Portland people: Tomorrow, October 11th, I’m excited to host a book chat with my longtime internet pal Evan Rail, talking about his new book The Absinthe Forger: A True Story of Deception, Betrayal, and the World’s Most Dangerous Spirit. We’ll be at Belmont Books at 7:00 pm followed by drinks at the great new spot Bar Loon. Come join us and enjoy a taste of the green fairy yourself!
From the official book description:
An astonishing true crime story about an eccentric grifter who blew up the lucrative black market for vintage bottles of the legendary drink of artistic renegades, absinthe . . .
Thought to be hallucinogenic and banned globally for a century, absinthe is once again legal and popular. Yet it is still associated with bohemian lifestyles, just as when it was the favorite drink of avant-gardists like Toulouse-Lautrec and Van Gogh and Baudelaire. And today, when vintage, pre-ban bottles are discovered, they can sell for exorbitant prices to private collectors. But such discoveries are increasingly rare.
Which is why the absinthe demimonde of rich collectors was electrified when a mysterious bon vivant claimed to be in possession of a collection of precious, pre-ban bottles.
Is his secret tranche of 100-year-old bottles real? And just who is the shadowy person selling them? And what about rumors of another secret cache, hidden away in an Italian palazzo?
Journalist Evan Rail sets out to discover the truth about the enigmatic dealer and the secret stashes. Along the way, he drinks with absintheurs frantically chasing down the pre-bans, visits modern distillers who have seen their status rise from criminal bootleggers to sought-after celebrities, and relates the legendary history of absinthe, from its birth in Switzerland through its coming of age in France, and on to its modern revival.
Just shy of a year ago, I decided I was done with X. (RIP Twitter, which used to be my favorite social network.) I don’t remember what specifically pushed me over the edge to quitting, but I’m sure it had something to do with Elon Musk. Nothing he’s done in the time since has made me regret leaving.
Back in December, I wrote a post suggesting that a resolution to “never tweet” would be a good start to 2024. From that post:
It’s possible to use the site without endorsing this garbage, but this garbage is very much the face of the site now. And I’m hardly one to judge, since it took me long enough to leave, but it’s baffling to me that so many of you are still content implicitly saying, “Follow me on X, because this is the platform I choose as the place to share my work, exchange ideas, and present myself to the public.”
Over the past year, a lot of friends and other people I enjoy interacting with online have made the switch to Bluesky, which now numbers more than 10 million users and is genuinely more innovative than X. Others are unfortunately still on the old platform. There are undeniably some costs to switching, but I’m nonetheless surprised at what they’re willing to put up with. (Quick disclosure: I am personally working on a different social network app — see the end of this post — but it’s a very different format than Twitter/X/various clones.)
Lately I find myself thinking of decent people still using X in much the same way I think of supposedly principled Republicans still voting for Trump. X and the GOP are on parallel trajectories. Both institutions are notionally continuous but fundamentally changed for the worse; both have seen their racist and crankish fringes rise to the top; both have been taken over and degraded by repulsively megalomaniacal men.
Both also continue to be supported by people whom, respectfully, I believe really ought to know better. Trump notoriously bragged that he could shoot someone in the middle of 5th Avenue and not lose any voters. An equivalent boast for Musk would be making flagrantly bigoted posts on X and not losing users. Except the latter is a thing that’s actually happening, and while Musk has driven a lot of people (and advertisers) away, plenty remain.
The metaphor that’s often used by critics to describe X is that of a Nazi bar. As in, if you frequent a bar that welcomes everyone with open arms, including Nazis, then you’re effectively in a Nazi bar and ought to leave. I think the usefulness of that metaphor is complicated in debates about content moderation, which have all kinds of nuances around speech vs. reach, protocols vs. platforms, etc. But the metaphor is a little more useful if you’re talking about the owner of a platform rather than its users. In that narrower sense, X is like a bar where the owner is always onsite and holding court, which lately includes recommending a Tucker Carlson interview with a Hitler apologist, joking about why no one is assassinating the liberal candidates for president and VP, and ranting about how immigrants are destroying American society, stealing elections, and eating people’s pets. Which, when you put it that way, does sound a bit like what you’d hear in a Nazi bar.
