Perusing this article in the Post about last night’s Steele/Cardin debate for a Maryland senate seat, I learned that an “independent” candidate–I’m unsure why the Post used that word, as it seems to conflict with, er, reality–Kevin Zeese is the nominee of the Green, Libertarian, and Populist parties. I’m a small-government type with a lot of libertarian sympathies, but the Libertarian Party is one of the most unappealing forces in politics. In theory, libertarian friends tell me, it works to keep Republicans honest and to force them to cater to potential Libertarian voters. In reality, the Libertarian Party is a constituency of malcontents, people too smart to be satisfied with anyone who might have mass appeal. They consistently nominate offensive candidates, or else people whose appeal to libertarian voters is minimal, such as Kevin Zeese, who seems to be more of a dedicated third-party type than a serious libertarian:

Zeese registered with the Maryland Green Party. He is a founding member of the Populist Party of Maryland as well as a member of Libertarian Party of Maryland. He believes that the United States needs to be a government ‘of, by and for the people’ but that the two major political parties have become corrupted by Big Business and wealthy donor contributions and no longer put the needs of the people first.

Zeese supports single-payer healthcare (see also here), some serious environmental regulation (”CAFE standards of 40 mgp [sic] should only be the first step.”; “4.Will you support a law to mandate that at least 20% of our electricity comes from clean, renewable sources by 2020? Yes…”; “7. Would you favor having the Congress restore protection for such bodies of water as headwaters streams, isolated wetlands, and prairie potholes? Yes…”; and my favorite, on giving money to other countries’ environmental efforts, “Indeed, a Martial Plan for environmental protection and restoration is necessary.” [My emphasis. I guess he intends to invade other countries to fix their environmental problems]), and has some non-libertarian ideas regarding Social Security (”By lifting [the $90,000] ceiling and taxing all income, Social Security will be secure and the U.S. will take a small step toward correcting the tax imbalance created over the last two decades where the wealthiest have gotten huge tax breaks while the rest of us have paid more of the cost of government. (Why shouldn’t income from wealth be taxed at least as heavily as income from labor?)”). That is not from an intensive search of his website, just the first few pages I skimmed.

So why did the Libertarian Party nominate someone like this? Here’s an answer from some guy with the Libertarian Party of Baltimore (my hunch is that that is a very small group):

Kevin was able to pull this off because he’s focusing on the major issues that all the small parties agree on — get us out of Iraq, end the drug war, repeal the Patriot Act, end corporate welfare, etc.

So we’ll gloss over minor issues like taxes, Social Security, the enivronment, government-run healthcare, where the libertarians are far more similar to Republicans than Greens. The Libertarian Party believes it has more in common with the Green Party (enough that they will endorse a member of the Green Party for a statewide race) than with either the Republicans or Democrats. And I guess they’re right, because while both the Democrats and Republicans are bad in their own ways, the minor parties have the bond of a shared insanity.

Posted by Apollo in Philosophy, Politics