Gary Johnson 2016, what went wrong?

[ShahOfIran1979]

Looking back to 2016, Gary Johnson was truly an interesting presidential candidate, and had a chance at one point to challenge Trump and Hillary, at least in my opinion. So what went wrong with the campaign? Was it really the fact that Gary did not know of Aleppo, a city in Syria? What if he won?

 

[YellowIsACoolColor]

No one likes Libertarian policies

 

[Dick Lickieta]

Third Parties can never win in America as they just split the vote of either the Democrats or Republicans and rarely enough of both to actually win any seats in congress let alone a presidential election. Moreover third parties only ever make an impact in American elections as a result of a extremely charismatic leader having founded that party right before the election and usually fizzle out shortly after maybe existing for one or two more election cycles with third parties that miraculously last decades like the Libertarians, Greens and DSA never get more then a handful of votes.

 

[Hunter Hearst Helmsley]

They did him dirty with the allepo thing. Basically another Dean scream moment. Total nothingburger they ran into the ground to mock him.

 

[BoomerSperg1922]

1) Correctly seen as the 'dude, weed lmao' candidate.
2) Picked a VP that hates guns as a LIBERTARIAN, and he himself threw a gift replica of George Washington's pistol given to him by a guy challenging him for the libertarian nomination into the trash, making him a mega cunt.

The syria gotcha question was tame in comparison to these two fuckups.

 

[Althalus]

His name was "Gary", enough said.

 

[JohnnyG]

Every 4 years, disillusioned conservative-voting libertarians and libertarian-leaning republicans who are fed up with the UniParty and its NeoCon/NeoLib politicians who get into office and don't act like conservatives.

And every 4 years the Lolbertarian party rejects every conservative/normal candidate in favour of some degenerate "left libertarian" whose focus is more troonery or legalizing narcotics or something else that can only make the country worse and disgust anyone normal.

 

[XL xQgg?QcQCaTYDMjqoDnYpG]

The real question is why anyone thinks liberty can come from any presidential campaign at all
Politics is the business of ruling. A so-called "Libertarian" president would still preside over taxation, regulation, central banking, foreign wars, and the rest of the machinery that makes the state what it is. At best he might promise to soften it, but softer coercion is still coercion. So the result is statism, not libertarianism.
So what went wrong with Johnson is the same thing that always goes wrong when "libertarians" run for office. They try to comply with a system that's designed to institutionalize aggression and end up legitimizing the very structure they should be opposing. The problem is in the premise

 

[Taser Confetti]

The modern Libertarian movement consists of

• Drug users
• Age of consent debate enjoyers
• SovCit/1A Auditor/Agorists who are angry about the last time they broke the law and faced consequences
• Polycules involved in the Free State Project

 

[Peaches the Wonder Cat]

His VP nominee Bill Weld endorsed Hillary. At least pretend you are running for office.

And against two candidates with low popularity numbers, they still lost big, even running two two-term governors on the ticket.

That marked the end of the party. Since then they nominated Jo Jorgensen (who I think campaigned from home because of the covid, obeying government lockdown orders like a true libertarian) and Chase Oliver who is a big faggot.

 

[The Hardest R]

Gary Bongson got 3.3% of the popular vote, which was the best turnout the libertarians ever received. The libertarians will never get that kind of turnout again.

Realistically Gary never stood a chance. The conventional logic was that libertarians are Republicans plus weed but that was never actually true. Most libertarian policies are typically either horrific or retarded. Most libertardians are cranks who just want to be left alone, those who take the age of consent and drug laws super seriously, or undiagnosed schizophrenics who are one bad day away from humping trees in broad daylight. 2016 was a rare exception where Republicans who didn’t want to vote for either major party hung out as a protest vote, which is where clowns like Bill Weld come in.

A casualty of The Great Meme War of 2015-2016.

 

[Großmann]

And every 4 years the Lolbertarian party rejects every conservative/normal candidate in favour of some degenerate "left libertarian" whose focus is more troonery or legalizing narcotics or something else that can only make the country worse and disgust anyone normal.

The modern Libertarian movement consists of

• Drug users
• Age of consent debate enjoyers
• SovCit/1A Auditor/Agorists who are angry about the last time they broke the law and faced consequences
• Polycules involved in the Free State Project

You can’t be surprised that a Libertarian is not conservative. The Libertarian Party did a good job during the Ron Paul era of branding themselves as a Republican Party alternative, but the reality is that they want less regulation and rule of law, which means allowing for LGBT culture to flourish, drugs to proliferate, and any other manner of “BuT hOw DoEs ThIs AfFeCt YoU pErSoNaLlY?” type of garbage.

