Attribute to L. Neil Smith's The Libertarian Enterprise

As I look back objectively on what I laughingly call my career, I can see with increasing clarity that it has consisted largely of offering my fellow libertarians advice, based, as detective Archie Goodwin (or was it Nero Wolfe?) is wont to say, on my intelligence, guided by experience … and watching them ignore it, even—or especially—when circumstances prove me right.

I have been standing up in public for something like half a century, as an advocate of individual liberty. I have run for political office twice. It could be argued—I could argue—that I know what I'm doing. Yet here I am again, casting pearls before porcupines. I know better than to make promises, but I'm going to attempt to make this the very last time.

Consider the current electoral situation: American voters are expected to choose between the National Used Car Salesman and a lying, murderous harridan. It may offend you if I offer the following observation (I don't really give a rusty fuck—hat tip to Rod Steiger) but it is the truth. There is nothing much wrong with Donald Trump that isn't wrong with every other practicing politician in history, although relentless propaganda from the mass media, dominated by hard-core collectivists (nah—communists), would have us believe otherwise.

And, pretty much, we do.

Hillary Clinton, on the other (appropriately gloved) hand is also a specimen we have seen before. All through the 1960s I was constantly astonished (I was younger then, and a bit naive) that the worse crimes Harlem Congressman Adam Clayton Powell was accused of, and the more of them there happened to be, the better his constituents seemed to like him. Likewise, Washington D.C. Mayor Marion Berry even went to prison for his evil ways—and was promptly re-elected when he got out. There seemed to be nothing that these miscreants could do that would harm their popularity and political viability.

The former Worst Lady and United States Senator (which I think is insult enough) seems to have “culturally appropriated” much of the style once exhibited by Powell and Berry, and with similar results. No matter how much Julian Assange and Wikileaks know about her and share with us, no matter how many FBI investigators yearn to put her and her serial rapist husband away for good, she appears to be, as the saying goes, made of teflon. In a peculiar way, the candidacy of the Donald explains this counter-intuitive phenomenon.

It is remarkable to me how few “older, wiser heads” seem to understand that Trump is greatly loved by his most ardent advocates for exactly what the other, politically correct, side regards as “gaffes”. And yet it isn't as if he didn't warn us; he started his campaign by declaring war on political correctness. If you've lived your whole life, as my generation has, under the grimy thumb of Northeastern liberals and the round-heeled news-floozies and gentlemen of the evening who enthusiastically service them, it is very hard not to treasure him—as we ought to treasure former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin—for the many lowlives, bottom-feeders, and scumsuckers he outrages and offends. Their shortened life expectancies, owing to their Donald-heightened blood pressure, is worth the price of admission alone, and various radio and other media pundits who keep nagging him to change his ways should shut the hell up.

But here's the thing: Adam Clayton Powell and Marion Berry (and to a lesser extent, punks like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton) are beloved by those they claim to represent for their very crookedness—for “sticking it to the man”. (Never mind that those who actually pay the high price for their blatant wickedness are almost uniformly black.) It is exactly the same with Hillary Clinton. Almost every policy she advocates, for example, in the name of women or minorities or the poor, actually does them more harm than good. A single example should suffice: gun control is the vilest disservice ever done to women and blacks, rendering them helpless in the face of tyranny and brutality; likewise, it is the greatest subsidy that anyone can grant to common street thugs, whose prospective victims are rendered defenseless by it.

But still, the very individuals damaged most by Clinton and her corporate socialist policies are the most loyal to her because what she proposes would help them get “even” with those—white, middle- and upper-class Americans—they have been relentlessly indoctrinated for six decades to hate and resent, usually for slights allegedly done by the whites' 19th century ancestors to the ancestors of the blacks. Be reminded that it was Democrats who maintained segregation and discrimination in the South for a hundred years, and that no living white American ever owned black slaves and no living black American was ever owned by anybody but himself.

Which, naturally, brings us to the Libertarian Party, home of absolute self-ownership, and its Presidential candidate, former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson. I'm sure I'm not the only columnist to observe that this might have been a banner year for the LP. We were obviously the only honest and decent party running. Voters hated the other two candidates so badly that they were ready to plump for Johnson in unprecedented numbers—except for one or two little things.

The first that stands out is his piss-poor choice of a running- mate, former Massachusetts Governor William Weld, who soils our soapbox by speaking publicly for his own, discredited, obsolete, cryptoClintonian, vestigially Progressive policies that violate the platform and Statement of Principles, not to mention the very political and moral spirit of the Libertarian Party. Weld must go. Johnson has no choice about that. And in the most humiliating and punitive way possible to serve as an example. People have labored their whole lives to give the LP a reputation for straight-up principled radicalism. This campaign will be written about by people like them—like me—and if Johnson doesn't want to go down in history as the most simple-minded, unlibertarian, and destructive candidate (short of drug-thug Bob Barr) the LP has ever fielded, he will listen up.

Now.

Once we have Johnson's undivided attention, he must be taught something himself, about courtesy, and humility. Almost anyone who's been in the party 20 years or more knows more about what it stands for than he does—or he would not, for example, be advocating new “fair” ways to steal what they earn. And if he wanted to learn what the LP is really all about—why it was created in the first place, for example, to fight parasites like Weld—he would humbly ask those who could tell him.

Operators are standing by.

I will not be holding my breath.