The Spoiler Effect
Libertarians face an uphill battle in electoral politics, but in the current winner take all environment, they are well suited to play the role of spoiler - holding bad politicians accountable.
Every election season, thousands of libertarians across the country feel the call to get involved and make a difference in their communities by running for office and getting engaged in politics. Few, if any, of them will win. The system is rigged against them, against any kind of meaningful change, as the establishment of the two major parties takes advantage of political and cultural division to strengthen their grip on the winner-take-all plurality elections that decide which brand of tyranny will lie to the American people for the duration of any given news cycle.
We’ve seen incumbents and media managers conspire to keep libertarians out of debates, uncovered in the local press, and ignored by supposedly non-partisan election groups. In rare instances, we’ve seen them elected and usually left as a powerless minority incapable of effecting real change. And recently, we’ve even seen them elected, and then become victims of state-based machinations to remove them from office before they can accomplish anything their constituents elected them to do.
So what are Libertarians to do?
In New Hampshire, libertarians participating in The Free State Project have taken the opportunity to infiltrate the two major parties to varying degrees of success. A strategy that’s been so successful, that the local political establishment has taken to conflating the localized libertarian movement and the leadership of the state Republican party as one and the same. The influence of libertarians on republican politics in the state has been dramatic and visible, and not all Republicans have been happy about it.
But regardless of the feelings, the establishment has towards these libertarian interlopers, the impact that free staters have had on local politics can’t be denied - from slashing school budgets, and nullifying federal gun laws, to expanding school choice, and reducing executive powers wholesale, the strategy of infiltration and subversion has pushed the Overton window of local politics in New Hampshire in a decidedly more libertarian direction.
But infiltration isn’t possible everywhere. In fact, it’s enabled in a unique way by the structure of New Hampshire’s legislature. With 400 state representatives for less than 1.5 million citizens, New Hampshire has the most representative legislative body in the world, and this makes it difficult for the establishment to exclude or restrict participation from within its ranks.
Georgia is another situation entirely. Unlike the extremely localized representation of New Hampshire politics, Georgia’s political parties are strong, centralized establishments, where candidates are not merely chosen in advance but are groomed by the party elite to seek election years in advance. There is little room for outsiders or infiltrators to influence the politics of the in-group.
So again, what are Libertarians to do?
Well, they can spoil the elections, foil the plans of the elite, and make enough of a wave in the general election as a third-party candidate to change the outcome of the final election, and upset the natural order that the establishment had planned for. Shane Hazel did exactly that with his last run for US Senate, drawing just enough votes away from the Republican incumbent, to force a run-off election that was eventually won by the Democratic challenger, not only upsetting the natural order of Georgia but shifting the balance of the United States Senate by the single vote needed to give a majority to the Democrats.
Did the Republicans learn their lesson? Will they shift towards more Libertarian policies in order to win back the votes they lost? Will they cater to the minority that now holds power as swing voters in what was previously thought to be a solidly red state? Well, Shane is running again, this time for Governor, will his candidacy change the fate of georgia’s executive seat? Will republicans suffer for empowering the tyranny of the COVID regime? We will find out in November.
Subversive #74: “The Spoiler” feat. Shane Hazel
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Summary
If you can’t win, make your enemy lose? Is spoiling elections a viable and worthwhile strategy for Libertarians? Shane Hazel has already spoiled one election and handed the United States Senate’s balance to the democrats. Is he going to do it again in Georgia? Is it worth it?
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