A COUPLE of Libertarian candidates were in The Gazette office last week, looking for some publicity. They are on a hard road.
Third-party candidates don’t get much respect. A strong majority of people seem to think that the Republicans and Democrats have pretty much cornered the market on acceptable political expression. By that reasoning, third parties — Libertarian, Green, Christian Falangist, Natural Law, American Nazi or dozens of others — are nothing more than refuges for cranks and nuts. Some parties more than others, of course.
Every party, including the Republicans and the Democrats, has some true believers whose vision has narrowed to a single issue, leaving the rest of the world blurred and distorted.
Neither of the big parties has a monopoly on truth or reason — they just have monopolies on political contributions and a lock on a large number of habitual voters.
Third parties have a tough time in elections because they are under-funded and under-organized, not necessarily because they have bad ideas. In 1890, the Populist Party won control of the Kansas Legislature and elected a U.S. senator. Two years later, the party went national and its candidate for president received more than a million votes.
The Populist Party soon fell apart because of internal disputes and external opposition, but it did have a winning run. A few years later, Theodore Roosevelt adopted some of the Populist positions when he started the progressive movement in the Republican Party.
Could the Libertarians have as much influence on mainstream American politics as the Populists had? What do Libertarians believe in, anyway?
According to the Kansas Libertarian Party’s Web site, “The Libertarian Party is dedicated to a free-market economy, civil liberties, personal freedoms and responsibilities and a foreign policy of non-intervention, peace and free trade.”
The party, with nothing to lose but one more election, has a refreshing, freewheeling combativeness. On the same Web site, Ray Davis, editor of The Free Kansan, throws down the gauntlet to politics as usual:
In an era when the two major political parties argue over how many warrantless wiretaps can dance on the words of the Fourth Amendment and when you are absolutely free to express your displeasure about it in a free-speech zone three miles away from the nearest elected official, Libertarians offer a welcome change.
Now that’s political discourse with style and bite.
Does that mean the Libertarians are on the path to power?
No, but given the current political turmoil, some of their ideas may migrate into the mainstream in the next few years.