Let’s drop the Nazi bar metaphor and be literal. Musk is the owner of a large and influential social media platform. He has nearly 200 million followers on X, he is X’s main character by a longshot, and he uses X to boost his presence and his favored political views. And those views are, to be blunt, pretty damn racist.
A few examples of his recent posts, starting with this account from Thomas Chatterton Williams, who notes that “the pervasiveness and normalization of what was, until very recently, niche and stigmatized bigotry has been astonishing to witness”:
With his nearly 200 million followers—a sizable portion of whom amount to cultists—he is responsible for tuning X’s digital culture into a gratuitously repulsive frequency. Astonishingly active and available on the platform that he so bombastically controls, he not only enables bad actors; he also personally praises and promotes them.
Just a week before the presidential debate, Musk wrote, “Very interesting. Worth watching,” about a conversation between Tucker Carlson and the amateur historian and Nazi sympathizer Darryl Cooper. In that talk, Cooper claimed that Hitler had killed millions of Jews unintentionally, and that Winston Churchill was the real villain of the Second World War. Musk has since deleted the post, but such an endorsement from X’s apex user makes the spread of anti-Semitism not just likely but inevitable.
shared with his nearly 200 million followers on X that “Trump must win” to “preserve freedom and meritocracy in America”
insinuated that it was suspicious that “no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala,” adding a thinking-face emoji. He subsequently deleted the post and argued that it was a joke that had been well received in private. “Turns out jokes are WAY less funny if people don’t know the context and the delivery is plain text,” he wrote in a follow-up on X.
This past weekend, Musk posted, “Very few Americans realize that, if Trump is NOT elected, this will be the last election. Far from being a threat to democracy, he is the only way to save it!” He want on to explain a version of the Great Replacement theory, accusing Democrats of flying illegal immigrants into swing states to “fast-track” them into citizenship and create one-party rule. As Philip Bump writes in the Washington Post, none of this makes sense.
This is all bad enough coming from the site’s owner and most-followed user, but it’s also worth looking into how it seeps into the experience of everyone else. As noted above, racism is now rampant in replies and quote-posts. It’s also financially rewarded thanks to X’s ad revenue sharing program, which paid users can opt into. This pays posters on the basis of ads displayed in replies to their posts. Predictably, this creates perverse incentives to make incendiary statements. I was interested to see these figures from one of the site’s more notorious racists, whose payments peaked over a period in which he was focused on derogatorily posting about Haitians:
In other words, Musk has created a machine that turns racist shitposts into about $1,000/month, and you keep it running by using the app.
When Musk bought Twitter, some people speculated that he would bring in positive innovations and make it a haven for free speech. (If you believe that Musk is a genuine champion of unfettered speech, I have a bridge to sell you.) Instead he has driven away thoughtful users, created a toxic environment, and generally raised the acceptability of racism in American discourse. X is now best understood as Musk’s personal propaganda machine for his anti-woke and anti-immigrant political views with a vestigial, decaying social network attached.
So, what the hell are you still doing there? I know some of you are doing good work and feel like it’s important to continue sharing it on X, and I think reasonable people can come to different conclusions about how that moral calculus shakes out. It’s not easy being a journalist or writer and we’re all trying to get our work out there; if you specialize in, say, more fact-based immigration policy, you might make a case that it’s worth being on X to counter the dominant narrative. On the other hand, if you’re just using the app to kill time and mess around online (this is most of you), you should absolutely quit and go elsewhere, and I don’t think that’s remotely a hard call at this point.
