of enforcing the edicts of politicians because they lack the skills and temperament to be productive members of society. There is a dependent class of people who have become accustomed to existing parasitically upon the productive members of society. All of these people are used to their way of life, and they will not give it up without a fight. Any strategy that does not deal with this fact, as well as the fact that an institution based upon initiatory force will resort to force to counter attempts to remove and/or dismantle it is doomed to failure. There are many other methods that libertarians have proposed and tried to increase the amount of liberty in society, and some have achieved some limited success. But electoral methods, agorism, cryptography, seasteading, civil disobedience, education, and peaceful parenting all fail to address the fundamental problem. Thus, they will fail to defeat the state by themselves at best. At worst, they will ease some of the pain of oppression, which allows people to tolerate more evil before they must take action to end it. Their usefulness, if any, is to push the state toward collapse while growing the population and resources of libertarians to such an extent that revolution becomes feasible.
A Successful Revolution
A revolution to end the state can only be successful if enough people participate. Moving too soon plays into the state’s hands, as it will only give the state more cause to grow and sour the reputation of libertarianism. The personnel and resources necessary to carry out a revolution are not yet assembled, so the task of the libertarian is to figure out how to assemble them. Let us begin by noting what the Declaration of Independence says about the matter:
“Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”
This is indeed what history shows us; people tend to overthrow governments only if they believe themselves to lack better options. Regardless of whether war, famine, or pestilence visits a population because of their government or in spite of it, a failure of a state to meet the needs of its people in a crisis has precipitated more revolutions than anything else. Although the tyrannies inflicted upon the American people by the federal government are far greater than those which inspired our forefathers to take up arms, the comforts of modernity and the civic religion of democratic statism have made evils more easily sufferable. That which would once have led people to revolt is now merely a minor inconvenience, to be brushed aside and endured because the next sports game is on. Clearly, conditions must get worse in order to make enough people believe that they must rise up against the system rather than keep trying to play the fool’s game of working within it.
Use It to Destroy It
Given that liberty requires anarchy, anarchy requires abolition of the state, abolition of the state requires revolution, revolution requires a sufficient number of participants, the number of potential participants is lacking, people revolt when they believe themselves to be out of other options, and more people will believe themselves to be out of other options if conditions get worse, the next order of business is to see what can be done to make conditions get worse. In a democratic state, the ballot box is the primary means by which decisions are made. Conditions sometimes change slowly in a nation with a deep state of unelected bureaucrats that is largely impervious to the winds of politics, but conditions do deteriorate when bad rulers are elected. While this is always the case, some candidates for office are clearly worse than others. The obvious strategy, then, is to intentionally vote for the worst candidates in an effort to push the current system toward ruin.
Who Is Worst?
With a strategy discovered, the next question concerns application. Which candidate in the 2016 presidential election would do the most to push the current system toward ruin? In other words, who has no intention or motive to make any significant changes to current policy? Who would amplify and accelerate the current course of the federal government?
We may begin by considering only the candidates who have a chance of winning, as a candidate who cannot get into office in the first place will fail a fortiori at making conditions worse while in office. This reduces our options to Clinton, Johnson, Stein, and Trump. All of the other minor-party candidates lack the ballot access to gain the Presidency, even if everyone voted for a particular one of them. Stein may also be dismissed, as polling has shown her to be in fourth place in nearly every national and state poll that has been conducted. (Though if Stein had a chance, this would be a case for supporting her instead of Clinton, as the implementation of her platform would accelerate the national debt, grow the size and scope of government, and push the nation toward economic ruin faster than the platforms of the other candidates.)
Johnson and Trump offer respites from many of the failed policies of recent administrations, though to varying degrees and for different reasons. While both focus on economic matters, Johnson takes a more libertarian approach while Trump is more nationalist. The practical upshot is that a Johnson presidency would be likely to offer much more relief over the short-term but ignore important demographic concerns, while a Trump presidency would offer much less immediate relief but address concerns over demographic shifts which are hostile to liberty. But the strategy being discussed is to vote for the worst, not the best.
A look at Clinton’s platform reveals that she favors higher taxes, more programs for minorities, more taxpayer funding for college tuition, strengthening of entitlement programs, stricter gun control measures, universal healthcare, ending the sequester for both defense and non-defense spending, amnesty for illegal immigrants, more funding for clean energy, a continuation of unproductive anti-terrorism policies, curtailment of civil liberties, and more government intervention in the workplace. She is also far more likely to start new wars than the other candidates, and this would speed along the decline more than any other policy. In other words, she will amplify and accelerate the current course of the federal government much more than Johnson and somewhat more than Trump.
