I said “hey” to Gary Johnson outside the statehouse in Concord, N.H.,
last month, and said I appreciated his campaign. He said recently on the
John Stossel show that he could run as a third-party candidate. I hope
he does.
Others threaten to do so, like Trump and Bloomberg, but they would run
as third or fourth gargantuan party chiefs just like the other two but
with themselves as the new Godzilla.
But Johnson, with Ron Paul, has added enormously to this campaign. As he
told Stossel, the rising energies in conservatism today are in
Libertarianism, and Johnson is a libertarian. Most of the gargantuans,
or globalists or neo-totalitarians — Clinton, Bono, Trump, Bloomberg —
act out of a basic anthropology that would claim that if you can conquer
New York City you have conquered the world. The presumption is that
people are sheep, but our two existing globalist parties helped make
them sheep.
There is little inner satisfaction in conquering sheep. A libertarian third-party approach would liberate individuals, freeing them from the neurosis to “save the world” and guide the child instead to Krishnamurti’s direction, allowing them to free and conquer themselves as individuals and as communities. This cannot be done with a top-down, one-size-fits-all federal government.
I was drafted into libertarianism in 2003 when I wrote an article titled “A states’-rights defense against Dick Cheney.” It took awhile to figure out what it was, but Johnson, Ron and Rand Paul and Judge Andrew Napolitano have clarified things. I claimed then, citing Jefferson’s Kentucky Resolutions and not knowing it was libertarian, that New Hampshire and Vermont need not participate in the war on Iraq.
In those days it seemed only a few hundred were listening, but today millions nightly follow Judge Andrew Napolitano on states’ rights, constitutional government, Austrian economics and personal freedom. I have never voted for a third party but would not this round consider voting for either Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich. A third party like this would be a nice option.
Besides the books of Judge Napolitano, there are two recent free-state and libertarian books that some Western governors are already using as texts: Rick Perry’s Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America From Washington and Nullification by Thomas Woods. I have spoken at a series of conferences that featured both Johnson and Woods, and the energy and ideas presented brought a vitality that I’ve not seen elsewhere in my lifetime.
Much is to be done in this regard, because most states are in truth not ready for selfgovernment and rely on federal government as the inmates of the cuckoo’s nest rely on Big Nurse. The Northeastern states; the oldest states and Vermont in particular, are most dependent. These are ideas for new people and new regions like Texas, California and Johnson’s New Mexico.
That is where the future of the free state lies. Those who have made the journey across the desert sense it, feel it, and Washington, D.C., is just too far away to tell them what to do.
The late distinguished historian David Smiley used to say that when the United States moved to centralized government in the 1850s all of the major governments in the world followed suit. It may prove to have been the greatest disaster ever to befall the human race. Johnson, the Pauls, Napolitano and company offer us an auspicious new beginning.