To the best of my recollection, I haven’t voted since 2004. I’d been a reliable LP voter since 1988, but the LP’s nomination of Bob Barr and Wayne Allyn Root in 2008 soured me on the LP; and though the LP has had better candidates since (particularly in 2020 with Jo Jorgensen), by the time those campaigns came around I was no longer enamoured of electoral politics and was committed to non-electoral strategies for political and social change. (I even have a video on my YouTube channel from 2020 that blathers on for a mind-numbing 45 minutes about my non-voting policy; I’m not sure why I needed more than ten.) I expect I’ll most likely continue to be a non-voter in future elections. But I’m planning to vote in this one – though perhaps not for the reasons you may imagine.
Unlike many non-voter libertarians, I don’t buy the argument that it doesn’t make sense to vote because your individual vote won’t make a difference to the result. I believe in an imperfect duty to contribute to public goods, and voting can be a way of doing that. Still, public goods compete with each other, and refusing to vote is also a way of contributing to a public good, and one that I regard as generally more important in the long run.
Now what are the pros and cons of the various voting choices in the present election? The various salient options (salient for me; ykmv) are voting for Harris (to block Trump), voting for Oliver, and not voting.
Harris is of course very bad: a pro-cop, pro-war, pro-drug-war, pro-Gaza-genocide, pro-deportation authoritarian – but wrapped in slogans and rhetoric suggesting sweet reasonableness (much like Obama). Still, Trump is much much much worse on all of those points, as well as on many others where Harris isn’t so bad (such as abortion). So one could reasonably vote for Harris as a way of making a contribution to Trump’s defeat.
On the other hand, there are drawbacks to voting for Harris. There’s a popular meme on the internet right now to the effect that voting for a candidate is a chess move, not a love letter. But of course it’s both; it’s a chess move that one can’t make without automatically sending a love letter too. To cash the metaphor: votes for Harris will be (mis)interpreted as support for her policies. I don’t think that argument’s a dealbreaker; unlike some libertarian non-voters, I don’t think that voting for a candidate counts as authorising the candidate’s policies. (I’m with Spooner on that one.) And one can counteract the undesired message with explicit messages to the contrary. But it’s a consideration.
In any case, the result it makes most sense to support if one could actually bring it about may not be the one it makes most sense to support otherwise. If there were a button such that, if I pushed it, Harris would be guaranteed to win, and if I did not push it, Trump would be guaranteed to win, then I would hold my nose and push the button – because Trump is the most dangerous and ideologically repulsive major-party candidate in my lifetime. (And much the same applies to Vance.) But alas, there is no such button; Trump will win Alabama, and most likely win it in a landslide, regardless of whether or how I vote. So the case for my casting an extremely distasteful vote for fascist-lite Harris, while not nonexistent, is also not that strong.
Voting to boost the popularity of a particular perspective makes more sense than voting to get a particular candidate elected, since getting a candidate elected is an all-or-nothing matter, whereas boosting a particular perspective is a matter of degree. That’s also an advantage of the non-voting approach: promoting alternative, non-state solutions to social and political problems. Of course refusal to vote will be (mis)interpreted as apathy; but again, one can counteract that interpretation with explicit messages to the contrary. In terms of promoting a particular ideological perspective, one blog post arguably has more impact than a thousand votes.
But what I’m actually planning to do this year is cast a vote for Oliver. Not to boost the visibility of the LP; I cared about that in the past, but don’t really care about it now. But instead to push back against the takeover of the Party by Mises Caucus fascists. Even if I’m no longer involved with the Party, I don’t like seeing reactionaries take over libertarian organisations. Oliver’s winning the nomination was dismaying to the Mises Caucus hierarchy, many of whom have openly supported Trump. LP chair Angela McArdle, who is supposed to support the Party’s nominee, has said publicly that she would support Oliver only for “president of Clownworld.”
Chase Oliver is by no means my ideal candidate. He’s no FMAC in economics, for example. But he is pro-choice, pro-immigrant, pro-LGBT (and in fact gay himself), anti-police-abuse, anti-death-penalty, and anti-war (and specifically opposes the genocide in Gaza and calls it by that name) – all positions that ought to be no-brainers to associate with the LP, but regrettably are not. His stances on some of those issues are more moderate than I’d like, but still pretty good. Every vote for Oliver represents support for the sane elements in the LP and a repudiation of those who are trying to turn the Party into a right-wing cesspool. It’s essentially a protest vote against the Mises Caucus (though of course against the major-party duopoly as well).
