Kerry or Badnarik?

[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]

FERRIS: Are you going to be as impractical as that?
REARDEN: The evaluation of an action as"practical," Dr. Ferris, depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
FERRIS: Haven't you always placed your self-interest above all else?
REARDEN: That is what I am doing right now.

      -- Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

While I hear a lot about"undecided voters" on the news, I don't personally know anybody who is undecided between Bush and Kerry. I do, however, know quite a few people who are undecided between Kerry and Badnarik. I certainly can't blame anybody who ends up choosing Kerry as a means to unseating the most dangerous president of my lifetime. But as the last grains of pre-electoral sand are running out, I think it's worth explaining once more why I'm voting for Badnarik rather than Kerry.

Two recent posts (see here and here) from Robert Bidinotto offer a convenient foil. Bidinotto argues that those who support Michael Badnarik (or, as Bidinotto mistakenly calls him,"John" Badnarik) are forgetting that"the 'perfect' is the enemy of the 'good'." (Whenever anybody invokes that phrase, some compromise of principle always seems to be in the offing.)

Bidonotto aims to be making a case for Bush over Badnarik, rather than for Kerry over Badnarik. That’s because Bidinotto assumes, first, that a Bush victory would promote libertarian values better than would a Kerry victory, and second, that a vote for Badnarik"is a de facto vote for Kerry." I think the first assumption is clearly false; if we look at results rather than rhetoric, Bush comes out as objectively far more anti-liberty than Kerry. I'm not sure the second is true either; certainly I would vote for Kerry over Bush if I had to choose between the two, and this is likewise true of most of the Badnarik supporters I know -- so it's not obvious that most Badnarik votes would otherwise have gone to Bush. (It's true, though, that Badnarik, bless him, is specifically targeting Republican voters in an attempt to hurt Bush.)

But Bidinotto's argument is worth addressing apart from these two assumptions. For if his argument, with those assumptions, makes a case for supporting Bush over Badnarik, then the same argument, without those assumptions, makes a case for supporting Kerry over Badnarik. Thus Bidinotto's argument counts, objectively, as an argument on behalf of Kerry; those of us who plan to vote Libertarian tomorrow thus need a reply to Bidinotto's argument in order to justify voting for Badnarik rather than Kerry.

Bidinotto's argument, briefly, is this: When faced with a choice between voting for a lesser evil (whether you think that's Bush or Kerry) who can win, or endangering that candidate's chances by voting for a principled libertarian (which describes Badnarik, whatever his personal eccentricities) who cannot win, Bidinotto thinks that the principled choice is to vote for the lesser evil, whereas to risk hurting the lesser-evil candidate by supporting the one who can't win is moral fanaticism. For Bidinotto,"the difference between a man of principle and a fanatic .... comes down to whether you primarily view moral principles as means to your ends (values), or whether you primarily view moral principles as ends in themselves." Badnarik supporters, he suggests, are moral fanatics who" cast purely symbolic votes for Principle," thereby expressing their"moral commitment to the platonic Ideal" -- but insofar as this choice helps to get the worse of the two viable candidates elected, it counts as"an objective sell-out of our lives, our security and all we hold dear, for the sake of a subjective feeling of smug self-righteousness." Those who hold principles, not as ends in themselves, but as means to achieving values in real life as far as possible, will vote for the least bad viable candidate.

This argument doesn't sway me, for two reasons. First, as an Aristotelean I cannot accept Bidinotto's dichotomy between principles as means and principles as ends. And I'm surprised that Bidinotto accepts it; for he himself has previously argued (see his article Survive or Flourish? A Reconciliation) that principles adopted as means to maintaining our lives become constitutive parts of the kind of life we aim to maintain. Hence on Bidinotto's own neo-Aristotelean view, the principled person cannot regard her principles merely as strategies for advancing some independently specifiable mode of life, but must regard adherence to those principles as part of the mode of life to be advanced. (The quotation from Rand at the top of this post arguably expresses the same idea; Bidinotto is in effect condemning Badnarik supporters as impractical, and the proper reply is Rearden's: that depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.)

Second, even if one were to adopt a purely strategic attitude toward one's principles, Bidinotto's conclusion still does not follow. The strategic point of acting on principle is to think long-range, rather than sacrificing significant longterm gain for the sake of some slight but immediate advantage. As I wrote in a piece titled Thinking Beyond the Next Election: A Strategy for Victory:

In playing chess, a sure way to lose is to spend your first few moves capturing as many of the opponent's pieces as possible. It’s much more important to let those juicy-looking pieces go than to allow them to distract you from your main mission of building a strong presence at the center of the board.

