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1. Gary Johnson’s Foreign Policy is Clueless and/or Terrifying – In deciding where to focus for purposes of casting a presidential vote, there is probably nothing I value more than having a clear set of principles for maintaining the U.S.’s post-World War II position as the nonpareil military hegemon atop the global order, keeping the homeland safe, and destroying the jihad. The reason for this is quite simple, actually: Article II of the U.S. Constitution unambiguously makes the Commander-in-Chief prerogative the exclusive aegis of the presidency, and alongside administrative and judicial nominations, there is nothing that the president more directly controls besides the amorphous bully pulpit and the concomitant ability to set the tone for the nation’s civic discourse. Only the presidency has the requisite “secrecy” and “dispatch” to lead the nation’s foreign affairs, as Alexander Hamilton famously argued in The Federalist No. 70—a view largely upheld over two-plus centuries’ worth of U.S. Supreme Court caselaw.
So where does Johnson stand on foreign policy and keeping the homeland safe? Well, it isn’t fully clear, from his campaign website. In public interviews, Johnson has generally been willing to defend the use of force when the U.S. is actually attacked—thus placing him squarely in line with literally every U.S. congressman and senator not named Barbara Lee—but has been woefully silent on confronting the jihadi threat. His website (rightly) questions moralistic nation-building and classical neoconservative interventionism, but he also explicitly condemns “dropping more bombs” and has otherwise criticized the drone war. Indeed, a vote for Gary Johnson might be the best thing that either the Ayatollah Khomenei or Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi could ever hope for.
Perhaps most stunningly, during the recent Libertarian Party presidential debate at the party’s convention, Gary Johnson was unable to definitively defend the morality of U.S. involvement in World War II.
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2. Johnson and Weld are Socially Liberal Republicans, not Principled Libertarians – Like most Millennials, I regularly encounter scores of people my age who describe their beliefs as “libertarian.” What I have noticed is that these folks tend to break down into two separate categories: (1) actual, Hayek/von Mises-reading, radically anarcho-capitalist/minarchist, oftentimes Ayn Rand-sycophanting principled libertarians; (2) those who self-describe as “socially liberal” but “economically conservative,” and who are actually usually better described as being just the sort of David Brooks-reading, Rush Limbaugh-disparaging Republicans who would be accepted by the “tolerant” progressives at a cocktail party in Manhattan’s Upper East Side. (I sometimes like to call this latter group, “liberstablishmentarian.”)
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3. The Right to Life Issue – Gary Johnson has proffered a jurisprudential belief in the legal wrongness of Roe v. Wade, but he and Bill Weld are still themselves vehement pro-choicers. The Libertarian Party had a chance to nominate (nominally) pro-life candidate Austin Petersen, but they went instead with Johnson, who touts the modern Democratic Party’s usual “pro-choice up until viability” party line.
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4. Complete Tone-Deafness on Illegal Immigration – Despite being avowedly #NeverTrump, I am very much a border hawk. I am also, furthermore, very much a Jew. So imagine my disgust when I saw that Bill Weld had analogized “deport ’em all,” anti-amnesty border hawkishness to the practices of…Nazi Germany. And to make matters worse, Gary Johnson defended him.
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So, yeah—I’m out on the Libertarian Party. As of now, without a post-David French #NeverTrump candidate, I’d say I am 90% planning to write in Ted Cruz’s name, and 10% planning to vote for the Constitution Party.
- Discussion
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At @resurgent, I explain why I will not vote for @GovGaryJohnson. https://t.co/Ofyqb2Pqm5
— Josh Hammer (@josh_hammer) June 6, 2016
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