“But Roderick,” I hear you expostulate (and yes, I can literally hear you; I have microphones implanted where you’ll never find them), “stopping Trump (as a short-term goal) and promoting anti-electoral strategies (as a long-term goal) are surely each more important, to you, than affecting the internal composition of the LP!”
Yes, certainly they are. But the importance of a result does not necessarily translate directly into the importance of acting to promote that result. Precisely because the number of votes for Oliver will be so few, every vote for him has a bigger impact percentagewise – not toward the all-or-nothing (and anyway unachievable) goal of getting him elected, but rather toward the incremental goal of promoting the good guys against the bad guys within the LP. By contrast, the impact I could make either by voting for Harris or by not voting is percentagewise much smaller. (Plus a vote for Oliver does reduce Trump’s percentage win in Alabama, for whatever message value that may have.)
So I plan to vote for Chase Oliver on Tuesday. Probably. And then take a shower afterward, because voting, yuck. Not planning to go back to a habit of voting though, because again, voting, yuck.
Policy of Truth 
* LP = Libertarian Party
* FMAC = free-market anti-capitalist
* imperfect duty = a duty that can be fulfilled in different ways or at different times, where the holder of the duty is free to choose the manner of fulfillment they prefer
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See also Irfan’s case for Jill Stein here:
https://irfankhawajaphilosopher.com/2024/11/02/a-vote-for-harris-is-a-vote-for-genocide/
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Though I voted for Stein (and am in favor of people’s voting for Stein), strictly speaking, I don’t see my post as a case for Stein. I see it as an attempt to clarify the price of voting for Harris.
It’s one thing (however debatable) for someone to say: “I agree that Harris has presided over a genocide, but I’ll accept that as the cost of protecting abortion and/or saving the country from outright dictatorship.” Another possibility is to deny (however implausibly) that what is happening in Gaza is a genocide and then vote for Harris. I reject both arguments, but at least the people involved are (somehow) acknowledging that events in Gaza are relevant to their decision to vote.
Neither approach is commendable, but neither is as bad as the widespread belief in Democratic circles that Gaza (or Palestine generally) has literally no bearing on a decision to vote for Harris. In this universe, it’s as though Gaza and the Harris campaign were somehow operating in parallel and unrelated worlds. Gaza is a faraway place bearing no connection to the United States, and Harris is the leader of the Leader of the Free World, which bears no connection to Israel, Palestine, or any violence taking place there.
Most (not all) of the people around me are Harris-Walz supporters. These people tend to have very, very inflated beliefs about their moral and intellectual superiority to everyone else. But the main driver of those beliefs is just outright, flat-out evasion. Confronted with any fact they find unpalatable, they just pretend that it doesn’t exist. It’s not a one-off here and there. It’s a consistent, adamant, truculent, militant ethos of denial, particularly when it comes to either Ukraine or Israel/Palestine. Oppose support for Ukraine, and you’re a “shill for Putin,” or a “tankie.” Oppose the Israeli genocide, and you get accusations of “blood libel” and “anti-Semitism.” These slogans are obviously just shields against reality.
Harris may be better than Trump all things considered, but there is a fundamental overlap in the mental attitudes of their supporters. When it comes to Gaza, they are basically equivalent. The Trump supporters adamantly want genocide. I’m convinced that many Harris supporters covertly want genocide but do a better job of hiding it than their opposite numbers. As far as Gaza is concerned, what we have is just a good cop/bad cop routine or an express train/local train distinction.
By the way, I’ve pinned your post to the top of the blog. Will keep it there until the 6th.
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I’ve often wondered how people who share fundamentally the same moral intuitions (such as you and I do, Roderick) disagree so strongly on certain points. My wonderment applies to libertarians and all species of politico-philosophic beliefs. When I debated vaccine mandates recently with a friend who identifies as a “left-leaning progressive liberal,” it struck me as strange that we could so radically disagree while sharing perhaps 99% of the same moral intuitions.
My attempt to explain this phenomenon led to the formulation of what I call “The Nature X Fallacy.” Criticisms of that title and the concept itself are, of course, welcome. J
Nature X Fallacy: The assumption that ideal behaviors or values derived from observing individuals or nature – or one’s own imagination – can and should be directly applied to human society without considering the complexities and unique contexts of human social structures. This fallacy overlooks the differences in environmental, cultural, and biological factors that shape behavior and the feasibility of implementing such ideals in real-world situations.