Resolution in Defeat
It is also necessary to consider the impact that the election is likely to have on the supporters of the losing candidates. If Johnson loses, his supporters will likely get the result that they expect, as third-party candidates have almost no chance in a system rigged to produce a two-party system. Although a Johnson victory is technically possible if everything plays out just right, the more realistic question is whether he can get 5 percent of the vote, which would make the Libertarian Party a more significant election machine going forward. As such, voting for Johnson is more of a punt on 2016 with hopes set on 2020. That said, a disastrous result for Johnson will affirm the need for the LP to stop running the milquetoast candidates they have fielded since 2008 and put forward openly radical, even anarchist, voices.
A Clinton loss will have the effect of opening a pressure valve on populist and nationalist resentment, just as the Brexit victory did in the United Kingdom. If liberty is the goal, then a pressure valve to release steam that is needed for a revolutionary explosion is counterproductive. For as long as Trump remains in office, the right would rally behind him, turn a blind eye to many of his negative tendencies, and forget their anti-state sentiments because their man is in charge. While Trump could cause some disillusionment when many of his lofty campaign promises do not come true, many on the right have some understanding that this will be the case and that he must speak bombastically to keep his base energized and motivated. Trump could also do some good in the form of neutralizing the tactics of social justice warriors, but he has already done this and could likely not do much more in this regard. Of course, the political pendulum will swing again, for Trump is not Pinochet and never will be. Trump has given no indication that he would do anything meaningful to abolish democracy or eliminate the programs which create left-wing moral degeneracy. The left would return to its excesses as soon as it regains the Presidency, using state power to press its thumb on the scale even harder to try to ensure that nothing of the sort can happen again.
With the exception of cuckservative neocons who would count Clinton as one of their own, a Trump loss would further inflame the right and grow the reactionary movement. The right would increasingly come to realize that the democratic process as it currently operates is no longer in their interests, just as many Southerners did after the election of 1860. Due to demographic shifts, a Trumpian candidate will likely never have an easier path than in 2016, and the path is quite difficult now. While a Clinton victory is unlikely to result in a revolt before the 2020 election, it could produce other interesting results, such as renewed interest in the idea of nullification, an Article V convention, or even a serious effort by a state to secede.
Objections
Naturally, a plan to deliberately worsen conditions in one’s own nation will invite sharp criticism. Let us consider some of the most likely objections to such a plan. First, there is the objection that this will harm innocent people. This is not necessarily the case, depending upon how one defines innocence. To return to the Declaration of Independence,
“But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”
In this sense, the American people are in dereliction of their duty to throw off oppressors. While those who say that we get the government we deserve are victim blaming to some extent, they have a point in the sense that revolution is far more practical than most people think, yet the American people have not revolted against the state in a meaningful way since 1794. (The Civil War was a meaningful revolt, but it was not anti-state in nature; the Confederates sought to replace one government with another.) But even if we grant that this will harm innocents, it is not as though innocents will go unharmed otherwise. The state violently victimizes the innocent by its very nature, and other plans for ending the state will not prevent such victimization before the state is abolished. It is thus a question of degree and duration, much like that of ripping off a bandage rather than pulling at it slowly.
Second, there is the possibility that this plan will backfire. We may make conditions worse, but perhaps a sufficient number of people will never decide that they have had enough. This may occur because they blame those who voted us into a crisis and do not wish to fight alongside them, or because they simply lack the fortitude to revolt. This is a legitimate concern, but the possibility that people no longer have the fortitude to forcefully resist the state will be a concern regardless of the method used by libertarians.
Third, Clinton may also make leftists look for more radical methods, as she is likely to further upset the people who supported Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary. This is actually a feature in a plan to overload and collapse the system, as it pushes the establishment toward ruin even faster. And if the far-left and the far-right come to blows in America, the rightists have a clear advantage in manpower, firepower, and the concern to target one’s enemies without harming bystanders (although neither side is perfect in the latter regard).
Fourth, there is no guarantee that Clinton will be worse than Trump. But there is no guarantee of anything promised by politicians to voters; this is the very design of democratic statism, and one of its intractable problems. Both major-party candidates are known to be serial liars, but based on their track records both inside and outside of politics, it is reasonable to conclude that they will at least attempt to advance the agendas in their platforms.
Conclusion
If one understands that the problems with which the democratic state presents us are intractable in its presence, and that the best use of the ballot box is to vote for the worst candidate in order to hasten the demise of this broken system, then supporting Hillary Clinton for liberty makes a great deal of sense. The common objections to such a plan do not withstand scrutiny, as other methods of action or inaction have the same or worse potential shortcomings. The effects of her defeat would only slow the decline rather than reverse it, and the effects of her victory would galvanize the anti-state movement like no other result that can be achieved in 2016.
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