The Libertarian party seemed to have a once-in-a-generation opportunity this cycle. The public hates both the major-party nominees, and Gary Johnson, a former governor of New Mexico, seemed to fill a real niche.
But he’s blowing it. He’s had a series of gaffes in recent weeks, especially over foreign policy. More broadly, Johnson’s campaign lacks any coherent theme to attract disaffected partisans from both sides. And his only real shot at viability was to make it into the debates, but his polling numbers were too low for the minimum threshold.
It is easy to blame Johnson for these failures, and no doubt he bears a healthy portion of the responsibility. But there is a tendency to focus too intently on the personalities in politics, rather than the rules and institutions that govern their behavior. And in the case of the Libertarian party, there are serious roadblocks to its success.
As institutions, political parties serve a lot of functions in our system of government. They help organize the legislature. They give voters cues about what candidates stand for. They narrow and (hopefully!) improve the choices on the ballot by nominating candidates.
Parties also structure political ambition. This is where the Libertarian party runs into trouble.
Think of it this way. You’re a young, smart, libertarian-leaning kid, just out of college. You love politics so much that you want to make a career out of it. Which party are you going to join? If you’re serious about politics as a profession, you won’t join the Libertarians. Because they never win elections, there is no career to be had. Instead, you need to join one of the two major parties.
Alexander Hamilton knew how important ambition was in politics. Government, he argued, could not function based on public spiritedness alone. It had to somehow yoke the passions of men—for glory, power, and riches—to the public interest. At the Constitutional Convention, he argued that one of the problems under the Articles of Confederation was that the capacity to do this belonged wholly to the states, so nobody was attracted to federal service:
On another occasion, Hamilton asserted: “We must take man as we find him, and if we expect him to serve the public, must interest his passions in doing so. A reliance on pure patriotism had been the source of many of our errors.”
This is as true today as it was in 1787. Just consider…this year’s Libertarian nominee, Gary Johnson! For most of his professional career, Johnson was in the Republican party, serving as governor of New Mexico. It was only when he launched his quixotic bid for the presidency in 2012 that he joined the Libertarians—and even that was after he ran for the GOP nomination that cycle.
And who did Johnson beat out for the Libertarian nomination in 2016? John McAfee, the gadfly inventor of the antivirus software, and Austin Peterson, a 35-year-old with no experience in politics. Similarly, William Weld—the former Republican governor of Massachusetts who has not held an elective office for almost twenty years—beat out a list of no-names for the vice-presidential nomination. Neither faced competition from anybody we would think of as presidential.
Moreover, Johnson is not running a presidential campaign in the sense that we normally think of one. As of August 31, he had raised less than $8 million and had less than $2.5 million on hand. This is yet another manifestation of the travails of third parties. They don’t have good fundraising networks to tap into—who gives money to a hopeless cause?—and anyway, the best fundraisers are already involved in Republican or Democratic politics. On the disbursement side, the Johnson campaign spent about $3.7 million in August, about $2.5 million of which went for advertising. That leaves a very minimal budget for doing all the things a major presidential campaign needs to do—polling, focus grouping, policy development, etc. And the Libertarian party does not have a good network of political professionals to make the most of the Johnson’s shoestring budget, anyway.
So back to Johnson’s gaffes and lack of an overarching theme. Is it a sign that he is flaky? Sure, but I’d reckon it is also because the Libertarian party lacks the money and the talent necessary to school him on policy or help him develop a compelling, big-picture reason for his candidacy.
As Hamilton said, “pure patriotism” is not a sufficient motivator for most people to commit themselves to public service. They usually want for themselves—an office, a title, a place of honor. Those dispensations belong exclusively to the Republican and Democratic parties, leaving the Libertarian party a home for principled objectors to the two-party system, but bereft of the capacity to do anything about it.