In other words, one assumes that a specific trait, behavior, or social structure observed in nature or derived from one’s imagination – considered ideal or superior within its own context – can and should be directly applied as a model for human or animal behavior or beliefs.
The Nature X Fallacy also seems to hinge on the distinction between prescriptive ideals (how things should be) and the complexities of the real world (how things are). For instance, while cooperative behaviors may benefit some species (like Bonobos), these behaviors don’t directly translate to other species with different survival pressures, like chimpanzees or even humans, whose societies and contexts are vastly different. I’m seeking to address the flawed logic of assuming that ideals or traits we value can (or should) be universally applied, often by cherry-picking examples from nature to argue that a given behavior is inherently “better” or should be a template for society. This fallacy disregards differences in context, species-specific needs, or even the structural constraints that shape behaviors.
This fallacy might also relate to the “naturalistic fallacy,” which is the belief that what is “natural” is inherently good or preferable and is perhaps a species of The Ontological Argument (what we can imagine is real). However, it goes beyond that by suggesting that once we identify what we think is ideal in nature, we can somehow extract that ideal and impose it elsewhere—without fully considering the broader implications or whether it’s truly applicable.
The intent of the Nature X Fallacy is not to rule out any theoretical ideal in advance but rather to question our assumptions that what we see as desirable is based on observations of others or our own philosophic constructions. That is, such assumptions should be critically analyzed with an eye toward appreciating the reality of differing contexts – and that analogy does not equal identity.
That we can construct an analogy – say, between the natures/behaviors of Bonobos and Chimpanzees – does not guarantee that they possess the same natures overall or that their behaviors are interchangeable.
Much like the Ontological Argument, which seeks to establish the existence of God by reasoning that a “perfect being” must exist because existence is a necessary component of perfection, NXF operates on the premise that we may move with impunity from an abstract ideal to an assumed reality.
How do we determine if the Nature X Fallacy is being committed? I offer no original insights here. In making that determination, we use the same recognized logic and evidential consultation methods. The fallacy is intended to introduce a cautionary tale to comparisons between idealizations and observations of reality.
That groundwork brusquely laid, I turn to a few issues we disagree on: LGBTQ+, open borders, wokeness, feminism, and racism. I (of course) believe: people should be 1) allowed to move freely over borders (as an anarchist libertarian, I don’t believe borders or countries/should even exist as government-controlled geographic areas); 2) everyone should be free to practice whatever sexuality they wish (with the usual NIOF principles in place); 3) women should have the same rights as men, and 4) racism in any form is bad.
With the Nature X Fallacy in mind, I’ll offer a very nutshell version of why I don’t believe supporting these four issues benefits humanity. Let’s start with “open borders.” While I believe ideally that borders should not exist and that people should be able to travel freely (while respecting private property rights), I don’t believe that government subsidization of these things is compatible with libertarianism. People’s travel to the United States (for example) is now heavily subsidized by government grants to NGOs (see James O’Keefe’s graphic illustration of that in his LINE IN THE SAND documentary), and then, upon arrival, immigrants’ hosing, education, medical care, food are subsidized. They allow free plane tickets and money.
Now, we and many others have debated these points ad infinitum, and I doubt either of us is interested in pursuing that here. My central point is that the idealization of free immigration is not being realized in our current reality. What we believe about borders should reflect that and other realities – such as some immigrants being criminals and even vanguards of hostile governments. Ideally, we shouldn’t have governments – not to mention some of these governments intending us harm – but in reality, we do.
In reality, most people who advocate feminism and “wokeism” are authoritarian to the core, which sometimes leads to authoritarian measures abridging free speech and the hiring and/or firing of employees. Now, I’m certain that you, Roderick, and many (if not most) libertarians share an idealized version of feminism and wokeism, which I probably would think is fine (judging from our previous debates and your comments elsewhere), but in reality, most feminists favor imposing their agenda on individuals and organizations by force, as do Woke advocates.
I could apply my Nature X Fallacy to countless current issues, and I will if you want to have that debate (which I doubt you do), but for now, my purpose is to introduce the concept to you and let it percolate in your brain.
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