But even if you are on X as a writer or public intellectual, I would encourage you to think critically about whether being active there is really the best use of your time and whether it’s really making a positive difference. My impression from checking in occasionally is that many of you are drawn into responding to (and thereby elevating) cranks, bigots, and morons. I’m sure you can come up with some justification for remaining on the platform, but at least consider the possibility that X has become a fundamentally racist and anti-immigrant enterprise that is making America worse, and that the best decision for you is to no longer be part of it.
Will that involve some loss of influence? Yeah, possibly, but if sacrificing a bit of influence is the cost of no longer associating with racists, that can still be the right thing to do. Lots of smart people with large followings on X have walked away without regret.
On an anecdotal level, I’ve also noticed that X no longer even functions as a useful way of getting my writing into the world. I stopped promoting my own pieces there a long time ago, but other accounts do link to them. Some combination of the algorithm favoring paid users or disfavoring posts with external links has made their posts irrelevant. For example, Slate has 1.6 million followers on X. Slate’s postslinking to my most recent article there have fewer than 8,000 views each. Not clicks, views! Another respected journalist with 37,000 followers also linked to my article; his post got 820 views. These are terrible rates, but they’re pretty typical if you’re not paying to play. In the good old days of Twitter, posts from prominent accounts could bring my work to a much larger audience, but on algorithmically opaque X they’re often completely worthless.
That the broader conversation on X is functionally indistinguishable, both in its content and the character of many of its participants, from Truth Social interacts in troubling ways with the perception, by those still-active journalists and thought leaders, that X remains what Twitter once was: a more or less representative picture of the wider discourse.
First, there’s an internal, deleterious impact. Who you associate with matters, not just because the people you associate with is a reflection of your own character, but also because the people you associate with shape your character. We cultivate our ethical perspective in collaboration with others, and if those we collaborate with are unethical, we’ll shift in that direction, too. Thus if our thought leadership is mostly interacting with the kind of hard-right and profoundly immoral perspectives of the community Elon Musk has cultivated and promoted, and is reflected in electoral politics by people like JD Vance, then this is bad for those thought leaders, because to the extent it makes them increasingly unethical, in both values and the way they see the world, it makes their own lives worse. You can’t lead a good life as a bad person.
So again, what are you still doing there? Is it just inertia? X is never going back to what Twitter used to be and it’s most likely to keep getting worse. The near-future of social networks is smaller, more fragmented communities rather than a global town square. You can lament that, but you can also embrace it and find excitement in building new communities. And it’s easier to build your network when you join as an early adopter than as a latecomer. I hope you’ll give it a shot, because while I do want to read your work and see your photos and joke around with you online, I don’t want to meet you at a racist hellsite to do it.
A brief pitch for Bluesky
The social network that most closely replicates the feel of the good days of Twitter is, for me, Bluesky. There are now enough users on the site, including journalists and academics, to make it a great place for finding good things to read, keeping up with breaking news, and making jokes. It’s thoroughly replaced X for me, and at any given time a dip into my Bluesky timeline is much more worthwhile than what I find on X. I’ve also built up my network there such that when I post or write something, it has a chance of being picked up by much more influential accounts and actually seen by a lot of people. The total userbase is still smaller and less diverse than old Twitter, but the quality of engagement and discourse is leaps and bounds better than what’s currently on X.
As I mentioned above, Bluesky is also more innovative than X, not just for its open protocol but for rolling out new features too. One of these is “starter packs,” a smart feature that makes it easier to get started on the site by offering users a way to make lists of recommended people to follow. You can find mine here, so if you’re new to Bluesky or haven’t checked in for a while, it’ll give you a solid list of people to enliven your feed.
An even briefer pitch for Seabird
Unlike a lot of new social networks, Seabird (the platform I’m working on) is not anything like a Twitter clone. It offers a chronological feed but it’s designed exclusively for sharing links, encouraging discourse through blog posts, articles, and writing rather than debates on social media. We’re wrapping up work on a brand new build before we shift our focus to expanding our userbase, but we are welcoming new users. It’s the other platform where I’m most active these days and we have a small but enthusiastic community. Sign up here if you’re curious to check it out.
