Voting and Politics
On a bus from Boston to New York, a reporter learns a lot from voters. On NBC Evening News for Monday, November 4, 1974, Tom Pettit talks with voters in the northeast about the upcoming elections.
“I voted a long time ago, but I learned later on that it was useless.”
Rothbard responded in The Libertarian Forum in November 1974.
On the night before election, and again on the Today show on election morn. I appeared on nationwide NBC-TV, denouncing politics and declaring that I never vote. Despite the fact that the interview was a pure fluke, taken while minding my own business on a New Haven bus, that it was severely edited and truncated on TV to fit the anti-politics theme of mass sentiment as picked up by the reporters, I was immediately besieged by phone calls from libertarians throughout the country. Some LP people attacked me for not mentioning Tuccille and the LP, while the anti-politics forces hailed me for — at last — denouncing all politics and voting. Since I have been accused of inconsistency in being one of the few libertarians who favor both the Libertarian Party and Sy Leon’s League of Non-Voters, perhaps I can seize this occasion to make my views on the politics and voting question — I hope — crystal clear:
1. I am indeed opposed to the State and therefore to politics. If the State-and-politics disappeared tomorrow no one would be happier than myself.
2. The fewer people that vote in any election, therefore, the better. The fewer the votes, the greater the evident anti-politics sentiment throughout the country, and the greater the implicit repudiation of the entire political system. The fact that only 38% of the eligible voters cast their ballots in the 1974 election — the lowest voting percentage in three decades — is one of the most heartening results of the election. It is no coincidence that all politicians from President Ford on down begged the electorate to endorse the American Way by voting, voting for either party. (”We don’t care who you vote for, but for God’s sake VOTE!”) Think of how glorious it would be if the next President were elected by a popular vote of five to four for his opponent. The smaller the vote, the more ridiculous the claim for a “popular mandate” for the victor.
Unfortunately, politicians tend to interpret low voting as “apathy” instead of hostility to the political system (although that concept is now changing, pace the findings of NBC-TV that throughout the country people are disgusted with all politicians.) Hence the importance of the League of Non-Voters’ campaign to transform the alleged “apathy” of non-voters into an explicit repudiation of the political system.
3. I don’t vote, and haven’t done so in two decades, not because I believe voting itself to be immoral (as do the anti-LP libertarians), but because of the reasons in point No. 2, and because one person’s vote is of marginal importance, approaching zero. And for another and for me overriding reason: that the roll for compulsory jury slavery is taken from the voting lists. Compulsory jury duty differs only in degree, not in kind, from the slavery of conscription.
4. However, and unfortunately, neither politics nor voting are going to disappear overnight. Confronted with the fact that tens of millions of Americans are going to continue voting, what party should we support? Whom should we hope wins the elections? Does it make any difference who wins? I contend that it usually makes a great deal of difference. Jefferson was better than Hamilton, Jackson than Adams, Gladstone than Disraeli, Judge Parker than Teddy Roosevelt, etc. A fortiori, the Libertarian Party is infinitely better than any of the other contenders, for many important reasons: as an educational vehicle of unequalled force in influencing the public and the media; as a method of putting pressure on the other parties and on the government to curb their statist policies; and as an eventual conduit for rolling back the State. Of course, there are risks in the LP becoming corrupted if it becomes a major political force, but there are risks in any course of action or inaction. Life itself is a risk. The gripers who sit on the sidelines and carp about the LP have a responsibility, it seems to me, to come up with a course of action that will be at least as, if not more, effective than the LP in spreading the ideas and the influence of libertarianism. So far, the non-party ad hoc organizations have had only a minimal impact. The more impact that any tactical roads may have — be they the LP or any form of non-party organization — the better. This, the area of tactics, is one of the few cases where the pragmatic attitude is the proper one. Let a hundred libertarian flowers bloom. As far as I know, no one in the LP spends any time criticizing the various non-party individuals or organizations; why do the latter expend so much of their time criticizing the LP? Is it because the LP has been so successful?
