Upvote for ‘lil’lemmy 😄

I’m also asking this partially just as a chance to mention a lot of the ‘discourse’ around the Libertarian Party isn’t fully true anymore.

Basically they fucking imploded and broke apart after the midterms. The Paleo Branch(Hoppeans, Rothbardians, Paleolibertarians, Paleoconservatives, Ex-Tea Party) attempted a takeover of the party in 2022 which ended up failing. The Center Randian and Minarchist and Old White Libertarians opposed them and allied with the Left-Leaning Proudhon, Green Libertarian, and Hard Centrist faction. Most of the hard right group left the party and defected to Trump (That’s why polling averages dropped from 2% usual to 0.7%). What’s left has been infighting between the more classically Libertarian and right leaning side who wanted to back RFK Jr. and Chase’s guys and the more strongly left leaning faction. Chase pulled the party together internally, the state level branches defecting to RFK were reigned in, but externally it’s lead to more voter bleed.

So they’ve lost more than half their guys including most of the hard right and tea party expats.

Like many libertarians I think he fails to understand the world does not work according to his ideals. That is to say, the problems they seek to solve are very complicated and their proposals are, quite frankly, too simplistic and reductionist to be effective.

I like his stance on ranked-choice voting, abortion (though a publicly funded option should always be available), police reform, and (generally) drugs. I think I agree with him on immigration and homelessness, but I would need to dive deeper to know for sure.

However, while I am a huge supporter of private industry, Climate Change must be combated with government regulation; the free market alone will not stop or mitigate it. History has also proven that unregulated private industry can destroy the environment. (Chevron needs to be restored.)

His stance on guns is also overly simplistic and I think we need better gun regulation. At a certain point, everyone having a right to a gun (regardless of their mental state) is endangering their fellow citizens right to live without fear. We require licenses to drive our cars, so why do we not require licenses to own a gun? I support background checks and gun registries at the very least.

His stance to abolish the U.S. Department of Education is also absolutely braindead. Already, we have problems with states like Texas deliberately misrepresenting history and presenting false narratives. There are also movements in states such as Oklahoma to impose a “Christian Education” on public schools. If anything, I think the Department of Education should be more centralized and states should have less individual control over their curriculums; the quality of one’s education in the United States should not depend on which state they happen to be raised in.

Lastly, I do not like his isolationist stance on foreign policy. This isn’t the 19th century and the world is global now; if the United States were to cut off aid and withdraw from global affairs, it would open up a massive power vacuum that would only be filled by China and Russia. I don’t need to elaborate on how bad this would be for the United States and our allies.

As for this election, I think he should do the moral thing, which is to drop out and endorse Harris. To be clear, I fully expect this to never happen, but he knows there’s no way he can win the Presidency, and if Trump wins the government will only become more authoritarian which is the opposite of what libertarians want. This is an election between someone who can really help the people of the United States (Harris) and someone who has explicitly stated a desire to end democracy in the US (Trump); I don’t think this is the election cycle third parties should be playing games with.