Thankfully, courting the “We Vape, We Vote” movement was insufficient to return Trump to the White House. Vapers are a relatively small demographic—estimates vary, but it’s probably around 15 million Americans—and restrictions on nicotine and tobacco use are broadly popular. It may be the case, however, that among adults who vape, the threat of e-cigarette bans is highly motivating, and that even a few thousand votes in the right places could end up mattering to an extraordinary degree. That was the theory that swayed Trump in 2019, and it’s likely his motivation for appealing to vapers now. The fact that Trump is suddenly paying attention to the niche issue of flavored e-cigs is a sign that the campaign is desperate for any potential wedge against Harris.
Still, Democrats should take the concerns and needs of vapers more seriously. On the merits, Democrats have been getting tobacco harm reduction consistently wrong for years, calling for bans on lower-risk nicotine products that are helping drive rates of smoking to historic lows. Taking a less prohibitionist stance toward reduced-risk nicotine products would be both a smarter approach to public health policy and consistent with Democrats’ recent efforts to brand themselves as the party of personal freedom.
This thing is a beast. When I assembled the review model, I just had to laugh because it was such an absurdly large oven to have sitting on the floor of my one-bedroom apartment. I could neither cook with it there, where I lack the outdoor space, nor fit it into my sedan to take it somewhere else. Unless your name is “The Mountain,” carrying this anywhere is realistically a two-person job. Testing the oven required loading it into the back of my girlfriend’s SUV and hauling it around Portland to a series of backyard pizza gatherings.
This was originally published as a section of my Substack newsletter on July 16, 2021. Since I’ve migrated off Substack and the topic of how libertarians should approach politics in the context of an increasingly authoritarian and anti-democratic threat from the right is still (unfortunately) very relevant, I’m reposting it here.
Didn’t you used to be a libertarian?
I’ve gathered from conversations and online interactions that it’s worth addressing how my politics have (and haven’t) changed in recent years. Most of you know that I’ve been active in the libertarian movement for coming on two decades, starting with college summer seminars hosted by the Institute for Humane Studies and leading to an internship and full-time job in the media department at the Cato Institute, freelancing for Reason (which I still do), and other looser affiliations. Then two years ago I voted for a straight Democratic ticket for the first time, last year I marched in Black Lives Matter protests and endorsed Joe Biden, and currently I’m working to build up our local chapter of the Neoliberal Project.
This might seem like a significant shift, especially if you’re used to thinking of libertarians as naturally allied with conservatives against the big government left. That brand of fusionism has been on the ropes for years and broke down further with Trump taking over the GOP. Personally speaking, this isn’t just or even primarily about specific policy positions, although Republican policies under Trump gave libertarians plenty to be upset about. My general views on policy haven’t actually changed that much; what has changed is my sense of what to emphasize and whom to ally with.
To think about this visually, let’s bring out our old friend the Nolan chart. [At top.] Libertarians correctly argue that their ideology doesn’t have a place on the typical left-right spectrum of politics. They’re too radical to be described as centrist, but they don’t fit typical conceptions of the left or right either. The Nolan chart plots ideologies along two dimensions instead of one, personal liberty (“socially liberal”) and economic liberty (“fiscally conservative”). This is far from perfect, but it’s popular as a rough approximation of what sets libertarians apart as a political faction while flatteringly putting them at the top of the chart.
A lot of people encounter a version of this chart on the “World’s Smallest Political Quiz” from the libertarian website Advocates for Self-Government. Just for fun, I retook it to see where I fall on it now. It still puts me in the libertarian box but tilted toward the left, with a 100% score on personal liberties and 60% on economic liberties.
I don’t quite agree with this but it’s not bad for a ten-question quiz. It understates my support for economic liberty by only asking questions that code as conservative (privatizing Social Security, replacing welfare with private charity, etc.). It doesn’t ask about the freedom to build multifamily housing, hire immigrants, or trade with foreigners, to name three highly relevant economic liberty issues on which the contemporary right has become increasingly hostile.
