Do you *have* to pick a side in politics? Or, was MLK Jr. a Democrat or a Republican?

Reason's Matt Welch and I debate The Bulwark's Tim Miller and Sarah Longwell about partisanship, effectiveness, and social-political-economic change in the age of Trump.

Last week, I participated in a new series of debates that Reason magazine will be rolling out over the next year. Dubbed ‘Reason Versus,’ each one features two Reason staffers or closely allied writers mixing it up with two analogous folks from a different publication, website, think tank, or organization. The first of these took place at the great Howard Theater in Washington, D.C. and pitted my Reason colleague and occasional coauthor

Matt Welch

(also of

The Fifth Column

) and me against

The Bulwark

’s

Tim Miller

and

Sarah Longwell

. Another Reason colleague,

Peter Suderman

, moderated.

The proposition, which Matt and I defended, was ‘You don’t have to pick a side in politics.’ Scroll down now to watch video and/or listen to audio via Spotify, Apple, or SoundCloud.

I interpreted the proposition to be: You don’t have to pick a team in politics. My main argument, one that Matt and I elaborated in detail in our 2011/2012 book The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What’s Wrong with America, is that the most meaningful social, economic, and political change comes about not as the result of partisan, electoral politics but from outside of it. The parties exist to be pressured from without, not served from within. And that one need not be a registered Republican or Democrat to influence how society changes, even in terms of a specific laws and policies. In my opening remarks, I invoke a Boomer Trilogy of Martin Luther King, Jr., Gloria Steinem, and Bob Dylan (none of whom were Boomers themselves, I hasten to add), to explore this idea. Each has massively changed American and even world culture, and they had their greatest influence outside of traditional party politics (indeed, as I suggest, Steinem reduced her influence when in defending Bill Clinton in the ‘90s she reduced feminism to a mere special interest section of a larger Democratic Party coalition). Matt stressed the ‘brain rot’ that shows up almost immediately when someone picks a team. IIRC, he asks whether Elon Musk has gotten smarter or wise since signing up for Team Trump.

Midway through the debate, which also offers a spirited audience Q&A section (props to the attendee who insisted that I betrayed my lower-middle-class roots simply by being a pro-capitalism libertarian!), we were asked to use a prop to underscore our cases. I showed this 45-second short clip from a legendary 2004 episode of South Park, in which the kids’ school must vote on a new mascot:

I used this not to be glib, but to make the simple point that we are not going to get better candidates and better policies simply by backing whomever the major parties toss up, which is exactly what happened this past election on both sides. The result of extreme partisanship—with self-declared Republicans and Democrats backing their candidate in the 90 percent-plus range—is mostly a procession of terrible, awful candidates who cannot sway the large plurality of self-declared independents to their sides and maintain stable majorities that reflect the country’s beliefs and preferences.

As Stanford’s Morris P. Fiorina told me in 2020 (and in several earlier interviews), we are in a modern ‘era of no-decision.’ The previous one came betwen 1874 and 1894, as the coalitions that once powered the Democrats and Republicans no longer mapped well onto existing conditions. As a result, national politics seesawed back and forth. Nowadays, says Fiorina, each party is in the thrall of extremists who eke out a win in a given presidential or midterm election and then surrender it in two, four, or six years not in spite of pushing their agenda but because they implement their agenda, which is typically unpopular. This happened in Bush’s second term, and again with Obama and Trump, where even originally sizable majorities flipped quickly and decisively against each party. This process started with Bill Clinton, who won in 1992 with just 43 percent of the vote but a solid governing majority in both house of Congress that he coughed in the ‘94 midterms.

In case you don’t know, The Bulwark was launched in 2019 by former Dan Quayle chief of staff and GOP operative Bill Kristol, Sarah Longwell, and others, after The Weekly Standard was nuked by its owner, Phil Anschutz. It is arguably the purest emanation of Never Trump Republicanism, even if many of its contributors no longer consider themselves members of the GOP anymore (or at least as long as Trump and his epigones hold the reins). Tim and Sarah very much fit that bill and while I very much enjoyed debating them, I’m left puzzled by their insistence that Matt and I—and all libertarians—are really part of the right and, even more puzzlingly, that to not be actively anti-Trump is indistinguishable from being objectively pro-Trump. I have never voted for Trump and have spent much of the past eight years or so criticizing him and his policies (including in person, right before the election; see below!), but somehow I’m a Trumpist?

It was an Oxford-style debate, meaning the audience is polled at the start and the close of arguments and the winner is the team that moves more people to its side. Dramatic!

Here’s the video, followed by various podcast versions (note: you can also watch video via Spotify).

Spotify:

Apple:

SoundCloud:

Let me know what you think in the discussion or via messages.

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