A so-called "Libertarian" president would still preside over taxation, regulation, central banking, foreign wars, and the rest of the machinery that makes the state what it is. At best he might promise to soften it, but softer coercion is still coercion. So the result is statism, not libertarianism.
So what went wrong with Johnson is the same thing that always goes wrong when "libertarians" run for office. They try to comply with a system that's designed to institutionalize aggression and end up legitimizing the very structure they should be opposing.

This. Libertarianism inevitably runs counter to the Constitution of the United States. The Constitution has some libertarian ideas, but the country was not founded to be a libertarian society. If the Libertarian Party has serious hopes of governing one day, they will have to understand this and compromise.

 

[JohnnyG]

You can’t be surprised that a Libertarian is not conservative.

Sure I can, because at one point many were the Dale Gribble / Ron Swanson type: recognized government's overreach relative to its size & scope during the Founders' time, just a bit naive about nuking all laws on morality (because they themselves were generally moral, and assumed the country was still full of generally moral people).

When Trump offered the Lolberts the same thing he offered Tulsi & RFK ("we have common interests, support me and you'll get some of what you want and more influence than you've ever had"), and they said nah, we'd rather focus on molestering fetishists and be completely shut out of power, it was the ultimate "principled loser" decision...which conservatives have a history of.

 

[Taser Confetti]

they will have to understand this and compromise.

I don't remember which convention it was but they booed a candidate off stage because he said he was okay with seatbelt laws and heroin not being legal. They'd rather call the majority of the US "tyrants" and "bootlickers" than try to have an appealing platform. When you realize they're shitlibs who like crypto and gold their behavior starts to make more sense.

 

[XL xQgg?QcQCaTYDMjqoDnYpG]

This. Libertarianism inevitably runs counter to the Constitution of the United States. The Constitution has some libertarian ideas, but the country was not founded to be a libertarian society. If the Libertarian Party has serious hopes of governing one day, they will have to understand this and compromise.

The Constitution is not an ethical standard, it's a political document. If it authorizes taxation, regulation, and war, then by definition it authorizes aggression. Ethics derived from reality can't be "compromised" with a text that sanctifies the opposite. That's why liberty can't be voted into being, and why running libertarians on a statist charter always collapses back into statism

 

[Soso]

Third parties are often seen as a joke in the United States. Sure we had Perot and Wallace who got significant amounts of votes. For the latter though, it was during a very chaotic election and the race riots during the 1960s played a huge role in Wallace's appeal. But modern third parties are seen as a way to throw away your vote as a protest green for democrats and libertarians for republicans, and wind up making states closer during elections when both candidates are unpopular. Also many Americans don't want Libertarian policies, and won't want to vote for someone who has no chance.

 

[Großmann]

The Constitution is not an ethical standard, it's a political document.

Correct. I never said it was an ethical standard, though.

If it authorizes taxation, regulation, and war, then by definition it authorizes aggression.

I’ve seen your anarcho-capitalist thread, so I’ll put it like this: The USA is a giant coalition of private properties. The US Constitution is the contract between all of those properties on how everyone will interact with each other. To sustain the coalition and the resources required to keep it going logistically, the property owners agree on how to fund those resources (taxes). To defend their property or to ensure fair access to resources outside of their property, the coalition also outlines how they will use violence. The people that don’t like this either go off-grid, are homeless, or leave the country. Just like in anarcho-capitalism, people that don’t like the rules laid on by a property owners can just leave if they don’t want to deal with it.

Ethics derived from reality can't be "compromised" with a text that sanctifies the opposite. That's why liberty can't be voted into being, and why running libertarians on a statist charter always collapses back into statism

There is and has never been the kind of society you are promoting.

 

[XL xQgg?QcQCaTYDMjqoDnYpG]

The US Constitution is the contract between all of those properties on how everyone will interact with each other.

A contract requires consent and exit. Taxation enforced at gunpoint isn't consent, and "leave or be homeless" isn't exit. Calling that a coalition of private property is like calling a mugging a business transaction, or a rape victim a girlfriend. Whether it has existed before doesn't change whether it's ethical.

 

[Großmann]

A contract requires consent and exit. Taxation enforced at gunpoint isn't consent, and "leave or be homeless" isn't exit. Calling that a coalition of private property is like calling a mugging a business transaction, or a rape victim a girlfriend. Whether it has existed before doesn't change whether it's ethical.

Is the issue you have with a governing body the fact that people are born into it and technically never made the choice to be a citizen of where they happened to be born or is your issue different?

 

[XL xQgg?QcQCaTYDMjqoDnYpG]

Is the issue you have with a governing body the fact that people are born into it and technically never made the choice to be a citizen of where they happened to be born or is your issue different?

The issue isn't just birth. Even if you moved there voluntarily, being taxed and regulated under threat of force without a way to refuse still isn't consent. The absence of choice at the start only makes the coercion more obvious, but the core problem is ongoing aggression dressed up as a contract