Quizzes like this one also oversimplify by not weighting the importance of the questions. Even if I were a more hardcore libertarian on issues related to the welfare state, I wouldn’t rate them as a higher priority than, for example, ending the drug war and its concomitant violent policing, arbitrary asset forfeiture, and excessive incarceration. The gradual legalization of cannabis is one of the most important liberty-enhancing political victories of the past two decades; another is the expansion of marriage rights to same-sex couples. There have been massive shifts on both issues and the left deserves more credit for leading the way. You can make a case that conservatives have defended freedom by opposing excesses of the left, but it’s hard to credit them with actively expanding liberty to any similar degree.
For all those reasons, the left-leaning libertarian corner of the Nolan chart makes sense as a description of where I’d put my political views: accepting of a basic social safety net but committed to free markets and personal liberties. And while my positions on some particular policies have changed over time, as a general description that’s also how I would have described my outlook for most of my adult life.
Something important has changed, however. It’s just not about specific policies or suites of policy preferences, so it doesn’t show up in charts or quizzes built around the things government should or shouldn’t do. It’s more about the need to support the basic political institutions that make democracy possible. This is basic stuff like voting rights, respecting the outcome of elections, preserving the rule of law, and the peaceful transition of power. We might imagine this as a third dimension on the chart mapping a democratic versus autocratic axis, though that gets hard to visualize. This is all tremendously important, but since we live in a mature democracy in which we’re all expected to agree on these things, it typically stays invisibly in the background of our political debates.
The rise of Trump, his attempts to overturn the 2020 election, and his continued grip on the GOP highlight the peril of taking respect for democracy for granted. Trump is bad not just because his bad policies outnumbered his good ones. It’s a mistake to even think about politics in those terms right now. Doing so distracts from a much more fundamental problem: the intellectual and civic decline of the American political right and the Republican party.
In a contest between candidates like Bush and Gore or Romney and Obama, a libertarian could sensibly tally up their policy objectives, compare them to our own, and perhaps come to a weak preference for the lesser evil […] This is no way to approach the difference between Trump and Biden. To paraphrase some old campaign wisdom, “It’s not the policy, stupid.” Trump’s unique malignance endangers the country in ways that set him completely apart from any modern major party contender for the presidency.
I’ve never been enthusiastic about major party presidential candidates, but I also never had reason to doubt their commitment to preserving America as a democratic republic and to honoring the results of our elections. That’s not the case with Trump, who was signaling well before November 2020 that if the vote didn’t go his way, he would use every tool at his disposal to cast doubt on the result and possibly overturn it.
This isn’t a minor failing of a politician, like being caught in an affair or having the wrong position on steel tariffs, that you might sensibly forgive because he’s ultimately on your side. It’s an insidious rejection of hard-won American norms and institutions that shouldn’t be tolerated by any party or movement and it’s dangerous to let it go unchecked.
The crux of my case for Biden was to support him as the pro-institutional candidate and deliver a margin of victory decisive enough to prevent a potential legitimacy crisis. This worked out in the sense that our institutions ultimately held and the winner of the election was installed in the White House. But we fell short in other ways: the margin was narrower than expected, a violent mob assaulted the Capitol with the aim of preventing certification of Biden’s win, and the lie that the election was “stolen” metastasized throughout the Republican base.
I think it’s a mistake to dismiss this as sour grapes of no lasting consequence. The sheer size of the constituency buying into the stolen election narrative (or pretending to for personal gain) is too large to ignore and extends into Congress itself. Our institutions are only as strong as the people who operate within them to uphold free and fair elections and respect the rule of law. We avoided constitutional crisis largely thanks to officials and politicians who put devotion to principles over party, but if they are replaced with partisan hacks, the legitimacy of future elections could be even more tenuous.
