So our NRO friend Kevin Williamson asks conservatives to learn from the campaign of Gary Johnson.
It is true, the polls show, that almost as many young people support him as support Hillary Clinton. And more of them, by far, actually like him.
One fact worth pondering: The young like Johnson some, but like that loud old socialist Bernie Sanders more. We shouldn’t forget that, if Bernie were the Democratic nominee, this election would be over, partly because he would get Obama-like support among young voters.
I’ve said, more times than I can remember, that the young tend to be libertarian securitarians. They want to max out on their personal autonomy, but they are security-obsessed too. Libertarian securitarian may seem like an oxymoron, but students of Hobbes know there are ways of linking those two moods together into a coherent view of big — but limited — government. That’s a view with very little room for citizenship or religious liberty and even less for Second Amendment rights.
But one lesson of feeling the Bern is that the “libertarian securitarian” label doesn’t fit all that well in many cases. Sanders inspired the idealism of all those romantic enough to be looking, with Simon and Garfunkel, for America. He addressed the longing for justice lurking somewhere in every human soul. Now he’s way wrong on what justice is, but the other candidates didn’t seem to address the longing at all.
Consider this: In terms of coalitions, this election is pretty normal (with Trump having consolidated the support of the overwhelming majority of Republicans). That is disconcerting for those (such as me) who think of Trump as a ridiculous and highly risky choice. Still, Clinton should win easily, given that there is considerable bleeding in Clinton’s direction among educated women. Except: She’s not popular among the young. Why? What kids of voting age think they know about her, they learned from Bernie: She’s a tool of Wall Street and other sundry oligarchs. They don’t feel her idealism.
Many of the young are, some say, lifestyle libertarians. When they think freedom, they often think legalized marijuana and otherwise living as they please as autonomous beings. They don’t think Ayn Rand or even being entrepreneurs or job creators. So they don’t regard the implosion of the welfare state as a new birth of freedom. From their view, the differences between Johnson and Hillary or Bernie don’t seem all that pronounced. It is true they are repulsed by Trump.
Now there is a narrow category of well-off future members of our cognitive elite who do embrace Johnson’s combination of cultural liberalism — with its primo cannabis and Bill Weld’s urban casinos– and the rollback of much of the welfare state. But that’s a pretty small category. Many of those who you would think would be in this category are fine with Hillary Clinton too and will ultimately choose her in November.
Many real libertarians are repulsed by Johnson’s lifestyle emphasis, which doesn’t include a place for real religious liberty. Some old-fashioned libertarians are for libertarian means — pushing government way back — for non-libertarian ends, for defending huge safe spaces in which churches, families, and local communities can flourish as they please. It’s easy to understand why Evangelicals believe that Trump will do much more to defend their freedom than Johnson or Clinton.
Here’s something conservatives and Republicans should have already learned: The idea that the ticket for Republican success is to downplay the cultural issues and highlight tax cuts, deregulation, trimming entitlements, and all that has been discredited this year.
Here’s another discredited proposition: Our two parties are converging on a sensible cultural liberalism and on a qualified but real embrace of the benefits generated by the progress of capitalism — its technology and its free market.
The Democrats have lurched to the left on both the identity-politics and the economic fronts.
And mainstream conservative Republicanism has shrunk, having being outed as oligarchic by both the Democrats and Trump. The vacuum has been filled, in part, by Trumpian populism.
Trump, it turns out, has raised more from small donors by far than any other Republicans. The big donors who have allegedly driven the Republican agenda need to learn something from that.
To return to Gary Johnson: The real lesson is that he just hasn’t caught on, despite the fact that the two major candidates are hugely unpopular.
On the limits of Trump: It’s hard to say that anything about his populism is the future when the young think so little of him and his message.
A final lesson: Republicans, just maybe, should be thinking a bit about solidarity and subsidiarity as ways of living well with personal liberty. Catholic voters, studies vote, aren’t for either Trump or Johnson. And they are, the same studies show, the genuine swing voters.