I think the same lesson applies in politics. In crafting our strategy we need to plan several elections ahead, not just one. ... If we plan ahead only as far as the next election, then it's absolutely true that a vote for a candidate who loses is an ineffective vote.

But if we think ahead four years, or eight years, or twelve years, then a vote can do more than just elect a candidate. A vote can help to build a vote total which, even if it is a losing vote total, can, if it's big enough, draw more attention and support to the losing candidate and his party or cause.

This has two beneficial effects: First, it increases the good guys' chance of winning in the future. Second, it forces the major candidates to move in our direction in order to avoid precisely that.

Bidinotto considers this sort of argument, but only to dismiss it by asking:"Does anyone believe that Ross Perot had any enduring impact on the major parties, or on ensuing debates about economic policy? And will anyone be talking about Ralph Nader's views two weeks from now?"

Well, who cares what anybody is talking about two weeks from now? That’s short-term thinking again. What matters is what gets talked about four years from now; 2000 could be dismissed as a fluke, but if Nader makes the Democrats lose two presidential races in a row, I find it hard to believe that they won't scramble their hardest to win back Nader voters in 2008. Indeed, fear of Nader may already have influenced the Democratic nomination process by making more conservative candidates like Lieberman, Gephardt, and Clarke too risky. (As for Perot, he sacrificed much of the influence he could have had through his own erratic behaviour, and through not running a second time.)

There is historical precedent for the strategy I favour. As David Friedman points out in his book The Machinery of Freedom:

I believe the answer is that we should learn from our enemies; we should imitate the strategy of the Socialist party of 60 years ago. Its presidential vote never reached a million, but it may have been the most successful political party in American history. It never gained control of anything larger than the city of Milwaukee but it succeeded in enacting into law virtually every economic proposal in its 1928 platform -- a list of radical proposals ranging from minimum wages to social security.

And it did this precisely by forcing the Democrats to move leftward in order to keep voters away from the Socialists. No doubt there were, in every election year, left-wingers who told the Socialists"This election is too important! You must support the Democratic candidate to prevent the even-less-socialistic Republican from getting in." If the Socialists had listened, their influence would have been zero; there would have been nowhere for socialistically inclined voters to go, and so the Democratic Party would have gone on taking such voters' support for granted and never thrown them so much as a bone.

My argument is not intended as a criticism of those who think, not unreasonably, that the Prince President is so egregiously horrific that this election really is a case where preventing his re-election immediately is worth the setback to any longterm LP strategy (especially if they have doubts about the LP's longterm viability anyway). These are trade-offs that each individual must judge for herself. (I would note, however, that those who do not live in a swing state still have no good reason to vote for a major-party candidate.) It's also not intended as a criticism of those who are so disgusted with the electoral process that they prefer not to vote at all. While I don't buy the argument that voting is inherently immoral (see my counter-argument here), nor the argument that voting is pointless unless a single vote is likely to determine the outcome (I believe in an imperfect duty to contribute to public goods, so the fact that something would be good if lots of people did it is a reason, albeit a defeasible one, to do it), there is nothing inherently obligatory about voting (since the duty to contribute to public goods is imperfect, we can pick and choose which public goods we contribute to -- which is also why I'm not a vegetarian, but that's another story) and the whole process is pretty distasteful. My argument aims merely to explain my reasons for supporting Badnarik, and to show that Bidinotto's arguments against those reasons do not succeed. (And Bidinotto should be relieved that I'm not persuaded by his arguments, since if I were, I would be voting for Kerry.)

One final topic: Bidinotto also condemns the Libertarian Party for promoting"a philosophical package-deal that links free-market economics with absolutely [loathsome], Leftist positions on other vital issues, such as criminal justice and foreign policy -- positions which the L. P. now insists are integral aspects of 'libertarianism.'" I won't take the time now to defend those particular positions (I've defended the anti-punishment position here and here, and the military non-interventionist position passim), but I do want to make two points.

First, there is nothing specifically"Leftist" (in Bidinotto’s sense) about these positions, which were being defended by libertarians and classical liberals long before being borrowed (and mangled) by statist socialists. William Graham Sumner, for example, analysed the connection between imperialism and plutocracy in such articles as"War" and"The Conquest of the United States by Spain"; does Bidinotto think Sumner was a"Leftist"? (For that matter, as Chris Sciabarra reminds us, Ayn Rand adopted an anti-interventionist position with regard to Korea, Vietnam, and both World Wars. Was she a"Leftist"?)

Second, the LP does not enforce any"party line" with regard to these positions. They may be in the LP Platform (actually the anti-punishment position isn't, strictly speaking), but Libertarian candidates have never been, and are not now, bound by the Platform; Badnarik's own running mate, for example, is (regrettably) a pro-interventionist and a supporter of the"war on terror."