There are a few nightmare scenarios for how that could conceivably play out in the 2024 presidential election, such as Republicans in Congress refusing to certify results from a narrowly Democratic swing state or state legislatures sending electors who contradict the will of their voters. I’m not saying this is likely; it probably won’t happen. The point is that even strong institutions are vulnerable if one side is truly committed to refusing to accept defeat and trashing our constitutional order.
You shouldn’t ignore catastrophic risks like that even if you think they’re improbable. And the way you insure against such improbable risks is by not tolerating aspiring autocrats even when they do nice things like deregulate the economy or cut your taxes.
Where does that leave libertarians? I wish I could say the answer is obvious and that we have been united in alarm against the autocratic turn of the American right from the beginning, but that hasn’t quite been the case. Some libertarians downplayed the danger, treated Trump as if he were within the normal bounds of American politics, or worse, enthusiastically welcomed him for shaking up the status quo and owning the libs. (I’ll cop to having been somewhat oblivious myself. I underestimated the possibility of Trump actually winning in 2016 and assumed the GOP would be forced to regroup after the embarrassing spectacle of running him as a candidate.)
Of course, other libertarians were right all along, including the late and greatly-missed Steve Horwitz. In a post from January 2017 that’s worth reading in full, he diagnosed a few reasons why some libertarians were getting Trump wrong. Two worth noting:
1. Too many libertarians are too focused on economics and are less concerned with other parts of the liberal order, especially the formal and informal political institutions that are equally necessary for a free society. […]
2. Too many libertarians hate the left more than they love liberty.
Steve was also clear about how libertarians should relate to the political left given the dangers emanating from the right:
Now, more than ever, libertarians need good-hearted, open-minded people on the left as allies in an attempt to preserve the things we agree on. We should never let our frustrations with the left become more important than preserving the liberal order.
So far, I’ve been intentionally avoiding the word “liberal” because Americans use it in such a peculiar way. In most of the world liberals are people who broadly support personal freedoms, open markets, and democratic institutions. In the United States the word came to be a synonym for “left,” with “more liberal” meaning “more left” no matter how illiberal the extreme left is in actuality. Because of that, we end up resorting to clunkier constructions for describing our political factions. A conservative like George Will is a “classical liberal;” a Democrat like Bill Clinton was a “neoliberal;” Justin Amash and Gary Johnson are “libertarian.” These groups certainly aren’t identical, but by abusing the word liberal we obscure their shared foundations.
Interestingly, “liberal” is becoming something of an epithet among the progressive, socialist, or far left too, as in this sign I came across recently in Portland:
If the word “liberal” is up for grabs, we might as well take it.
Personally, this isn’t a renunciation of the libertarian label so much as it is a change in emphasis. Emphasizing a libertarian identity as a contrast to mainstream Democrats and Republicans makes sense when the worst that can happen is ending up with someone like Barack Obama or Mitt Romney as president. Right now it feels more important to emphasize the longer, wider tradition of liberalism relative to the narrower libertarian movement, even though I situate my own views within both of them. For now, I’m putting liberalism first.
What does this mean in practice? For starters, it means voting for Democrats for the foreseeable future despite significant differences on policy. (Living in a very capital-D Democratic state that’s not well run, I’m not thrilled about this. But Oregon’s dysfunctional Republican party is hardly fertile soil for producing a reasonable alternative.) It means strengthening our election laws. It means working with groups like the Neoliberal Project and the Center for New Liberalism, which I think are better positioned than explicitly libertarian groups to advance pragmatic, liberty-enhancing policies in blue states and cities. And of course it still means working with smart, cosmopolitan libertarians, although that excludes much of the present Libertarian Party.
It also means working with honest people on the right. Nothing I’ve written is inherently anti-conservative or anti-Republican. There are current and former Republicans standing up for truth and liberal democracy, and we need them on our side, but the party is increasingly focused on punishing anyone who dissents from the authoritarian lie that the election was stolen: see Romney, Liz Cheney, or Adam Kinzinger. At the local level, it’s people like Upper Peninsula Michigan state senator Ed McBroom; if you haven’t read this Atlantic profile of him, it’s worth your time. Unfortunately, these are rare exceptions.
To my friends on the right who may be reading this, even if you can’t bring yourself to embrace the word liberal, I urge you to take seriously the threats to our democracy that are coming from your own side. Resist the kneejerk temptation of whataboutism that obsesses over real or imagined problems on the left while deflecting from the failure to get your own house in order. Be more like George Will; this profile is a good place to start. Be more like John McCain; go back and watch his 2008 concession speech to remind yourself how it’s supposed to be done in our country. Above all, break the illusion that America will die if Democrats win elections. You don’t have to like it when they do, and some of the policy results will suck, but this is nothing compared to what you risk by continuing down the path of burning it all down for an authoritarian loser.
Maybe this is alarmist. Maybe it’s cringe. Maybe the political winds will shift, the Trumpian fever will break, and we’ll look back on this period as a weird and very regrettable phase. But as a libertarian and a liberal, I’ve never been more worried about sustaining our most basic political institutions. With different people in our military, Department of Justice, courts, Congress, and state governments, or with an insurrection that managed to kill members of Congress or take them hostage, or with a president who combined Donald Trump’s lack of principle and lust for power with a more capable intelligence, the election and transition could have gone so much worse. Instead of recoiling in horror from that possibility, we have one party perpetuating the lie of a stolen election and making such an outcome more likely in the future.
This isn’t going to fix itself and we shouldn’t surrender our country to people who cosplay as defenders of freedom, liberty, and the Constitution while assaulting its democratic foundations. If we ever want to get back to a more normal politics, it’s up to the liberals of all parties to make sure they don’t succeed.
I was on video a couple times in the past few weeks. First up, I discussed the state of tobacco harm reduction around the world on the Vaping Unplugged Podcast, with a focus on Australia, Japan, and the United States:
Reluctance I can understand; but what’s the argument for enthusiasm? The case Grier makes is pot-forward and prog-friendly: Harris-Walz is the “first major party ticket ever to support legalizing cannabis”; they’re also dovish on crime, pro-abortion rights, and generally exhibit humane, pluralistic values. As libertarian nourishment goes, I find it more than a few crumbs short of the full brownie.
The baseline expectation for libertarians is that many of our ideas will be unpopular and that the state will be gratuitously cruel. That is not going to change overnight, but it’s no excuse for indifference to the outcome of the 2024 election. Faced with the real danger of an actual authoritarian in American politics, I am amazed by so many libertarians’ inability to rise to the occasion and proclaim their willingness to do the bare minimum to defeat him, namely voting for Kamala Harris.
Someone had to write it and I am happy to be that guy. New today at Liberal Currents, read the whole thing:
As a longtime affiliate of the libertarian movement, I’ve often shared such pox-on-both-their-houses disdain for the major parties. In the current circumstances, I find it hopelessly dated and out of touch. The threats to liberty, democracy, and the rule of law coming from the Democrats and Republicans are not remotely symmetrical. In no presidential election in my lifetime has the question of whom to vote for been so easily decided.
My libertarian friends, I’m telling you: It’s OK to get excited about a major party ticket. You should endorse Harris and Walz, not with reluctance but with genuine enthusiasm.
For the past few years I’ve been putting together a summer playlist to highlight recent music I’ve been digging. Here’s this year’s: lots of new music, a few covers, and quite a bit from bands I’ve been fortunate to catch live. Enjoy!
Jacob Grier writes about public policy, lifestyle, and books in Portland, Oregon. His own books are The New Prohibition, Raising the Bar (with Brett Adams), The Rediscovery of Tobacco, and Cocktails on Tap. He has written for a wide spectrum of publications, including Slate, Reason, The Atlantic, The Washington Examiner, Inside Hook, Imbibe, and many others.
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